Productivity advice that sounded stupid and turned out to work, and the ones that stayed stupid

Collected from asking people which advice they resisted and then adopted. The pattern is that the good ones are physically awkward and the bad ones are merely effortful.

Sounded stupid, works

• Write down the next action as a physical verb. Not "sort out taxes", but "open the folder on the desk". Absurdly small and it removes the thing that actually blocks you, which is not knowing where to put your hands.
• Do the thing for two minutes with permission to stop. Almost nobody stops. The resistance is to starting, not to doing.
• Leave work mid-sentence. Finishing a section cleanly makes the next session a cold start. Stopping in the middle gives you somewhere to land.
• Put the phone in another room while you work rather than on silent. Distance, not notifications, is the variable.
• Do nothing at all for ten minutes, deliberately, with no phone. Reliably ends procrastination, because procrastination is more boring than boredom.

Stayed stupid

• Waking at five to be virtuous.
• Elaborate weekly reviews. Everyone described these collapsing.
• Inbox rules with more than about three folders.
• Any app that gamifies the work. Maintaining the score becomes the work.

The through-line: the ones that stuck changed something physical. The ones that failed asked for more willpower on the same setup.