Most of the Productivity Advice Is Useless

unless you filter it through your own standards.

Photo by Anthony Tran on Unsplash

For a long time, I couldn’t figure out how to design my “perfect routine.” I came to Medium when the productivity hype was up in 2017 and, right at the doorstep, I was greeted with a colourful plate full of advice.

I could pick all the appetizers I wanted.

So I tasted the “Waking up at 5 am” one. The “daily exercise routine.” For a while, I fiddled with journaling, meditation, breathing practices, scheduling my breaks and so on. It was fun to experiment. I learned a lot.

But, in the end, all of these were just appetizers.

The main dish came when I started listening to my own voice to design my perfect day — and not that of productivity gurus.

Productivity advice is not universal

Personal development advice can be great, but it can also be useless — or even downright harmful. That depends on whether you are able to filter it through the lens of your own standards and individual conditioning.

I was missing that last point for quite a while.

I took most of the productivity and self-management advice quite literally in the beginning. If a guru said: “wake up early and…