For most of my professional life, I thought I was bad at productivity. I read the books, tried the systems, built the lists, and still felt like something fundamental was broken. I could sit down to work with the best of intentions and end the day feeling scattered, behind, and vaguely ashamed. The diagnosis was always the same: I needed better planning, clearer priorities, and more discipline. But over time, I noticed something that didn’t fit that story. When I actually started working—when I truly got into something—I was fine. More than fine. I could focus deeply for an hour, sometimes longer. I could think clearly, write, design, reason, and build. The problem wasn’t doing the work. The problem was everything that happened around it. started What finally clicked for me was this realization: my productivity didn’t fail at the beginning of work. It failed at the seams. It failed in the moments between tasks, especially at the end of a good focus session. That’s where momentum collapsed, attention scattered, and email mysteriously took over my day. between Once I saw that, everything else began to make sense. The Lie I Believed About Productivity Like most people, I was taught that productivity is about choosing the right things to do and then executing them efficiently. Mornings were for planning. Lists were for clarity. Schedules were for control. If I was struggling, the explanation was always that I hadn’t planned well enough or followed the plan with sufficient discipline. This model never fit my experience. Planning felt heavy and abstract. Lists felt accusatory. Schedules collapsed the moment reality intruded. Worse, the more carefully I planned, the more brittle the system became. One interruption or energy dip, and the whole thing unraveled. For a long time, I assumed this was a personal failing. Only later did I realize that the systems I was using were designed for a kind of attention I didn’t have. They assumed steady, linear focus and low transition costs. My attention wasn’t like that. It was immersive, state-based, and fragile at boundaries. The real mismatch wasn’t between me and productivity. It was between me and the systems that didn’t understand transitions. The Moment That Finally Made It Obvious The turning point came when I started paying attention to when my day actually went off the rails. It wasn’t when I sat down to work. It was after I’d already done something well. when I would finish a solid 60–90 minute stretch of focused work and then… stall. I’d check my email. I’d scroll. I’d wander. The energy that had carried me through the previous block evaporated almost instantly. And then I’d spend the next hour doing things that looked like work but didn’t move anything forward. This was deeply confusing at first. Why would I derail after being productive? after The answer, I eventually realized, was that finishing a focus block dumped me back into an undifferentiated world. Context dissolved. Time became vague. A dozen possible next steps appeared all at once, none of them clearly more important than the others. The emotional cost of choosing what to do next felt surprisingly high. In that moment, email wasn’t a distraction. It was relief. It gave me structure when nothing else did. That was the insight that changed everything: my problem wasn’t focus. It was a transition. Why Endings Were Harder Than Beginnings Once I started looking at my work this way, I saw a consistent pattern. While I was inside a task, everything felt “ready-to-hand.” I didn’t have to think about what I was doing; I was simply doing it. But the moment the task ended, the world reappeared all at once. Obligations, ideas, and anxieties flooded back in without hierarchy. That moment was emotionally expensive. It demanded reorientation, prioritization, and decision-making all at once, precisely when my energy was dropping. No wonder I avoided it. Traditional productivity advice never addressed this. It treated transitions as neutral, almost invisible. In my experience, they were the most dangerous moments of the day. Once I accepted that, I stopped trying to fix my productivity by optimizing beginnings. I started designing endings instead. The Shift That Changed My Work The single most important change I made was this: I stopped ending work without deciding what came next. Instead of planning my day in advance, I began planning the next step at the end of whatever I was working on. I would stop a few minutes early, while context was still alive, and ask myself a simple question: if I were to continue, what would I do next? next step Then I wrote that down—not as a project or a vague intention, but as a concrete, bounded action I could pick up later without thinking. This did something remarkable. It allowed me to borrow energy from the present to support the future. When I returned to work, I didn’t face a blank slate. I faced a clear on-ramp. Over time, this became a rule for me: I don’t get to stop without handing off momentum. Why I Needed a Small, Disposable System As I experimented with this approach, I noticed another important constraint. Whatever system I used had to be small and disposable. Large, comprehensive systems failed me for the same reason they always had: they required too much maintenance. What I needed was not a perfect map of everything I had to do. I needed a baton—a simple artifact that answered one question: what do I do next? I settled on a short list, usually no more than three items, each one sized to fit a single deep focus block. I stopped worrying about whether the list was complete or correct. Its job was not to represent my entire workload. Its job was to preserve continuity. If it got messy, that was fine. If I abandoned it for a day, that was fine too. I could always create a new one. The system worked because it didn’t punish neglect. That was a revelation for me. I had spent years building systems that collapsed the moment I stopped tending them. This one survived precisely because it expected imperfection. Rethinking Time and Energy Another shift followed naturally. I stopped treating time as something to allocate and started treating it as something to contain. Schedules never worked for me because time didn’t feel linear or predictable. What did work was recognizing that my best work happened in long, immersive stretches. Instead of trying to chop my day into small pieces, I began thinking in terms of 60–90 minute blocks. I didn’t schedule them rigidly. I let them emerge. What mattered was that once a block started, it had a natural size, and once it ended, it triggered a handoff. This made time feel safer. Work no longer threatened to expand infinitely. I wasn’t committing to “work on X today.” I was committing to one block. one block That subtle shift reduced resistance more than any scheduling trick ever had. Email Stopped Being the Villain As my system changed, my relationship with email changed too. I stopped treating it as an enemy to be vanquished and started treating it as a signal. When I noticed myself opening emails compulsively, it was almost always because I had ended a focus block without a clear next step. Email rushed in to fill the gap. That wasn’t a moral failure. It was feedback. Once I stopped ending blocks blindly, email lost much of its power over me. It became something I used intentionally, often as a recovery activity, rather than something that hijacked my transitions. Letting Go of the Need to Be Organized Perhaps the hardest lesson for me was letting go of the idea that a good productivity system should feel organized. For a long time, I equated order with control and control with competence. Messiness felt like failure. What I eventually learned is that for me, messiness was often a sign that the system was doing its job. A slightly chaotic backlog was better than a pristine system that I didn’t trust. A disposable list was better than a carefully curated one; I was afraid to break. Once I stopped optimizing for neatness and started optimizing for continuity, my work became more consistent almost overnight. Ending the Day Without Closing It The final piece fell into place when I realized that days, like focus blocks, also need handoffs. If I ended the day without deciding what I would work on next, the following morning was almost guaranteed to dissolve into email and indecision. So, I began ending my days the same way I ended my blocks: by choosing one clear, bounded first step for tomorrow. Not a plan. Not a review. Just a baton. This small ritual dramatically reduced morning friction. I stopped needing motivation to start. I simply continued. What I Finally Understood About Productivity What I eventually came to understand is that my productivity was never about doing more or trying harder. It was about not dropping momentum. Work didn’t fail because I was disorganized or undisciplined. It failed because I was asking myself to reorient too often, with too little support. By designing for transitions rather than tasks, I stopped fighting my attention and started working with it. I stopped blaming myself and started engineering better handoffs. I no longer think of productivity as control. I think of it as continuity. If I can end one thing well, the next thing almost always takes care of itself.
