To work every day on an ambitious long-term project you must make all the usual cliché commitments, from discipline to routine to cultivation of a favorable self-image. But even together, all these commitments ensure is continued effort. To truly be productive—in the sense of actually prosecuting and improving the work—takes more than a Day Runner and a visualization of the award ceremony waiting on the other side; it takes a concerted, far more specific strategy. Today I’d like to share with you some of what I’ve learned about how to stay productive in this more specific sense of the term. It’s a long column but by the end I hope to have convinced you that there are four, technical facets to maximizing your return-on-effort with respect to that big job of yours, and that focusing on these four facets might just help you in the same way it has helped me. The essay takes about twenty minutes to read.
