Before I discovered the power of thinking on paper, I discovered the power of Notion.

I needed a homebase for tasks, notes, and creative projects I was working on so I ran a quick YouTube search and every so-called productivity expert claimed Notion was the best tool for the job.

Notion is a "productivity" platform that allows you to build custom workflows using a modular system of connected databases and multiple views to display the data contained within them.

As it turned out, it was pretty powerful–perhaps too powerful.

I started using it for simple things like saving notes and tracking my to-do list. With my new sense of confidence in a working system, I started getting more stuff done.

I felt like I finally found a good all-in-one solution for my needs.

But things quickly escalated.

I started devoting hours every day to building out my perfect productivity system.

• I had custom calendar views and project trackers.
• An experience point system with unlockable rewards for completing tasks.
• A complicated tagging system so I could hyperlink and cross reference ideas that spanned across multiple notes.
• A daily, automatically reoccurring template where I would log journal entries, work history, and notes from the day.

I had this feeling that if just got the right setup to oganize everything I would finally be able to be productive and yet, with each passing week I seemed to get less and less done.

Soon an agitated sense of frenetic anxiety started to settle in.

I was supposed to be writing essays and making videos but all I did was tinker with this damn app all day. I kept telling myself that the next week would be better, that I must be missing something and to keep on adding.

I remember trying to show my friend all the "cool stuff I could do" with my custom Notion setup and he just laughed.

"Is any of this actually helping you?"

It wasn't.

I realized I had just spent hundreds of hours creating the nerdiest system for endless procrastination imaginable.

In David Epstein's new book Inside The Box, he writes, "Without helpful constraints, our powerful instinct is more, more, more; bigger, bigger, bigger."

Epstein devotes an entire chapter to this tendency arguing that we have a strong bias and instinct to solve problems by adding more, even when subtracting is better.

The product design term for this is "featuritus" which refers to this tendency to keep adding features to solve a problem even though they tend to degrade coherence and usability.

Notion offered me boundless freedom, but that freedom from constraints led me down a path of total pseudo-productivity–busyness without any of the results.

I eventually gave up on Notion and went back to basics.

I started using old journals to take notes like I would back in my school days; I journaled in my diary like my grandparents might of; I carried a pocket notebook with me to capture ideas on the go; I bought The Bullet Journal Method and gave Bullet Journaling a trial run.

The friction of handwriting protected me from my instinct to complicate my systems.

Everything had to be simple and essential.

If I was going to add something to my Bullet Journal it needed to have real impact and help me practice my values.

If I was going to take notes I had to distill it down in my own words through writing. I could no longer clip articles and hyperlink an elaborate system of tags and categories.

If I didn't finish a task I had to maually transfer it over into the new day which created enough space for me to reconsider if I needed to in the first place.

I became significantly more intentional and deliberate about what I was doing and why.

I also got a lot more done because I wasn't wasting time on a bunch of nonsense tasks or tedious system upkeep and organization.

Slowing down sped me up and the constraints of thinking on paper set my mind free from the trappings of frictionless software.

Prompt:

Write about a problem your facing either in your personal or professional life. Instead of looking for solutions of addition, consider how you might solve the problem by subtraction.

Ask yourself, "Is this vital, does it really matter?"