Take Control of Your Productivity

Map Your Natural Style

You’re coming to this book with established productivity methods—at the very least, the ad hoc system you’ve developed from your work habits. In many cases, these came with their own presumptions about what productivity means: how you implement it, how you measure it, and how you judge yourself in relation to it. I’m going to refer to all that as your natural style.

“Natural” in this case isn’t something you were born with, or even a necessarily positive attribute. What comes naturally to you is a function of what you find comfortable, which for many people means “the methods I learned in high school.” The results of what’s natural to you led you to interest in improving your productivity, so clearly those methods fall ...