You need more focus, not more productivity
By definition, cleaning your house is productive.
Running errands is productive.
Responding to 32 emails a day is productive.
But who cares if you’re productive on the wrong things?
I have a friend who spent almost two years “building” his business. He had the logo, LLC, website redesign, brand colors, social media templates, and a 90-day content calendar he never used.
When I asked how many customers he’d actually talked to, he went quiet…. the answer was zero.
Meanwhile another buddy of mine launched a completely new business with nothing but a Google Doc and a paypal link and had paying clients within a week.
Jeff Bezos has said he gets paid to make about three good decisions a day. That’s it. The richest guy on the planet doesn’t have a color-coded time-blocking system or second brain in notion.
He just knows what matters and ignores everything else.
The best productivity advice I’ve ever gotten can be summed up in two words: do less.
Do less of the stuff that doesn’t matter so you can do more of the 1-3 things that actually do.
Why you feel busy, but still stuck
James Clear has one of my favorite principles: the difference between motion and action.
Motion = planning and learning.
Action = what actually produces a result.
Outlining 5 videos is motion. Filming 2 videos is action.
Listening to a podcast about the benefits of keto is motion. Changing your diet and keeping a food log for 7 days is action.
This is one of my favorite productivity points because I still catch myself doing this. I’ll hum and ha all week about little things I could do, outline videos, tweak thumbnails, and build out a content calendar. But if I never sit down and film, none of it matters.
It’s so much easier to watch someone else break down how they built their business than to actually launch your own offer and face rejection.
But that’s the difference between being in the audience and being in the arena.
The days I actually film, it’s like a weight lifts off my shoulders. I’m not worried about cramming more tasks in or checking boxes.
The hard thing got done, and everything else is just noise.
The reason we stay stuck in motion is because it protects us. It gives us this feeling of pseudo productivity that’s way more comfortable than risking failure.
Next time you’re stuck ask yourself: is this motion or action?
Less Time = More Output
When I quit my jobs to go full-time on YouTube, I thought I’d be a productivity machine.
But I was miserable, lonely, and completely unproductive. I had all the time in the world and mostly used it to stare at my computer in sweatpants.
Nobody warns you about that part of entrepreneurship.
After about a month I took a part-time job as a middle school counselor, only about 20 hours a week. And somehow… with less time I started producing more content.
There’s a name for this.
Parkinson’s Law: tasks expand to fill the time you give them.
You’re not unproductive because you don’t have enough time, you’re unproductive because you have too much of it.
I’ve seen it play out with videos I spent 10 hours on that flopped and videos I made in a fraction of the time that got millions of views.
The effort doesn’t matter if the focus isn’t there.
Give yourself half the time and watch what happens.
The 2-hour window that builds everything
Everyone has 2 to 3 hours a day when they’re roughly 3x sharper than any other time.
Stephen King writes every morning and is done by noon.
A successful musician I know writes exclusively after midnight.
Mark Wahlberg’s got that unhinged 2:30AM routine you probably saw the meme of.
Doesn’t matter if your window is at 5AM or 11PM, what matters is you know when it is and you build your day around it.
I used to have an impressive 2-hour morning routine before I even started working. There was running, meditation, superfood smoothies, the whole thing. But by the time I was “ready” to work all my willpower had been eaten up from doing the damn morning routine!
So over the years I came up with my most productive morning routine I’ll share with you.
Fair warning, it looks pretty boring:
5:00 AM | Wake up
5:05 AM | Let dogs out
5:10 AM | Coffee
5:15 AM | 2 hrs deep work
That single change did more for my output than any app or system ever could. I’d estimate 70% of my best videos were made before 9 AM.
Find your window and protect it.
How to become 4X more productive overnight
I used to mark emails as “unread” so I could deal with them later.
Seemed like a smart system until I realized that by the time I finally responded, I’d already thought about that email five times. Opened it, read it, closed it, stressed about it, opened it again.
That’s four times less productive than just handling it the first time.
Simple rule: if something takes less than 2 minutes, do it now.
Wash the dish, reply to the text, pay the bill, confirm the plans. Every small thing you put off adds invisible weight to your brain, and by 2 p.m., you’re mentally exhausted without having done anything that actually matters.
Now the flip side.
For everything that takes more than 2 minutes, batch it.
A researcher at UC Irvine found that every interruption costs you 23 minutes to refocus because your brain bounces to two other tasks before returning to the original one.
Check your phone a handful of times during a deep work session and you’ve lost hours just getting back to where you were.
So run your errands on one day instead of three, check email twice a day instead of all day, and do what I do: film all my videos on one day and save over an hour of setup each session.
Group the small stuff and protect the deep stuff.
The dirty tap water theory
I stole this metaphor from Ed Sheeran. He compared creative work to turning on a tap that hasn’t been used in a while. The first water that comes out is brown and gross. You have to let it run before the clean water flows.
You can’t skip to the good water.
This is the thing that keeps most people unproductive. They want the first attempt to be perfect so they never start.
But you doing it (even badly), gives you experience.
Let me show you.
What you’re reading right now shouldn’t exist. I was terrified of writing.
In school I was labeled a “bad” writer, and in college my papers always held me back. But in 2024 I wanted to start a newsletter because it sounded fun and I knew I wanted to write a book one day.
When I sat down with a friend who runs a massive newsletter, his advice was dead simple: publish every week, no matter what, and commit to that for at least a year.
So that’s what I did.
I forced myself to hit publish every single week whether I felt like it was good or not.
The first few editions were brutal and took 10-15 hours to write something I still wasn’t entirely proud of. That’s the dirty tap cleaning itself. But I kept publishing, and somewhere around week 30 the water started running clear. Now here we are at week 57 and haven't skipped once.
So beat your inner perfectionist into submission with this one liner:
Done is better than perfect because perfect never gets done.
If you only did one thing today…
One question changed everything for me:
if this was the only thing I did today, what would make it feel like a win?
For me that’s always been filming. And I used to avoid it constantly. Setting up a YouTube shoot when you’re doing everything yourself takes 45 minutes to an hour before you even start talking, so I’d push it off, do easier things first, and have this low-grade anxiety humming all day because I knew the real work was still waiting for me.
Then I’d finally film at 4pm and feel this wave of relief. At some point I realized I was giving myself maybe four hours of that feeling when I could’ve had the whole day.
So I flipped it.
Hard thing first, everything after feels easy. The rest of the day could be chaos and it doesn’t bother me because the thing that actually mattered already got done.
Your one thing is probably whatever you’re most likely to avoid. You know exactly what it is. You’ve likely been thinking about it while reading this newsletter.
Do it this week and feel the relief.
Whew! I just threw 15 years of productivity lessons at you in one email. That’s a lot. But if you only remember one thing, make it the first one.
You don’t need to do more. You need to focus more. That’s it. Everything else is just a better way of doing that.
Only took me about 15 years to figure out. You’re welcome for the shortcut :)
See you next saturday,
CK
P.S. Which one of these hit hardest? Hit reply and tell me. I read every single one.
Also - the video I teased in last week's email is live. It's a good one. Watch it here:
