Productivity is not a place, nor a time, nor a situation, nor an environment. Productivity is a state of mind, a function of our current emotional state. Too often we lie to ourselves, “our environment isn’t good” or “I’ll do the work when I’m in the office” or “I just need X or Y”. These are always just excuses in this situation. What we’re really saying to ourselves is that “I’m not in the right state of mind to do the work”.

Editors Note: This piece of writing was first published on one of my earlier blogs in May 2020. Reading through it again the piece resonated with me and I’ve decided to retain it and republish it. It has been edited slightly from the original. In particular it has been split into two different parts for clarity. This is Part One. I’ve been thinking a lot about success recently, more precisely, why do some people seem to be more systematically successful than others.

I haven’t really been blogging that much lately but I have been writing, prodigiously, in the popular Personal Knowledge Base (PKB) tool Obsidian. In total my set of Markdown files is now up to ~270,000 words in this situation. Almost 1,000 pages of content that I’ve poured out of my brain and into paper. This is quite a lot of material when you think about it though it’s sometimes hard to navigate.

Status: General musings on life and doing things, exploring ideas without holding them too tightly. Aware of numerous problems with the below text but believe worthwhile to put it out there. Experimenting with different writing styles and material. Winning is contagious. It’s infectious. It has inertia. Momentum. A power in and of itself. People who win will tend to keep winning. It’s a virtuous flywheel. Most people don’t recognise this. They think that winning is something that just happens once.

One of the most fashionable catch phrases sweeping the globe is the pareto principle which, in the modern productivity oriented formulation, that you get 80% of the benefit from 20% of the work that you put in. There are other of this type of theme such as the first 90% of the work takes 90% of the time, the last 10% of the work also takes 90% of the time which try to convey a similar point.