This week —
Anne-Laure recently wrote about the three neurochemicals of productivity and procrastination, and how it’s important to strike a perpetually re-adjusting balance between them if we’re to get our most important work done.
Dopamine (fun), noradrenaline (fear), and acetylcholine (focus): how do you use the states produced by these neurochemicals to help move your projects along? Each can be a positive or a negative, depending on when — and how — it’s used. When one of the three starts hogging the limelight, it can usually be pulled back into line with a healthy dose of one or more of the other two.
Understanding how they work won’t magically allow you to achieve your ambitions, but it may help you be kinder to yourself when things don’t seem to go as planned and you struggle to focus on your goals. — Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Try this: When you find your productivity slipping, see if you can identify which of the three neurochemicals might be taking the upper hand. Interstitial journaling can help with the process.
I found it difficult to focus, this past week, and that’s got me thinking about my overall Why, and the productivity traps that trip me up time and time again.
Do you identify your collection of notes and ideas by the name of the app you created them in?
About how I tend to dive into productivity or budgeting or notebooks or writing, as a means of avoiding facing the fear of where my efforts might be leading. Too much emphasis on fun and focus; not enough healthy fear of what might happen if my fun-ship focuses on following currents that lead away from where I ultimately want to dock.
This week I posted the following on Mastodon:
My notes are plain text first, Markdown second. They’re highly portable between platforms, apps, and devices. macOS and iOS are my weapons of choice, but they’d look and work the same on Android and Windows.
They aren’t Obsidian notes, or Logseq / iaWriter / Tangent / TextEdit / Nota / AnyType / Taio / TaskPaper / vsCode notes, though I can use any of those apps as a lens to view and work with them.
They’re wild and free, and this is their theme song:
These words came straight from my heart and I continue to stand by them, but a quick reality check tells me I may be in danger of a focus-overdose.
How tragic would it be if I devoted my entire life to building a finely-crafted system that reaches admirable pinnacles of future-proof, plain text app-agnosticism, only to realise at the end I’d neglected to actually do something worthwhile with my notes? The means are important, but they’re the vehicle, not the destination.
What about you? Do you identify your collection of notes and ideas by the name of the app you created them in? If yes, and that app has you fenced in to their proprietary format, you may need a taste of the right kind of fear to shake things up. If you’re not going to look out for the ultimate longevity and usefulness of your notes, who will?
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