What's next for personal productivity
I don&#x27;t think that going &quot;holistic&quot; is the future of productivity. Something something dilution of focus.<p>My personal view: the next big improvement should come from tackling emotional self-management.<p>This is derived mostly from my own experience of ~15 years of struggling with personal productivity (and going through every trick in every popular book), as well as observing others close to me. In recent years I came to the conclusion that it&#x27;s all about emotional state.<p>The planner, the TODO list, the Pomodoro timer, the Inbox &amp; Someday&#x2F;Maybe folders, the bullet journal - those are all complexity management tools. They address the problem of having too many things taking your attention, making you unable to focus. They don&#x27;t address the problem of not being able to focus <i>at all</i>, not being able to open your TODO list, not being able to work on a task for more than 30 seconds before either feeling distressed, or beginning to question your life priorities. Conversely, when you&#x27;re feeling really good and pumped about the thing you&#x27;re doing, you don&#x27;t need a complicated system to keep you focused - a notebook and some pens, or an open text file, is enough to keep the complexity manageable, and you&#x27;ll figure out an effective enough system on the fly.<p>I&#x27;ve only begun exploring the space of emotional self-management, and so far, I haven&#x27;t found any neat hacks or effective methods. A big problem is that the brain adapts to attempts at cheating it - like e.g. there was a time where I could control my emotional states through the choice of music, but it stopped working after I started exploiting it to make myself work on things. Similarly, all attempts at self-gamifying fail because I <i>know</i> I&#x27;m just manipulating myself.<p>But if anyone can crack that problem - effective emotional self-management - I&#x27;ll happily shower them with all the money I can spare.