Introduction
Becoming more productive is not about going faster right away.
It's about choosing to slow down on purpose, temporarily, so you can move much more efficiently later. The logic is similar to the need to take an intentional break when your energy drops.
This goes against our natural reflex: sticking with familiar methods, even when they are inefficient. But without that initial investment, no lasting progress is possible.
Invest time to save time
In this training, several tools and methods will be suggested to improve how you work.
The most dangerous reaction is to think that a new tool or a new method will waste time, simply because you have to change your habits.
Staying in that mindset means living on autopilot.
That's exactly what prevents real improvement.
Productivity follows a simple rule: you need to invest time today to save more time tomorrow. That's the idea behind sharpen your axe.
The J-curve of change
When you implement a change, it almost always causes a temporary drop in performance.
You need to unlearn before you relearn, which mechanically creates an initial slowdown.
This dynamic is often shown as a J-curve: a dip, followed by lasting acceleration.
A classic example is learning to type properly.
At first, changing your finger placement makes you feel much slower. After a few days or weeks, your speed and comfort end up far above your old level.
The same mechanism applies when you change your work organization or your tools.
Don't change everything at once
This also implies another essential rule: avoid transforming everything in one shot.
Changing your tools, your organization, your note-taking system, and your meeting habits at the same time creates too much load. The result is often quitting entirely. It's better to prioritize your tasks and move step by step.
The methods presented here can be adopted gradually, at the pace of your needs.
Week after week, month after month, sometimes even year after year.
This progressive approach is more effective than brutal revolutions.
The compounding effect of small improvements
Productivity gains are rarely spectacular at the beginning.
They become powerful over the long term because they compound.
A tiny daily improvement can feel negligible. But over time, it creates massive results. This is hard to grasp because the brain naturally thinks linearly, while real effects are exponential.
That is exactly the bias that makes people underestimate the impact of small repeated optimizations.
Improve what consumes the most time
The best way to progress is to observe where time actually goes.
If meetings take up a large part of your week, it makes sense to question them, shorten them, or restructure them, as covered in the pages on work organization.
If note-taking is expensive, you may want to improve your tools or your method instead of suffering daily friction.
Each adjustment looks minor on its own. Together, they deeply transform how you work.
Invest your time instead of spending it
Time can be seen as a financial resource.
Either you only spend it, or you invest it.
People who accept to invest time into improving their methods end up working faster, with less effort and less fatigue.
This is the logic behind all the productivity principles presented in this guide.