Productivity Is Not a Destination, It's a Cycle
How to turn random bursts of motivation into a decade of discipline.
Most people treat productivity like a finish line.
They think you either have your sh*t together, or you don’t. They spend weeks building a “system,” and then beat themselves up when they stop using it a month later.
I used to be one of those people.
The first decade of my career was spent in an engineering office where momentum was built-in. But when I switched to remote work, I realized passion wasn’t enough. To be self-directed is to be disciplined, it’s having an ever-evolving productivity system that keeps tabs on what you need to do, and when you can disconnect.
I stopped trying to build a “perfect system” and started embracing “cycles.”
Here are the three major cycles that keep me on track—and why they form a spiral, not a circle.
The Weekly Planning
If you don’t plan your week, someone else will plan it for you.
I start my Mondays by looking at last week’s goals. Did they succeed? If not, why?
I write a few lines in a “Past Weeks” document.
I shift unfinished work to the current week (usually with a sigh and a grunt).
I plan events in my calendar.
I do not create a task for everything. I trust myself to “check email” without a checkbox. But major projects? Those get a task. I map these tasks against my energy levels and appointment times. I find the gaps in the calendar and fill them with high-leverage work.
The Monthly Mapping
The weekly cycle is for doing. The monthly cycle is for selecting.
In my main notes app, I have a “Master Collection.” This holds everything from “Get yearly bloodwork” to “Redesign the website.”
At the end of every month, I go through everything and choose where to focus my attention. I select only the items that fit into the next 30 days.
Being reasonable is key.
I would rather have one big thing to focus on than a list of 20 things I will inevitably fail at. Having a big list of forgotten items at the end of the month is a recipe for disappointment.
This system ensures things stop falling through the cracks. I can’t do everything. I can only do this month’s work.
The Yearly Audit
The longest cycle of the system is the one which changes it most. This is when:
I set goals for the new year.
I change the tools I use every day.
Between Christmas and New Year I reflect on the past 12 months.
I look back on my notes, I set my sights to the future, and I set goals that I can achieve (”write one post per week”) rather than ones outside my control (”sign one new client per month”).
I find this to be the biggest motivation boost, I always get into the new year refreshed and filled with purpose.
If I need to change the tools I use, I try to save it for the new year.
In previous years, I have moved from Notion to Craft, from Google’s suite to Apple’s. It usually invovles moving over thousands of documents and setting up meticulous workflows (and allows for an interesting look into who you were 3, 5, or 10 years in the past), so the downtime at the end of the year is the perfect fit.
Why This System Works
It might be a surprise, but I’m not aiming to be super productive. Being self-directed, especially in working remotely, can lead to burnout if you can’t disconnect, and for me, having a system I turn to allows for that disconnect to happen more easily.
When this system was just starting, I was very hard on myself when failing to get the thousand things I set out for myself, so for the longest time I thought I was a lazy slob.
It was during one of the yearly system resets that I saw real progress. And I started to embrace the three cycles:
The Week keeps you moving.
The Month keeps you focused.
The Year keeps you climbing.
And that’s what it’s all about - because looking at these loops differently you’ll see they’re actually a spiral moving you up, one cycle at a time.