#004 | Double your Productivity

Hey friends,

Following last week’s newsletter about system, this week I want to talk about the productivity system. There are many articles out there already explaining the concepts I listed here so instead, what I want to do differently is make them very actionable for you so that you can take actions right away! Let’s go 😎

⭐ Batching + Time Blocks + Goals

1. Batch similar tasks together and get them done in one go. For example, only check emails in the morning, lunch, and night time

2. Set 2 - 3 hours time block to focus on important tasks. For example, each day I have one 3-hour time block in the morning, one after lunch, and two 2-hour time block after dinner

3. Remember to set goals for each time block (very Important)

⭐ Remove External Triggers

1. Turn off notifications on your phone and laptop

2. On your phone, you can go to settings and set all your notifications to “Badges” only (or turn them off completely). And so you would still know about unseen notifications, you just won’t get distracted by your phone’s ping sound

3. On your Mac, set the time preference for Do Not Disturb to as below so that your laptop is always on Do Not Disturb mode

⭐ Make Time Visible + Variable Rewards + Increase Frictions to Bad Habits

To hit all three, I used the Forest app. I downloaded and tried it out this week and it has worked out amazingly well! (I know I know… I am very late to the game...)

Here’s why the app works so well for me:

1. Timer Countdown (make time visible) - Time is invisible most of the time and so if you can see that time is ticking away and you aren’t being productive, hopefully that will force you to get back on track

2. “Variable” rewards for good habits - okay it’s not really variable rewards but if you focus for 2 hours, your selected tree would look differently than if you focus for 25 minutes

3. Increase frictions to bad habits - Your tree will wither if you leave the app so not only did you not get to plant new trees, you also lose previously planted trees! And if you know anything about behavioural economics and loss aversion, you know that people tends to avoid losses whenever possible

⭐ The Power of 5 Minutes

Okay this one is a game changer. Although time blocking is great for deep work, it does required us to put aside a block of time in advance. What if we have 15 minutes spare time before a call? Do you simply wait around or start scrolling?

Instead, try using those times to make progress on certain tasks. I suggest choosing one or two tasks where you are only allow to work on them whenever you have spared time lying around. For example, I use this technique to write up my newsletter throughout the week. No time block requires. Maybe occasionally I would spend 30 minutes on my newsletter cause I got into the zone.

I hope you guys find these actionable insights helpful! 🎮

This week I finished reading:

1. Indistractable (23rd Jan - 25th Jan 2021)

2. Trillion Dollar Coach (26th Jan - 28th Jan 2021)

❓Question of the Week

Just like with most things, there’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to the productivity system. A strong productivity system (or any strong systems) is one that works best for you and to figure that out, you need to deploy self-awareness.

Share with me your top productivity hacks by replying to this email 👻 👻 👻

🐦 Tweet of the Week

💡 Quote of the Week

🔥 Recommendation(s) of the Week

Forest - Check out the Forest app and see if it works for you! Also, if you have decided to use the app, please help a brother out 🙏🏻 by using my referral code so I can plant different trees! Some trees cost a lot! My referral code is 5EEPWE5SG. Thanks guys!

🔦 AI Research Paper(s) Spotlight of the Week

Rethinking Generalization of Neural Models: A Named Entity Recognition Case Study

This paper was a great read! It focuses on developing a better understanding of the generalisation ability of neural models, focusing on NER. They introduced 4 measures and ran six different experiments to answer the following three research questions:

1. Does our model really have generalization ability, or it just pretends to understand and make some shallow template matches?

2. What factor of a dataset can distinguish neural networks that generalize well from those that don't?

3. How does the relationship between entity categories influence the difficulty of model learning?

🎥 This Week on YouTube

This week’s video is TriggerNER, using entity triggers to help improve the performance of NER models. Check out my summary below 😁

That’s it for this week! I hope you find something useful from this newsletter. More to come next Sunday! Have a good week ahead! 🎮

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