The way I see it: Productivity is a game with unbalanced mechanics.

So I’ve finally started achieving the things I want to with life and I wanted to describe the mental models I use for productivity. I’ve read a bunch of books around it but nothing I’m describing is from any of those books. I’m not sure what sort of response I’ll get from here but I hope it’s beneficial.<br><br>**Productivity is a game with unbalanced mechanics.**<br><br>If you’ve played games like RuneScape or WoW, you might know what I’m talking about. Unbalanced mechanics are mechanics you can exploit to play the game in a way that is clearly different from how the developer intended.<br><br>To give some examples, I know a player in RuneScape who is 99 in all skills except two, which are 90 something. You don’t need all skills to be 90 to play the game well, but it’s amazing to see that when you can skip the grind of two skills while staying competitive.<br><br>In WoW, there’s a popular meme in my server that one day a guy will just solo Kil’jaeden. Basically, Kil’jaeden is one of the most difficult bosses in the game but there are certain mechanics and strategies that can be exploited to kill him with one player. So far no one has done it. But the guy who will do it will get a lot of easter eggs and recognition in-game for finally achieving it.<br><br>That’s what life is like. You are the guy trying to solo Kil’jaeden. You’re playing the game under the standard ruleset that everyone else is playing under and your goal is to find all the ways in which you can exploit mechanics to achieve more while using less time.<br><br>**The game is easy when you have the right strategies.**<br><br>When I was in school, I was told that the only way to be good at anything was to work hard and put in 100% effort. Very few people disagree with that. There’s a popular meme that goes something like “A wise man once said nothing but work, so I worked 100% of the time. Now I’m a wise man also but I think he was wrong.”<br><br>I tried very hard for many years. It didn’t work out for me, and it doesn’t work out for anyone else. No one likes grinding out hours of work and no one has succeeded doing that. Today, Elon Musk is the richest man in the world, and while he says to work 100 hour weeks to be successful, he admits that he’s tried working 100 hour weeks and it’s terrible. It’s not sustainable.<br><br>Everyone knows hard work isn’t sustainable. There’s a reason why we talk about work/life balance - after 8 hours of work, you need to go home and focus on yourself and your relationships. Even the hardest-working people don’t work hard all the time. I’m sure even Elon Musk has some downtime, relaxing in his billionaire villas. But all we really do is talk about how important hard work is and how it’s necessary to be successful.<br><br>Hard work isn’t necessary to be successful, and the sooner you realize that the sooner you can achieve success. What’s necessary is to be good at something.<br><br>**The easiest way to be good at something is to copy someone who is already good.**<br><br>Learning to be good at something takes a long time. That’s why most people don’t do it. Most people, including myself, hate being bad at anything. All the time I spent grinding out school assignments and work projects that I sucked at, all the time I wasted on trying to perfect a skill that I didn’t really care about just because everyone around me cared about it. Looking back, I wouldn’t do any of it again. It wasn’t worth it.<br><br>But the good news is that you don’t have to do any of that. The game is easy when you have the right strategies. And its very easy to find the right strategies when many people have already figured them out and published them online.<br><br>YouTube is amazing for this. Watching a 10 minute video on how to do something properly is 100x faster than trying to learn it yourself through trial and error. And I’m sure many of you already do that. But I think most people forget about it when it comes to normal skills like cooking and cleaning and socializing. Most people try to figure those things out by themselves, wasting months and years on learning something they could learn in a weekend.<br><br>That’s what I did, and it’s not worth it. My mental health and relationships and finances all suffered because I wouldn’t ask for help. I wasted a lot of time and I hope you don’t do the same.<br><br>I think I’m done with what I wanted to say. I hope you guys have some thoughts on this and maybe some stories of your own.