How to Do Things: Productivity for the Productivity-Challenged

by David Cain

How to Do Things is a brief guide to getting a lot more done.

It's intended for people who are currently struggling with productivity, or have always struggled.

Specifically:

People who know they use their work time poorly
People having difficulty working from home
People with ADHD or other executive function issues
People who haven’t had success implementing the methods in popular productivity books, such as Getting Things Done, Deep Work, or The Pomodoro Technique.
If this sounds like you, the Guide can help you become much more productive in a very short time.

How to Do Things was created with a very specific goal for its readers:

1. Dramatically increase your productivity

2. Create this dramatic increase in a week or less

3. Provide this know-how in a resource you can read in one sitting and implement today.

What’s a dramatic increase? Somewhere between 50% and 200%, depending on how much room for improvement you have. If you know your current way of working is far from optimal, the method in this guide can help you make a major leap very quickly.

How to Do Things gives you a powerful, dead-simple method to get things done, designed for people who have never been great at getting things done.

You can be knocking out your to-do list in less than an hour from now, and celebrating your victories this evening, feeling amazing.

Genres: Self Help, Nonfiction, Productivity

38 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 2021

Reviews

[Mikolaj · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book of the self-improvement genre I've read in years.

The method on offer is not innovative in the classic sense of the word, but none of these type of books are. What's special and innovative here... Well, there are a few key things:

- Cain is not trying to invent "this one magic hack you never heard of that will change your life" or brag or pretend anything.
- Where most authors write 300 pages of filler content and seem to forget the original purpose on page 3, Cain distills the knowledge and experience into a few dozen of pages describing an actual method, a tool. This way it can be read, grasped and applied in one day, even if you have lots on your plate already.
- Following on from the previous point - most "self-improv" books that are not complete BS, are compilations of reading and "research" done by the authors. None of this here! Canin has clearly done his research honestly but we (the productivity-challenged people) all did. I don't need more theory, I need a method that works. And that's what's on offer.
- The Author is not another privileged CEO, rich marketer or natural go-getter - he's writing from the point of being a normal person with some serious struggles who fights to get anything done. this makes his tested advice way more real. And also, it is so refreshing!

Reading was a bit of a funny experience for me since I came up with almost identical mthod for myself after years of struggling and underachieving. However, I missed some important details. I also did not follow it regularly. I guess I did not believe it could be that simple, I was still looking for the Magic Hack or a Special Project Management Method. The book gives me (aside from improvements) more trust, that this can be my system from now on, a system that's even fun, and as a side effect teaches me to start, to associate work with pleasure, to realistically assess the tasks...

Thank you David! I hope for myself and wish you to write more of these single-purpose, dense tool-guides. I 100% agree it's worth paying at least the same $ for a book that's 40 pages instead of 400, if it saves me day of reading useless stuff. Time, energy and "brain space" saved. If I had time for 400p, there's a lot of beautiful fiction to enjoy.

PS another advantage of this method I think you didn't mention is those 5-min (or so) breaks are perfect for not only getting up from a chair but also letting the eyes relax on something better and further than computer screen. This is assuming one works from a computer. I think it's the only way I would ever effectively follow the advice on eye care (look far away, away from the screen) even though I really really care about my eyesight. No reminders worked on me.

[Mary-Lynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally a guide that gets down to business. It's my ADHD get-things-started scaffolding. Sometimes it gets you into hyperfocus, other times it's torturous, but most often it's helpful to get your forward inertia going. If you struggle, try this.

[Sheryl Garratt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short, practical guide to time-blocking/Pomodoro method for people who struggle to structure their days - especially those with ADHD

[Howard · Rating 3 out of 5]

I used to be a procrastinator, just the sort of person this book is aimed at. Years of my life sat in front of the computer trapped - unable to pick up the work because the very thought of it filled me with leaden sickness, but not deliberately slacking either. I would bang my head against that wall every day for years. Trapped in a daily 8 hour cycle of "Right let's do some work" / "Oh God I feel so terrible I can't possibly start". The pomodoro technique helped briefly but it didn't stick. I glanced at GTD but it seemed too complicated.

What really helped was just the realisation that I could do better, that I was desperately unhappy with my work life, that coasting would lead me to a retirement of eating cat food, and that I would be devastatingly and unrecoverably disappointed in myself. I faced these fears and admitted them to myself. I'd always known these things, but this time I admitted my own responsibility. No longer through a lens of anger or resentment, but through a lens of empowerment and my ability, my opportunity, to change things.

I changed jobs and fully reset my relationship with work. I wish I could tell you more than that but I honestly don't know what finally made it click. It's like waking up one day and you realise you've decided to quit smoking. You didn't do it, it just happened. Lucky me, after only a decade of swimming through mud at work.

Two years on, I am productive. Incredibly so. I get high performance ratings, wonderful feedback from my team, and I've hugely increased my salary through changing jobs, bonuses, and promotions.

So I picked up HTDT out of interest. I am quite understandably cautious about burn out, of slipping back into old habits. I am busy, and finding time to do all the things is getting tricky. My calendar is filling up with other people's priorities, and I'm starting to have to think about "how can I get everything done" again.

I was hoping for a lean-but-rich resource full of useful tips, but despite being a very short book it's still quite fluffy somehow. There's not a lot to it. That's sort of the whole shtick, and dramatically paring down productivity systems does have an upside, but I still felt like "oh, was that all".

It's pretty much just the next actions list from GTD plus the blocks from pomodoro.

I respect the motivation behind paring down these systems to just the most basic useful bits. But isn't that what you'd do anyway? Just like how every programming team is agile(ish), you can be pomodoro(ish) or GTD(ish).

You read the books, take the parts that resonate and ignore the rest.

One thing I do like is that it'll stop you falling into the trap of meta-gaming productivity ("look at all the ticks and lists I made! Oh, no I didn't actually do anything though"), which is a refreshing take.

It's impossible to go down a HTDT rabbit hole to the detriment of actually doing things, but that's only because the hole isn't that deep in the first place. It might be just deep enough for you to get the bulk of the value that these lengthier more complex systems offer. But equally, you might reach the bottom and find yourself saying 'where's all the rabbits?'.

I guess I was hoping for a wealth of tips and techniques I can pick and choose from, not a single approach to productivity explained very simply.

In HTDT, the author has 'absorbed what is useful and discarded what is not', to borrow from Bruce Lee. My problem with that is: who defines what's useful? In the name of simplicity, he's robbed us of the ability to make our own personal choice there. And that might be fine, if you are overwhelmed by complex systems and just want a simple 'do this' set of steps to follow that's small enough to keep in your head without worrying you're 'doing it wrong'. It's absolutely fine at being that.

I did take this one tip to heart: "Deciding to do a task tomorrow always frees up a bit of time today. The first thing you should do with this liberated time is to make it as easy as possible to do the task first thing tomorrow". There's a great article on his website called How to Do It Tomorrow Instead of Never that goes into this 'red carpet' approach more.

Look - it's a decent booklet if you've never come across pomodoro before, and I did find the Red Carpet concept handy, but overall it didn't tell me anything I hadn't already come across from pomodoro.

[Christian]

Short and sweet; I’m looking forward to trying the block method.

[Another · Rating 5 out of 5]

A quick read. Clear and concise. I'm already putting it to use. Good so rar.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short but valuable guide to becoming more productive. Concept of blocks. Will use this methodology from now on.

[Josh Wilks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Time to start this and see how it goes!