How to use technology and productivity hacks to reclaim your time for things that matter

This article deals with how society tries to convince people that technology will save them precious time when it usually just demands more of it and teaches several different strategies you can use to carve out a better life for yourself that protects your sanity. If you are a paid subscriber, then I recommend reading You don’t have to like me as long as you validate my existence to get my primer on how to survive as a creative in a hypercapitalist hellscape, Is it even possible to be a writer and happy at the same time? to learn some tips on how to protect your mental health, and Everything is beige here… to get spun up on neutral thinking to help you better synthesize this post. Additionally, since this builds on last week’s article, I highly recommend you read about our new archetype system before you dive in here.

If you are not a paid member, you can read everything with a 7-day free trial, or give us a one-time tip.

I think about whisks a lot. Yes, those kinds of whisks. The ones you use to whip eggs and do basic cooking tasks. Did you know that before the 19th century, whisks were basically just a bunch of sticks and thatch bundled together?

Think about how inefficient it would be to use a bunch of sticks to stir ingredients together. It took forever, and it severely limited the types of recipes that could realistically be executed on any given day.

Then, in the 19th century, this magical invention came onto the scene that promised to make cooking significantly easier and lower the bar for kitchen chefs everywhere. Except…that’s not what happened. 

Instead of making existing recipes more efficient and making cooking take less time, what actually happened was the bar was raised for what was expected for the average cook to create on any given day. Out with cake, in with souffle. 

Since cooking dinner was historically a burden overwhelmingly carried by women, so was this new expectation disproportionally carried by them. That doesn’t really have specific relevance here except it pisses me off every time I hear it. This burden extended beyond the making of the recipe, too, as cooks had to learn how to create these new recipes and test them to make sure they didn’t burn the whole house down in the process. When technology advanced from whisks to mechanical egg beaters onward to electric ones, those demands only increased.

This was not an isolated incident, either. Refrigeration had a similar cost burden, as instead of going to the store every day to find what was fresh and in stock, now cooks had nearly infinite choices at their disposal from around the world, which raised the expectations for the types of cuisine to cook. Even the humble stove made it so that you didn’t have to stand over a flame all day, but still, cooks spent the same amount of time cooking as they had a century before.

I am not a Luddite, but I do think they were onto something. Used as a slur in today’s day and age, the Luddites arose as a reaction to technology threatening their livelihoods.

About once a week I get the overwhelming urge to smash some piece of technology, so I have respect for an organization that saw through the bull promising that technology was guaranteed to improve their lives. Yes, there are some great ways that technology has undisputedly changed the world for the better. Two hundred years ago 80% of the world lived in extreme poverty. Today it’s 8%. During that same time, life expectancy has more than doubled.

People suffer less now, even if it doesn’t feel that way. Maybe it’s because of the purple dot problem, which helps explain why we might feel like nothing is better even when it objectively is in many respects.

Still, if everything is better, then why do we have less time than our forefathers? Humanity historically worked 15 hours a week for most of our existence, and yet, with every new advancement, we become more “productive” without gaining any time. Now, we’re working 60-80 hours a week just to keep our heads about water. Part of that is capitalism, silly, but another big part of this is technology promising to save us time when in practice it just raises the expectation and alienates us from everyone around us.

Yet, technology marches on. AI is the new(ish) technology on the block promising to save us time and money by automating much of our lives, but instead of allowing people to work 15 hours a week, employers are expecting exponentially more output from the same amount of time.

This is also true with creative entrepreneurs. They are constantly pulled in a hundred different directions trying to stay afloat, and yet it is never enough. This is in no small part to capitalism feeding off of creatives like a vampire.

Creators literally create the growth mechanism for platforms to turn a profit, and then are shut out of the process after years of work. They are told to toil away for endless hours to create content that can be monetized “eventually”. Meanwhile, they are too fried to actually make the things they love. Then, the owners drive the platform into the ground to extract maximum value for shareholders at the expense of their users, destroying all the goodwill creators have built up over the years.

That’s why I literally don’t care what the platform is, I won’t even try it unless I control the data. Maybe I will go and run ads on them to pull my own fans out, but I won’t do any work to add value to them if they are going to charge me to access the very value we help them build.

It’s a problem that goes back all the way to the humble whisk, a harbinger of doom for all technological innovations to come. It doesn’t have to be that way, though. There are many strategies that can help us reclaim our time even as new technology like AI looms large over everything we do these days.

***This is a long article. If you’re reading in your email, eventually it will truncate. For the best reading experience, I recommend going to this page to read all 6,000+ words in full without interruption.***

If you are too busy to do the things you like and can never get ahead, you are overleveraged and in time debt. In order to get out of that debt, you need to find leverage points in your business to exploit. 

If you are overleveraged, then you are most likely focused on too many low-margin activities, the kind of thing you can train somebody else to do and have nothing to do with your zone of genius. These are admin, customer service, data entry, and other tasks that are required to keep your business functioning, but that you don’t have to personally do for your business to keep running.

These are called $5 tasks because you can hire them out for about $5-$15 (This is an old metric but still works to describe entry-level tasks). These are also the tasks that AI is best poised to handle right now. Whether it is setting meetings, doing tedious research, spell-checking your work, helping with book marketing, or any number of low-level but necessary tasks, there is AI to help you do them better so you can reclaim large swaths of time.

You are probably (mostly) focused on $50 tasks. This is you being a technician in your business. This is the writing, drawing, editing, etc, that turns your ideas into books and articles. You may think you cannot hire these tasks out, but you can probably hire parts of them. AI is much worse at doing this type of work, though corporations seem to believe this is the future because they are stonewalling writers for demanding their work isn’t used to train their replacements.

It’s true that nobody can write quite like you, but you can hire editors, proofreaders, cover artists, etc. As a comic book artist, you may need to do the line work for a project but can hire out flatting, lettering, coloring, and inking. Or you can do your linework digitally and not pencil at all to create more time.

I know this sounds expensive, but it allows you more time to do better work that will pay you more, and it allows you to turn around projects faster, which generates more revenue for your business.

If you don’t want to hire out, then you could increase productivity on each of those tasks. For instance, I increased my daily output from 1,000 words to 5,000 words without decreased quality, so I now finish a book in a fraction of the time, saving more time. You can also use AI to help you flesh out certain aspects of your writing to add things you might miss. This might turn your stomach initially, but programmers have used AI to help them write code for years.

Another thing you can do is get existing clients to pay more. I know people generally hate raising their rates, but if you can double your rates and still retain 60% of your business, you are still ahead of the game. Plus, you have reclaimed half your time without decreasing your revenue.

If you aren't comfortable doubling your rates off the bat, try increasing your rates by 10%-25% every quarter until you start seeing people balk at your new pricing. If you have a good relationship and communicate with your clients, they will generally be willing to pay more for your services to retain you.

Or you can decrease the churn in your business so more people stay year after year. I have talked about churn before, but here’s a definition:

Most creative businesses are not concerned with churn enough. If you know that 20% of your customers leave every year, and you can find a way to cut that to 10%, you have just removed the need to spend marketing dollars and time onboarding new clients by 50%.

Still, $50 tasks should not be the end goal of your creative business. When you are stuck at the $50 activities (or even worse $5 activities) in your business, the thing you are definitely not focused on are the tasks that will grow your business, and those are the $500+ tasks.

These are the strategic partnerships you form and the products you launch with better results every single time. These $500+ tasks are ways you can double your income while halving your workload. They are the processes you put in place to offload your work so that you can take on more clients. These $500+ tasks are how you create leverage, by productizing services or creating new products or outsourcing.

If you haven’t read The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, then it has the clearest conceptualization of this concept of leverage points I have yet found.

I am not a particularly hard worker. I am just very good at finding leverage points and knocking over dominos. People are often surprised when I tell them how little I actually work because I generally seem so busy. But that is because I am excellent at leveraging myself and creating space to say yes to great opportunities and turning down bad ones.

It is possible to make the same money in 4 hours a day as you can in 16, and it is possible to create massive revenue in a very little amount of time. You just have to leverage yourself properly. It breaks my heart to see how much so many people I know work without getting any gain.

In April 2018, I spent two amazing weeks on a book tour in Spain. During that time, I did many incredible things, but one I will never forget is that I got the opportunity to eat at a couple of Michelin-star restaurants while we were in San Sebastian.

One of them was called A Fuego Negro. Aside from the puppets with penises that adorned the wall, I remember it as the best meal I've ever had in my life. Fifteen courses of amazing food played like a record across my palette. I couldn't believe how good that meal was, honest and true. It was perfection. Honestly, I never knew a meal could be so good.

On the menu, they had the year each course was added to the menu. The restaurant was over 10 years old, and there were pieces on the menu that spanned all of them, like the greatest hits of their past.

I'm sure the restaurant was amazing when it opened, but in order to deliver a world-class meal, it took ten years of refinement. It meant cutting really good menu items and replacing them with something great.

I run my business in a rather similar way. Every year, I take December off to examine everything I tried in the past twelve months..and scrap everything that wasn’t pulling its weight, even if it worked in the past. 

Through that process, I've jettisoned some really good strategies for growing my business in order to make ways for great ones. I let go of things that worked well enough to keep me going in order to find ones that were world-class.

Since I only have so much brainpower and bandwidth, I was left asking if it would be okay to stay at the level I was at for the next 10 years, and if not, I was forced to abandon things that were working decently.

Over the last few years, I've been able to construct a suite of world-class tools. There is still refinement to do in order to make it work perfectly, but there's no doubt it's working better than it ever has before.

An ecosystem is fragile. Introduce the wrong animals or vegetation and it could send a perfectly balanced system into chaos. The same is true with any industry, or even in your own practice.

Too often people take on every responsibility thrown at them, whether it's ideas for books or potential partnerships or conventions, or marketing efforts, without any thought as to how it will affect their ecosystem.

Part of this is naivete.

At the beginning of your career, you literally don't know how your ecosystem works. You also don't have the opportunity to turn down much work without setting yourself back.

So, you take on more and more.

Then, you establish yourself, but never take the time to figure out how your ecosystem works, and so you continue throwing junk and trash into your ecosystem until it is on the verge of destruction, leading to burnout or worse.

In order to find equilibrium with yourself, you have to find a balance that is right for you, jettisoning things that don't serve you, doubling down on things that light you up, and having enough space to recover.

The same is true when trying to place yourself in an industry. Whether it's comics, book publishing, magazines, or the world of food trucks, you need to find a way to become a beneficial part of the ecosystem...

...because if you aren't, then the ecosystem will treat you as a cancerous growth to protect itself against and it will be very hard to make headway.

If you want to find your perfect author ecosystem, you can take our free quiz and learn how to build a healthy biome for your work starting today.

As you go about building your career, tasks will arise that threaten to eat into your precious creating time. Meetings, interview requests, guest articles, upcoming launches, and more start to creep into your day demanding your attention.

That is why you must be precious of the time you have to create and hold it sacred above everything else. If you don't make it a habit from the beginning, it becomes nearly impossible to do it when other commitments start to intrude on it.

I’m a huge fan of time blocking and recommend it to any creative looking to protect their time.

I generally use a time-blocking strategy that involves green time, yellow time, and red time.

The bottom line is that not all time is created equal. Some time is used on useless tasks. Some time is used for rest. Some time is used for making money. Some time is used for chores. We make the mistake of equating time equally, but it is decidedly not equal. 

One surefire way to burnout is doing too many low-value tasks and not enough high-value ones. I know, for instance, writing and resting are high-value tasks for me. Writing makes me money. Reading helps me recover. 

Everything else in my business is secondary to those two tasks. Notice, only one of them directly makes me money (writing books), but the other is essential for my writing process to exist in harmony.

One of the best ways to reclaim your time is to stop splitting it between lots of different projects. Nearly every writer I know wants to write everything, everywhere, all at once, but if you want to leverage your time then it behooves you to push on one pressure point until you burst through the other side.

The simple fact is that multitasking takes more energy than single-tasking and has compounding negative effects. Suddenly, because your attention is elsewhere, simple tasks take longer than they should, throwing off your daily schedule, and stressing you out because you fall behind.

When you fully focus on a single task, however, you feel less stress, and can even enjoy your work.

This focus extends beyond just your daily schedule, too. The more focus you can put into any one area of your business, the more progress you will make on it.

I’m not talking about just focusing on a format like books or growing your Substack, either. I’m saying you should focus on one genre and hyperfocus yourself on breaking through one little gap in the market. 

You might write 100 articles on one topic, or write a 10-book signature series, but you are putting an overwhelming focus on a singular subject until people take notice and recognize you as remarkable.

The more focused attention you can give to one, singular problem, the more likely you will be to break through and push down that big domino blocking your path.

When we focus our attention on one problem, everything we do amplifies each other. Otherwise, you will likely disburse your effort to such a degree that it will be hard to get anywhere.

Yes, you can step out of that box, but it's basically like starting your career all over again when you do. Some people will follow you between genres and formats, but most won't, and unless you have a huge audience, it's really hard to have enough of them willing to read your other stuff to make it profitable.

When you write in one genre, everything you release helps market and amplify everything else. When you work in a lot of different genres, your marketing doesn’t really build on each other, or it takes a lot longer to work, because you are not taking advantage of compound marketing. 

This is a very grassland-focused marketing strategy, but it can work for every ecosystem.

Deserts are nimble enough to hop between genres, but they would benefit from diving deep into one main genre and getting to know the readers so well that they can predict trends better and spot them earlier.

Tundras can use this strategy to drive audience engagement with each book in a series as they build excitement for a launch.

Forests can use compound marketing to find faster success with one series that they can use to connect readers to all their work.

Aquatics can use it to quickly grow the audience for their overall brand when breaking into new markets.

I recommend always being underleveraged with your time and energy. I believe in an energy-first mentality, which I introduced in This is NOT a Book.

You can use this “energy first” mindset to analyze what you can do with ease, and then tack your expectations to that.

One of the things that changed my outlook on running a creative business was transitioning from overleveraging myself to being underleveraged, leaving huge gaps in my day for just thinking. This time allows me to find my most highly leveraged activities and double down on them.

Now, when something comes along that’s a “heck yes” I have time for it. Meanwhile, my income hasn’t dipped because I have found successively more leveraged activities that allow me to continuously do more in less time.

Humans are very good at filling out time with things that “might be fun” or “could be interesting”, and then when something comes along that’s a “heck yes!” they don’t have the available time to do it.

Why do we do that? It turns out that humans are also very bad at projecting how they will feel in the future, which leads us to be mean to our future selves. 

Chronic illnesses taught me that you have to reserve your spoons for the things that you really want to do, b/c there are only so many hours in a day, and if you spend your spoons on things that are just okay, you won’t have anything left for the stuff that you really want to do. If you don’t know spoon theory, here’s a little primer.

We are told to do all the things, but doing almost none of the things is way better until they resonate deeply has gotten me further than doing all the things ever did.

So, should you even care about AI? Yes, and no. AI probably will allow us to be more efficient, but will it provide us with more time in our day for enjoyment? Only if we intentionally decide to use it that way. Even now, I hear people talking about using AI to write books 10x faster or deliver bigger, longer, more in-depth articles than ever before.

And yes, that’s all possible, but it sounds exhausting and untenable. I really appreciate Steph Pajones’s work on this subject, because she has limited time and energy as well. So, she uses AI to create a life she loves and make the work that matters to her without overextending herself. I take a more measured approach to AI, but I do tend to remain optimistic about the potential of AI.

That said, the biggest problem with AI is that it is run, funded, and maintained by capitalists, and the hypercapitalism quagmire we find ourselves mired in exists solely to squeeze maximum profitability out of a system. Not to mention that AI doesn’t need to be good to be weaponized against creatives, so I remain hesitant.

Like all technology, AI will only help insomuch as it allows you to gain more control over your life. That is true with anything, though, even the humble whisk.

If you got something out of this article, we hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber to help fund future articles. If you are a paid subscriber, then I recommend reading You don’t have to like me as long as you validate my existence to get my primer on how to survive as a creative in a hypercapitalist hellscape, Is it even possible to be a writer and happy at the same time? to learn some tips on how to protect your mental health, and Everything is beige here… to get spun up on neutral thinking to help you better synthesize this post. Also, if you were confused about the ecosystem metaphors used throughout this piece, then I highly suggest you go back to last week’s post and read about our new archetyping system.

If you are not a paid member, you can read everything with a 7-day free trial, or give us a one-time tip.