This is optimal living daily.

Dangerous ideas.

What if everything we thought was true about productivity was wrong?

By Cal Newport of Cal Newport.com and I'm Justin Molek.

And I'm going to jump right into today's post as we optimize your life.

Dangerous ideas.

What if everything we thought was true about productivity was wrong by

Cal Newport of Cal Newport.com.

The surprising hardness of the symbol. I just observe something distressing about my behavior.

The absolute most simple component to my productivity repertoire is to keep a notebook and a pen

within reach at all times.

In the standard GTD canon, this allows me to immediately capture any tasks or ideas

that pop to mind. In theory, this basic behavior, taking a notebook out of my backpack when I sit down,

should present no difficulty. What task could be more simple? All I have to do is move my arm literally just a few feet from my bag to my desk. No thinking

is required. No more than three to five seconds transpire. No sweat. Many times, however, I can't stand the thought of it.

In fact, as I write this, such an occasion just occurred.

I returned to my office after lunch, sat down and found that every ounce of my being was resisting

this trivial act. I had a fight to rally the energy to get out that notebook, and this is a fight, I often lose.

The problem with the hardness assumption.

This observation contradicts a lot of what we assume about productivity. We like to imagine that the difficulty of starting something is in

linear proportion to the difficulty of a task. When we see write term paper on a to-do list, we know that we have our work cut out for us to overcome the urge to procrastinate.

Something simple on the other hand, like, take a notebook out of your backpack should be a breeze. But it's not. To my

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