My road to productivity
Productivity can be a thing as early as in the Industrial Revolution when people found it exciting to make something more and more because they could earn more. It looks like no one can escape from being productive nowadays, while education system never explicitly tells you how to become prolific (but they have ways to push everyone).
I am now here to share how the value of productivity gradually shaped my life since attending schools, how I live with this attitude and find ways to make my life easier.
The ideology of just working harder
As a Hongkonger who received education designed by British, I was always reminded of the importance of hardworking, by completing all my assignments with any procrastination, not only passing the exam (60 out of 100 marks) but getting 90% or above, a series of punishment like staying longer at school, being told I will have a good job which guarantees better and stable life.
The teachers didn’t know something like Getting Things Done (GTD) raised by David Allen. They just knew how to push us forward by having more exams and blaming us if we didn’t do well.
Making use of iPad and productivity apps to help me get more works done
In 2011 I had an idea of buying my first iPad. Before purchasing I did research on Google, and found a blogger who not only shared a lot of valuable information about various uses of the device, but also, most importantly, Evernote which could make my life easier.
I was working in an office which just asked everyone to work harder and stay overtime as late as like 1am! I couldn’t learn anything about the organization which made business tasks effective but did feel frustrated.
I then subscribed to Evernote until 2020, and also learnt from the blogger how to work smarter not harder. I even configured my Evernote to make things easier and searchable.
However, things were not that perfect. Evernote was already slow and buggy, and I couldn’t find alternatives even when other apps like Bear and Apple Notes were improving.
2020 was the year I was determined to quit Evernote, when their latest version was truly unusable. As I got used to Evernote, it took me around two years to find a replacement. Now I just use Apple Notes mainly.
Slow productivity and four thousand weeks
On the road of reading more books since 2015 (check out 2025.7.31 My reading habit for a decade), there was a very large number of nonfiction books about productivity, especially when I met the works written by Cal Newport, from Digital Minimalism to Deep Work to Slow Productivity. I also read Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. All these are really inspiring works but the knowledge, or acknowledgement cannot be easily transferred to wisdom immediately.
Part of the reasons is my work experience. When I was working in restaurants I was required to be multitasking. Filling every second of my working time resulted in frustration and burnout so I needed to have a break first.
I even questioned if productivity is inevitably a package inevitably including sacrificing health and wellbeing for doing endlessly, which is obviously not according to the above authors. I can work very hard but I end up burnout which leads to very long period of rest and travel.
Maybe I should give up any methods related to productivity?
Seeking professional help, but not from productivity guru
Due to encountering some issues in my life, especially getting stuck with procrastination, I seek help from talking therapies and my therapist told me to log my days, set my SMART goals and schedule my life. It looks like they are something I have already heard of before which is nothing special and even useful.
But this time, my psychological wellbeing practitioner added some important points and criteria so that my mental wellbeing won’t be compromised. Besides, as I am more able to interconnect the productivity books I read in the past few years, I feel like I truly understand why and how I should deal with simple journaling and planning, and I am more motivated to do something than before. So these years of reading productivity books and exploring apps weren’t wasted.
Wrap up
But I think my road to productivity has not come to an end, and it will never happen. The key message of productivity is to focus on what I really need to / want to do instead of fearing of missing out. Journaling aims to rewind what I did before, to remind myself what I can do, cannot do or when I should relax and design my rewards after a period of work, so that I will be less vulnerable to some circumstances with much less worrying and procrastination.
I will write more about what I got from the therapies. Stay tuned.
