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.

Writing on Twitter ruined me for any other kind of writing. I've been publishing Atomic essays on Twitter for 6 months now and it's completely changed how I think about writing. I used to think that writers hid away for months and years in a cabin in the woods somewhere only to emerge with a finished manuscript.

If you want to be a serious creator, you have to get serious about capturing ideas. My idea library is the single biggest key to my success as a creator and the reason I have been able to create so consistently over all this time.

I love creating order from chaos. In fact it's my main superpower. Give me a pile of unlinked things and I'll find the pattern and be able to give them order AND make them look stunning at the same time. But if you know me, that's no surprise.

What do you do when you're committed to writing daily, but you just don't feel like it? I've come up against a few of those days since committing to the daily pace of writing. As much as I have a library of ideas that are brewing, some days it's just not a hell yes on any of them.

We have come to glorify the cult of 24/7/365 culture. Hustle, productivity, grind, doing, busyness, more, bigger, better. We glorify people who are busy, hustling on the weekends, building their side hustles. Cause after all, if you're not hustling on the weekend then what are you doing with your life?

I can touch type at around 80-90 words per minute. I remember sharing an office with my best friend when we worked together. On my first day, I was banging away on the keys writing out an email. When I finished, I turned around and she was just sitting staring at me with her mouth wide open.

There is no such thing as an 'overnight success.' Just someone who put in the reps daily in the dark. As a creator, we all experience the rollercoaster ride of the highs and lows. Your daily practices are what grounds you & becomes your compass, your north star no matter what is going on around you.

My mum always used to say that curiosity killed the cat. Of course, I had questions. What cat did it kill? And how did it die? When did this happen? Who owned the cat? Oh... and can we get a cat? My mum would ask for quiet time after this

What does it mean to be a prolific creator? If you looked at my output over the last four months, some might call it prolific. After all, I've published something on the internet for the last 130 days straight. But if you look at that output in the context of the last 40 years of my life, it's just a drop in the ocean.

Since I can remember I've been obsessed with notebooks. I remember reading a biography of Leonardo Da Vinci by Charles Nicholl and was captivated by his notebook habit. Da Vinci was a renaissance man, curious about so many things, and used his notebooks to store and discover all that wonder.

I fell headfirst into Austin Kleons books on the weekend. It was wholly by accident. They were just sitting idly in my Kindle library for months. And yet on Saturday afternoon in a random moment, I opened Show Your Work and I couldn't put it down.