You Can't Just Change Your Environment To Become More Productive

It’s always funny to me when mentors give productivity advice because none of it is actual advice on how to be more productive. This is fine, most people have never actually thought about what makes them productive. They don’t understand the science behind productivity or the ways that overwhelm changes how the brain interacts with the world itself. When you hear the productivity advice from mentors, it’s not productivity advice, it’s basically environment design.

So it will always be things like morning routines or putting headphones on or putting your phone away, turning notifications off, having a certain playlist of binaural beats or something like that.

This is environment design. It’s the equivalent of telling people who want to lose weight to just change their food environment. Yes, that is a part of it, but it’s not enough to actually help.

Don’t get me wrong, I still do these things. I just learned a long time ago that trying to be productive is about more than whether you’ve got any distractions and whether you can do deep work.

It is about having a system that captures, surfaces, and structures work in a way where your brain is solely working on doing the task at hand. As soon as you have a system or lack of one where you’re constantly thinking, ‘Have I done this already? Did I remember to write that down? I must remember to reply to this person’, the cognitive load starts to chip away at your capacity to do the actual task in front of you. Your brain is trying to hang on to lots of other things whilst also freeing up enough compute to do the thing that you need to do in that moment.

So, yes, having some music that helps to drown out the noise around you is really helpful. But if you haven’t got a clue what you should be working on, how it’s prioritised, what else is coming up that day or that week or even that month, you’re still going to really struggle to consistently get work done.

This is particularly true in the world of AI agents where your job will become more and more about how do I give ‘staff’ the correct direction and the correct outcomes to optimise for.

If you don’t have systems that are catching those things and making a note of them, you’re not going to be able to harness the power of AI to be more productive.