A quick browse through Quora & you quickly realise people are obsessed with productivity. We have become programmed to fill our days with as many tasks as we can. And we call it productivity. Wearing 'busy' around like a badge of honour. But what if true productivity was about doing less?

I'm an Introvert. Yeah yeah. I can tell you're shocked. Most people are when I tell them. Because people assume that I'm an extrovert because they see me 'out there' online or chatting comfortably at an event, or hosting Twitter spaces or doing a thousand other things. Basically they don't see me acting 'shy' so think I must be an extrovert.

If there is one thing that has derailed me on many a 30-day experiment, it's submitting to the voice in my head. You know THAT voice. You've probably experienced it too. You're trying to build a habit. You start off so well, you might even get a week in, and when you're not seeing the results you thought you would... BAM doubt starts to creep in.

I have ONE GOLDEN RULE for capturing new ideas. I never capture an idea without doing a quick brain dump. Never. Like Never. Did I mention... Never

I might be killing it with Atomic Essays, but that doesn't mean I've got my whole life together. For instance, In the last two weeks, I haven't done any washing, I've been to the gym a mere 3 times and my house is a chaotic mess. Sure I've had some big things happening, like launching my first paid product. But surely not everything needs to go to crap.

The world is full of people who have ideas but can't articulate them. A few years ago, I sat in a seminar listening to one of my coaches. I was completely in awe of the way someone would ask him a question and he would always have the exact right metaphor or be able to draw the right model to illustrate his point.

This year I started timeblocking my days. Breaking my day up into hour-long chunks and scheduling tasks to do within that time. It all started so well. Then a meeting would get scheduled in the middle of my morning and I wouldn't be able to get into any kind of significant work, because all I felt was the meeting looming.

Every experiment starts with a hypothesis. It's one of the only things I learned from year 7 science. No one is performing experiments just for the fun of it. OK, we may or may not have had some fun with the bunsen burners... but I digress.

Reading one book a time is hugely inefficient. I've always been an avid reader. My favorite place to hang out at school was in the library. But there was always one thing that bugged me about reading. The advice that you should only read one book at a time.

I've been struggling to focus lately. I'm flitting from one tab to another, constantly checking my phone, jumping on Twitter every 5 minutes (reading all the amazing essays). But getting any kind of focused work done has been painful and fleeting. So, this afternoon I grabbed my headphones, headed for a sunny corner in a cafe, and switched on a rather magical playlist. Almost INSTANTLY I was transported into a state of calm, relaxed, flow.

Creativity thrives in constraints. As creatives and creators, we often balk at that idea. We want wide open space to be able to create and explore unlimited possibilities. But in reality, has your best work really been produced when you've had unlimited time and resources?

45 days ago most of my tweets went unnoticed. It's amazing how quickly showing up daily compounds. Now the engagement on Twitter is literally crazy some days! And I'm running to keep up. I can't remember the last time a tweet had 0 engagement. But something else has happened beyond just likes and comments.

Creators who master showing up daily are winning against 95% of everyone else. Except showing up daily is hard. There are a million other things that want our attention. And when we’re starting out it’s hard to see where all this ‘creating’ is going. Plenty of people in my real life asked me that question.

As a creator you can't afford to wait for inspiration, you have to manufacture it. Daniel Vassallo calls this 'bumping into inspiration.' It's not random, it's highly intentional places or inspiration generators that guarantee to serve you up ideas on a daily basis.

Being a creator and having a day job is tough. Your process will never look the same as a full-time creator. Deep work? Forget it. Cabin in the woods? Nope. Instead, you have to deal with limited time, kids, jobs, partners, and you know… a life.

If you didn't know by now I'm a huge fan of the atomic essay format. I started writing atomic essays way back in March 2021. Before that, I thought I was going to go the traditional route of starting a blog and writing one to two blog posts every week.

Notion, Roam, Obsidian, Craft. What do all these apps have in common? They all start from a blank page. Which can at once be the most exciting and the most daunting part. They are infinitely customisable and yet if you don't have any pre-conceived frameworks or problems you need to solve it can be hard to know what to do with them.

I'm addicted to constraints. OK, that sounded weird. Let me clarify. I'm addicted to imposing constraints on my creativity. It's why I challenge myself to write an essay under 300 words every day.

Every creator should be writing atomic essays in 2022. I started writing these yellow essays in March 2021 & have clocked up over 250 of them now. They have become the basis for articles, courses, products and an outline for a book. But I see many people struggle with the format.

Sometimes it's not what you say, but what you do that counts. Scrap that. It's always about what you do that counts more than what you say. I often get messages from people saying they were inspired to start shipping because of my example. And mostly they are people I had no idea were even reading any of my essays.

I'm convinced that I failed at being a creator for 10 years because I was too impatient. Sometimes it feels like Twitter is just full of people who just suddenly go viral, blow up and grow their audiences massively. So as a new creator naturally we get all excited when we put our one blog, one video, one essay out thinking this is going to be it. But then we wait.

Unless Twitter is your full-time job you don’t need to spend hours every week writing tweets to fill up a schedule. But, if you want to grow on Twitter you are going to need to show up with some value.

Every morning I sit down at my desk to write. Not an essay or a thread or a tweet. But just for myself. Writing helps me think, formulate ideas, & understand the world. And my writing inbox is the first place I start each day.

What if I told you prolific creators don't spend hours in deep work? My parents loved to garden. I remember long summer evenings where they wandered around our front yard pottering about the garden. Watering plants, pulling out weeds. It was never a back-breaking session. Just joyfully enjoying the work of tending the garden.