Increasing productivity through your brain

I've been reading about increasing productivity for about two years and I never saw the most basic, simple fact mentioned: that your productivity is determined by your brain.

If you want to be more productive you have to focus on your brain. Forget about your body. Voila, I just reduced the size of your mental field and increased your focus.

First, listen to this guy and discover why we don't have a good brain theory yet (spoiler: it's been ignored until now).

The GTD book doesn't work for me. It definitely points out interesting things about productivity but it simply ignores the role of my brain in my productivity.

Think about the role of your brain like this: reading this text on a computer screen occupies your brain to a high degree. More specifically, our brain can be trained to read text from a screen but it takes much more effort than walking or talking or doing the dishes.

So, how can you expect to be productive while you're occupying your brain this much for such a mundane task as reading text? And I guess you're reading a lot on any given day, so there you have it.

Instead of focusing on being more productive you're straining your brain with unproductive tasks. So what can be done? To answer that question look at this chart:

Your brain is exposed to many common tasks and each of them have their position on the complexity/productivity chart. Household chores are my favorite since it can be done with little mental resources and the result is high productivity.

Remembering stuff requires a little more mental resources yet if you succeed in remembering what you shouldn't forget you increase your productivity.

Surfing the web without purpose does not result in any productivity increase whatsoever yet requires a lot of effort from your brain. If you're not sure this is true take a look at web design from scratch (here's is a good start). Occupying your brain without return is exactly what you should avoid if you want to free your brain for more productive tasks.

Then there is the knowledge work you're involved in and your career. This will always be complicated for your brain and can and should be highly productive.

What the complexity/productivity chart reveals is that many tasks in your life can be much easier to perform. The trick is to avoid involving your brain too much during their planning and execution. Look at Doing the dishes efficiently for one example.

In order to increase your productivity you should start to acquire some useful habits that automate low complexity tasks to a large degree. However, how can you increase your productivity?

Keeping to-do lists will in some case lead to increased productivity. In most cases however keeping them is about as effective as solving an algebra exam by chewing gum.

The road to increased productivity is training and specialization. And you should start at the bottom of the ladder. If you hate doing the dishes, clean the house, iron your clothes and prepare food and thus delay those chores then you could increase your productivity by actually learning to do them, one at a time.

This is the domain of Zen Habits: Simple Productivity. If you're doing these task but find them annoying and hard then changing your habits and attitude is your next step to increased productivity.

The productivity of doing chores is more complicated to understand than you might imagine. The good news is that they can be organized and executed in a very relaxed way, both in terms of comfort and brain relaxation.

I spend about 5 hours a week on household chores, most of them during the evening. Your first goal is to estimate how much time a chore will take and plan that time in your weekly schedule. Your second goal is to organize the execution of these chores as efficiently as possible.

You will actually spend brain power on the organization and appreciation part so that you will get free mental time each week while you're performing these chores. And this is a lesson for life, one that you will never unlearn.

Once you have the chores under control you can use your free mental time to think about the next tasks in your life where you can improve productivity. For me this is currently the time I spend online so expect more posts on that soon.

Here's a wrap up:

• Most activities in your life require a lot of effort from your brain.
• Some of these activities won't increase your productivity at all.
• If you like to fish or golf or ride your bike then by all means do so.
• You can get better organized without to-do lists by training and specializing for activities.
• Household chores is where everyone has to start because they are low complexity and highly productive.
• Once you have them under control the quality of your life will improve significantly and you can focus on improving other activities.