I increasingly believe that the only successful approach to productivity is treating yourself like an addict

If you want to stop drinking alcohol, don't keep it in the house 🙅

Here's how I keep myself productive:

1. Clean Out The Cupboards 📱

I use iOS Screen Time to block all social media, news, and yes, EMAIL, from my phone.

I also remove the ability to install new apps.

My wife set the code, so I don't have any easy way to get around it.
2. Add Guiderails 🚆

On my Mac, I have an automation that quits all apps each morning before I get to work and pulls up OmniFocus on the screen, so it's always the first thing I see when I open my computer and can't go down a rabbit trail.
3. Reduce Dopamine Hits 🥱

I use to spend my entire day in my inbox.

As I'd send emails, new ones would stream in constantly, and before I'd know it I'd spent 4-5 hours just responding to emails instead of moving important projects or individual work forward.
I setup @Mailman_HQ, a Gmail plug-in @mohitmamoria and I built, to only deliver email once in the morning and once in the early afternoon, and to automatically batch any emails from anyone I hadn't emailed with before at 7AM...
It lets in anything with "ASAP", "emergency", and "end of day" immediately. The rest can wait...
4. Use GTD ✅

David Allan's Getting Things Done productivity system is the only thing that has ever worked for me.

My tool of choice is @OmniFocus, but you can use almost anything.
The idea in a nut shell: get *every* task out of your head.

Don't trust your brain.

Turn the raw tasks into projects and give them a context (Computer/Phone/Home/Out and About), then when you are in that context you can rip through your tasks...
Here's a quick overview: https://t.co/hYWJIzxUf7
My name is Andrew, and I'm a distractaholic 😂🪙

What has worked for you?

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Great article from @AsheSchow. I lived thru the 'Satanic Panic' of the 1980's/early 1990's asking myself "Has eveyrbody lost their GODDAMN MINDS?!"


The 3 big things that made the 1980's/early 1990's surreal for me.

1) Satanic Panic - satanism in the day cares ahhhh!

2) "Repressed memory" syndrome

3) Facilitated Communication [FC]

All 3 led to massive abuse.

"Therapists" -and I use the term to describe these quacks loosely - would hypnotize people & convince they they were 'reliving' past memories of Mom & Dad killing babies in Satanic rituals in the basement while they were growing up.

Other 'therapists' would badger kids until they invented stories about watching alligators eat babies dropped into a lake from a hot air balloon. Kids would deny anything happened for hours until the therapist 'broke through' and 'found' the 'truth'.

FC was a movement that started with the claim severely handicapped individuals were able to 'type' legible sentences & communicate if a 'helper' guided their hands over a keyboard.
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