Rami's Universe

Why going with the flow actually kills your productivity

5 min read

Subtitle: How your intuition leads you to waste so much time and the planning system I use to effectively execute and make progress on my goals

Yesterday I talked about how I gaslight myself in a way that negatively affects my productivity in the morning, and what are the habits I’m incorporating this year to deal with them. But getting into the right mindset and mental space only solves the first half of the problem of productivity. The 2nd half is about being clear on HOW to do the work

Here’s a cleaned up transcript of me yapping while taking a shower. The writing quality is better than you think and it’s not AI slop I promise. I clearly define my problem and come up with a solution that turned out to align very well with what Dan Koe and Alex Hormozi advocate for; All within a 20 minute shower session.

I believe I cracked the code on why I am not able to do good work, and why I’m always distracted. There are several reasons, but I think the core reason for me is that I don’t plan effectively. The way I plan tasks is not the best, which leads to misalignment, lack of motivation, and a lot of distractions.

So what is the antidote to this? First, I have to reframe my mindset on planning, because I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t feel productive when I’m planning. What I do instead is go straight into the task that I want to do, and I do it in a way that I think is right, based on my intuition and just going with the flow. This “going with the flow” is killing me. It’s absolutely killing me and my ability to do good work. Ironically, by going with the flow and doing what feels right, I’m killing my flow by doing things that don’t matter.

Fundamentally, what I need to change is the way I plan things, when I plan them, and how I plan them. It’s either in the morning or the night before. I would look at my long-term goals—whether it’s weekly, monthly, or yearly doesn’t matter, whatever I have available. Then I look for specific tasks that need to be done to reach these goals. From there, I make them very well-defined. most ppl stop here. for some it might be enough, but not for someone like me

I also have to ask myself questions that help me understand and figure out what is the best way to do certain tasks. It’s kind of like shortcuts, or having a GPS. You don’t go somewhere you don’t know without first opening Google Maps and looking for the best route, checking if you need an Uber or if you can walk. using Google maps helps you figure out the best way to Go from A → B

here’s what I’ve been doing instead: I’m currently in point A and to reach point B there are two ways:

  1. Walk two hours
  2. Uber for 10 minutes

What I used to do is I would walk that two hours, because it’s just the most obvious thing to start with. For the Uber, I would have to wait five minutes for it to arrive and pay like $8. But that two-hour walk turned out to cost me even more, more than just the two hours of time that I’ve wasted. I also wasted energy and mental clarity which are even more valuable than time. But it doesn’t end there, I introduced other random tasks that I have to do now because of that two-hour walk. Most of the time, they don’t align with my goals that I mentioned previously.

Notice how this two-hour walk not only took extra time, but it stole my mental clarity and introduced other random tasks which will also steal more of my time and mental clarity.

So how does that look like in real-life situations? Very similar. My task would be, “Let’s do market research.” Without proper planning, I would start doing the most obvious thing with market research. Maybe it’s Reddit or I start writing something in my notes. In general, I just start doing the task in a way that I think and assume is the best way to do it. But because I didn’t go to it with a plan, with a GPS, a direction, I go into it with a lot of assumptions, a lot of doubts, and ultimately it would lead to me being distracted, because there’s no lane I’m following. I’m just going with what I assume to be the right path to achieve my goal.

Now that we know the problem, how can we solve it? It’s actually quite easy. Just have to build the habit of doing it before starting any task. You spend like 5 minutes ask yourself these questions in order:

  • Why is this task important?
  • Why is it important RIGHT NOW to be completed? Why not tomorrow? Next month?
    • That will help you figure out the broader picture.
  • What does this connect to in terms of your career, your health, your relationships? (or whatever your pillars of life are)
    • This will help you sustain that motivation and keep you in alignment with your short and long-term goals
  • What really needs to be achieved?
    • Narrow it down and define it in a very clear and tangible manner. That will help answer the next question
  • What is the easiest way to complete that task?
    • You’ll be surprised with how many shortcuts we can actually find if we just take a minute to think about it.
  • How can I make the completion of the task a little (or a lot) more fun?

Dan Koe made a tweet and wrote about this recently too:

Graph View