Happy Friday!

Pr*d#ct!v!ty

Is “productivity” a dirty word to you?

It can carry negative connotations, conjuring images of ambitious workaholics racing rats in hamster wheels.

The word is problematic enough that I’ve played around with alternatives. “Prolific” feels pretty good, but in the wrong contexts it can carry other meanings: I’m not interested in the quantity of your offspring, for instance.

“Fulfillment” is good too—especially after one of my Action-Powered Productivity community members pointed out that orders can be “fulfilled” as a way of saying the work has been accomplished. But Fulfillment leans too far away from the work itself to convey quite what I want to convey.

Bridge to Somewhere

In each of the last three newsletters (36, 37, 38) I’ve explored the idea of Productivity Bridges. Bridging is an action taken now that increases the speed, accuracy, or quality of future work. An Agenda is a Bridge from today into the middle of tomorrow’s work. A Template is a Bridge beyond the predictable part of reusable work.

Bridges are at the core of productivity. They help you get more done with less time and effort.

HOWEVER…

Bridges that lead you nowhere in particular—or worse, that lead places you don’t want to go—are not at all productive. Part of that can be solved with another Bridge. A good strategy bridges you from Goals to Action, ensuring you’re doing the right things.

But there’s even one more layer: Productivity is what we apply to our work so that we can create the space, and free the bandwidth, for true fulfillment.

Every Productivity Bridge then also has a meta-objective: make it easier to focus on what’s truly important to us.

💡 Build Bridges where you want to go… and Boundaries where you don’t 💡

👆 That’s your weekend upgrade.

Bridges as Boundaries

In which direction will water flow? The answer is always downhill. And when downhill isn’t consistent or clear, it will meander. Drive Interstate 95 between Savannah and Jacksonville for a quick primer on meandering water.

This is one expression of the Principle of Least Action—whatever requires the least energy or input will be what happens.

Our goal building Productivity Bridges is to leverage Least Action—make things easier so we’ll do them. And it works. Like water flowing downhill, you’ll focus your attention on those things that you’ve made easier to accomplish.

But there’s a flip side: That which isn’t effectively bridged becomes less likely to happen. What serves as a Bridge for one bit of work becomes a Boundary for something else. And if that something else is “spending time with loved ones” or “realizing my lifelong dreams,” then our Bridges are, in fact, counterproductive.

Boundaries as Bridges

In his excellent book Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman points out that no matter how efficiently we do our work, there will always be an impossibly large amount of potential work that we could theoretically do. Meaning, even an optimal productivity system is easy to overwhelm. At some point, we have to make hard choices: what do we really need to do? What do we really want to do?

Sometimes, that can be Bridged even when it’s more personal in nature. For instance, I Bridge my Facebook birthday wishes with a Typinator snippet (which I explain in this video). On the surface, that seems impersonal—who wants an automated birthday wish? But here’s the thing: I really want to wish them happy birthday, and I want Facebook’s algorithm to know that I want to see things they post. But I probably wouldn’t do it regularly without a Bridge making it easier.

But much of what we do with our loved ones can’t be directly bridged—or would be extremely difficult or off-putting to bridge. In that case, a Boundary can be a Bridge.

Do I want to focus more on my children every evening? How about a clear Boundary around my electronics? Put my MacBook in another room. Drop my phone in a drawer. Those are Boundaries because they make it harder to give in to the urge to do more work. But, following the Least Action principle, they’re also a Bridge. They make it easier for me to turn my attention to what’s important—my wife and kids.

Both Bridges and Boundaries can serve as the tactic to execute the kinds of hard choices explored in Four Thousand Weeks.

How can Tana help?

I mentioned that Strategies are our Bridge from Goals to Action. A more complete structure might look like this: Goals → Strategies → Tactics → Actions. Tana, especially if outfitted with my Tana for Tasks 2 template (get T4T2), can make that progression far easier to map and implement.

This is true even when the tactic is a Boundary. If my Goal is to spend more time with my family in the evenings, my Strategy might be to make some work more efficient—to tighten up my work day—and other work more difficult—avoiding extra evening work. The Boundary tactics might be leaving my MacBook downstairs and plugging in my phone on the bedroom nightstand, well away from the living room.

What does that have to do with Tana? Or any Tool for Thought, for that matter?

The Actions implied by those Tactics would need to be tied into my end-of-work routine every day. If that procedure, delivered to me daily in Tana, included a task to complete my Agenda planning in my office, I’m much more likely to leave my MacBook there. And if it also includes a final checklist item to take my phone to my nightstand, I can have it in my hand when I go up the stairs—making me far more likely to get it where I want it.

You do what you systematize

The overarching lesson of Bridges and Boundaries is this: if you include something in your system, that’s what you’ll do. Your system has to be carefully calibrated, then, with Bridges simplifying what you want to do and Boundaries complicating what you don’t want to do.

The wonderful news here is this: the effects of system building are exponentially cumulative. With each new Bridge or Boundary, everything else gets clearer. Make a couple of things easier, and the time and effort those free up gives you more time to build more Bridges and Boundaries. Which, in turn, free up more time and effort—and so the cycle goes.

What do I do next?

(1) Take 2 minutes and answer this question: What’s one thing I learned in this newsletter that I can put into practice right away?

By committing to a specific action, you make it much more likely you’ll do it.

(2) Pick two aspects of your life: one you want to do more of, and one you want to do less of.

For each, what are the Bridges and Boundaries you can build to accomplish that?

If this was valuable for you:

Share the newsletter with someone you think would also get value from it! https://rjn.st/weekend-upgrade-newsletters​

Until next time, friends:

Build your Bridges to somewhere, and your Boundaries everywhere else!

R.J.
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P.S. From Thursday, August 31 through Saturday, September 2, I’m hosting the first Action-Powered Productivity Digital Conference. All live speakers’ sessions will be FREE for anyone to attend, with a few talkbacks, designated spaces, and live session recordings exclusive for APP Pro members. Several speakers are already slated (announcements coming soon!), and I’ll post a landing page with registration info within the next week or two. No action required from you now—except be on the lookout for more information!