Busy Doesn’t Mean Productive

I wrote The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck in 18 months. For much of that time, I was writing 8-10 hours per day.

Yet somehow, I got the most done in the 3 months where I worked the least.
Here’s how:

First I made the mistake of believing that more productivity meant working more hours.

For most of my 18-month writing slog, I was forcing myself through pages, stories, chapters, without considering if what I was writing was the best thing for the book or not. As a result, I spent most of my time going in circles, deleting, rewriting, reorganizing, redoing.

After circling that creative drain for 15 months, I got fed up and decided to try something different.

I stopped chasing word count and simply focused on writing something good. Whether that ended up being a paragraph or 20 pages, I didn’t care. Just write something usable.

What I quickly discovered is that my ability to write something “good” quickly dropped off after about 3-4 hours and pretty much everything I wrote after that was terrible, thus creating more work for myself, as I had to go over it the next day, edit it, rewrite it, decide whether to cut it, etc.

So instead, I just stopped after that first 3-4 hours.

And as if magically, within three months the entire book draft was written.

We’re obsessed with this idea that being busy = being productive. It’s a lie made up by people who think responding to 1 AM emails makes them Elon Musk. But studies show that most of us only have 3-4 good creative hours in us per day.

So yeah—work less. But when you work, really work. Honor those 3-4 hours. Block out everything else, give it your full attention. Then, go home.

And when you get home, don’t mistake being always on for being effective.

Shut your laptop. Turn off your notifications.

And trust that it’s the quality over quantity.

See you Monday,
Mark Manson

#1 New York Times Bestselling Author
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