The key to productivity: dopamine and a new insight

Habits need motivation, and motivation is the hard part

Many studies suggest that dopamine is closely linked to habit formation. Atomic Habits explains how each habit requires 4 things:

• A Cue
• A Craving
• Ability
• A Reward

Another important thing that doing anything requires: motivation. And we get motivation due to one of two things:

• An inordinate amount of interest in something. Simply speaking, not everyone is going to be interested in everything they "have" to do. And even when you are interested, the inertia is really high.
• What you are trying to do seeming possible through a clean path of action. While at its core every problem can be broken down into small steps that will ultimately solve the problem, very few people possess this ability. Because in the day and age of brain rot level attention span, sitting down to think, really think, is rare and also difficult.

Why schedules stop working

This is what mostly happens with schedules. You make a schedule, you feel in control, you stay in control, but staying in control takes effort. For the first few days, that effort is exciting, but sustaining the same effort for a similar pattern in the long term becomes exhausting.

A very common advice given to people is, take a break, come back and look at it with fresh eyes. And as much as we hate our parents/friends/partners for making us do that when we're fully invested in something and on the verge of a breakthrough if we powered on just for the next 24 more mins at 2:42am, they are right, and it works. And there's enough research (1, 2, 3) on why it works. When you keep working on something too long without a micro-achievement or a clear progress indicator, you, 1, start to lose interest, and 2, start to feel like you're losing to the problem, to the point where the brain stops bothering to try.

So what if it's just new? Use that.

But my question is, if it's exciting because it's new, why not just keep investing effort in a series of new things?

I have met both types of people: (If you can't guess, I'm an Obsidian user.)

• Ones who set up Obsidian after coming across it on reddit, or when their favorite youtuber talks about their second brain. Spend an enormous amount of time on it, setting up its structure, use it extensively for 2 weeks and then as things get more complicated, move to the next note taking app (maybe come back to it after a year, and wonder why did I ever leave this, this is great)
• And ones that dedicatedly review their Obsidian, cleanup and restructure as needed every weekend, and set themselves up for the next week

If you're in the second category, please send some tips. Needless to say, I'm in the first category. But so what? If at the end of the month, I don't have all my notes in one place, but I still worked on things I wanted to work on, and the clutter doesn't bother me, then just, embrace the clutter.

I went through a bit of "let's explore all productivity models" and without fail, any "self help" book I read talks about sustainability, how to continue something in the long term, and none of them has ever worked for me. I'm still finding my sustainability mechanism and that's okay. It takes time.

It takes time to learn things and spending time to build habits is okay. But it doesn't need to get in the way of still doing things.

Parallelize your brain, run experiments on yourself

All I'm saying is, parallelize your brain and run experiments on one thread while life goes on on the others:

Running experiments on humans is wrong, unless the human is you.

I recently read Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World. The book challenges the traditional linear approach to life and success, arguing that instead of rigid goals like "four-year college degrees, ten-year career plans, thirty-year mortgages," we should approach life as "a giant playground for experimentation." (is this why this blog is called life-in-increments? - thats for me and my 2:45am self to know and for you to ignore)

What I'm suggesting is not to not invest time and effort in achieving your goals, but to not let your laziness be a deterrent. Rather use your laziness as an advantage. If what gives you dopamine is a new insight, let's repeat getting new insights.

Where new insights come from

Now where do new insights come from? They can come from anywhere. They can come from conversations, from books, from movies, from shows. From personal experience, I'm a binge-watching champion but most of the insights that have been actionable for me have come from books and articles. That is not to say that's the only source. I've personally just found it more helpful. Because somehow, Ross proposing to Rachel has not given me direction on how I can spend more time building a cool new tech project than watching Friends :)

You see a problem, you consume content that gives you a new insight, a new mental model, even just a new app to try, try it that week. If it works, keep at it, maybe it becomes part of your everyday life. If it doesn't, find the next insight, move on and try again.

Don't wait until you've finished the book

Another thing to note is, sometimes you can derive a potential insight but you don't have enough information yet. Let's say you discover the Zettelkasten method through a random youtube video but you don't know the ins and outs of how to implement it yet, so you start reading How to Take Smart Notes and wait to finish the book to try its implementation. No go amigo. By the time you finish the book, even if you're a fast reader, the excitement of trying it out will either die or it will just feel like work. That's not to say, don't read the book, read it, but parallelize reading it and trying it out. Claude, ChatGPT and Youtube are at your service.

The takeaway

What I want you to take from this: if you are someone with a dedicated attention span, who hasn't been sucked into the world of social media and instant answers through AI that's destroying our attention span, "you go person!" But if you are, and are looking to feel the excitement of doing things again, start experimenting on an interesting insight every week or month.

That way you are creating a dopamine induced progression bar for yourself, while you work on your goals in your everyday life. Sometimes what you experiment with will help you achieve your goal in the long term, and sometimes not, but each time it will help you either discover a little bit about yourself, or the world, or have some fun.