I know a lot of people who read a load of productivity blogs, but they aren’t really productive, and organized. They want to be, but they start out with a method they read about, fail with it, and move on to the next. While it is obviously not a good idea to change methods after an initial failure, the real reason for the many long faces I see regarding all the productivity tips out there is not this.

The real reason behind people not being able to force productivity on themselves is much-much deeper. For this I will need to go deep into what I think productivity is and how you can achieve it. Read on to see what I think about the whole issue in general, and how you can learn to be more efficient and productive on your own (am I cutting out my own audience here? Oh well, as long as you become productive!)

Let me start this all off with a small example of the most basic productivity. When you write a list, say a grocery list, you indicate the list items in some way correct? You put dots, hyphens or numbers beside each item, you separate them with line breaks, you make a table, everyone does something! This is productivity at its best. People realized a long time ago that writing a list one below another is far easier to read and follow than one written inline. This is something obvious to everyone, and the reason is that we are taught this from very early on.

Everything else you can do more productively mirrors this example. You need time, patience and experience. You can only become productive in something if you have a lot of experience in it. Otherwise how do you know what to do more productively? I know I can do some aspect of coding more productively because I realize I’m writing the same line of code 10 times for each page. I learned to substitute that with a function, which means I write the code once, than I call it with one word 10 times, saving space and time (Yes, my time machine worked).

People expect that they can use a method or an application like GTD, Moleskine, Remember The Milk, Todoist and the rest and then just plug it into their life. First of all, no. You need to come up with your own solution to your productivity issues. If you find that a great list making app like Remember The Milk is the answer try it out, not the other way around. Create a solution to fit the problem, don’t try to fit the problem into a solution.

Also, ironically enough, you need to become productive in using your productivity tool. In my previous example I mentioned writing functions so I don’t have to write the same line of code ten times. Well at first I wasn’t great at writing functions. It took me a much longer time to figure out how to do it than just copy pasting the code ten times. I worked at it though and by now it is a huge time saver. If you go for Remember The Milk for example you won’t find that it helps you immediately. You need to find the best list combination, the best categories, tags, notes, use of smart lists and so on to work for you.

In other words, coming back to the title, you can’t learn productivity, you need to experience it. Blogs like Hack Your Day, Lifehacker, and so on give awesome tips, but reading 20 posts a day won’t get you anywhere. Start taking control by actually thinking about what you need, not trying to get David Allen to think about it.