“Stuckness” is where the potential of maximum growth exists. Yet the feeling itself is terrible and breaking out of “stuckness” is extremely hard. An enormous amount of productivity hacks and books have been written around breaking the “stuckness” walls. Over the last decade, I personally devised an “Abstract Productivity System” which is basically a system which encourages breaking tasks down so the
next thing to work on is well defined
it is easier to recover from a slump by picking up the next thing
Read that post here if you are curious.
I have been writing about productivity for a while. It started with Trello in 2013 and turned into a very custom system of things to track in Notion by 2018. Currently, my day to day is driven by what I call "Yearly Process" that reveals itself in chunks of "Weekly plans". I have had the though of productizing the process from notion into an app (mainly…
But can we summarize “stuckness” and all the possible solutions (distilling all the bodies of work on productivity) in one go?
“Stuckness” is this uneasy feeling when you are tasked with something that you ought not to be doing or it is at a hardness level that is unpleasant for you and your whole body-mind system wants to avoid that and it is pretty good at distracting you. This is where easier work that gives you a feeling of progress like microblogging or doom-scrolling kicks in.
The solution almost always is “act and do something”, do the next step, the smallest thing that you can do to move in the problem space where you are stuck. Most productivity systems encourage this one thing
GTD (getting things done) encourages you to take up the micro-dopamine or distracting tasks in one go and build a pipeline for the rest
The one thing encourages you to take up one thing at a time (which should be the topic of your “stuckness”)
Eat the Frog encourages you to take up the hardest thing first thing in the morning. That’s usually the thing you are stuck at or has the potential for getting stuck at.
Once you read enough self help books and try enough productivity solutions — you realize that almost all of them are true (or none of them are true depending on your perspective). If you are able to follow any of the productivity systems for long enough (let’s say 1+ year), you will likely be in the top 1% percentile of productivity.
Some folks might want to point out that real life is different and instead of a “single stuckness” there is “nested stuckness” (things blocked on one another) and “parallel stuckness” (multiple priorities that are actually equal). This is true and I believe that’s where many people fail to stick to the plan because eventually things get so overwhelming that you think that the productivity system you employed is not working. That’s why mentally linking “action” as a solution to “stuckness” is so important.
To summarize, make “action” the default. Action is the solution to “stuckness”. Practice this thought so many times that it becomes the default reaction. That’s where the real growth will start to happen.
When in doubt do something, do anything, just act.