How Am I SO Productive?

Some Productivity Tips I Learned Along the Way

Aug 15, 2025

I write ~~a lot of~~ too many Substack posts every week. I’ve gotta be averaging like 4 or 5 across the different sub-projects I’ve got going—like our read-along of Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy, happening right now!

I also write philosophical science fiction and fantasy short stories with companion essays to help you learn more of the philosophy at play in the stories. I make most of my living from my YouTube channel called ParkNotes where I sneak philosophy lessons into videos about notebooks. I’m writing a non-fiction book called Journal Like a Philosopher which I’m under contract for and which is due in March ‘26. I’m writing a science fantasy novel on top of that. I’m also turning my Substack publications into two physical zines and selling them on Etsy. I’m a brand affiliate for a bunch of leather goods companies and notebook companies. I’m an elder at my church and regularly preach now. I’m a jiujitsu purple belt and compete 2 to 4 times a year. I host a philosophy and theology podcast where I read the work of my guests and then talk with them about it. I work part time with a sports ministry where I regularly give talks and host ask anythings for college athletes exploring faith. I have a wife and a daughter, two crazy doodles, and some frogs and turtles. I’m probably missing some more important stuff too but it feels really weird listing all this stuff here.

Let another praise you, and not your own mouth — a stranger, and not your own lips.

Proverbs 27:2

It’s super gross to talk about one’s own achievements or level of productivity. It’s gross to ‘humble brag’ about all the things on your plate. To boast and brag is not great. And ‘humble brag’ is a contradiction in terms. It’s not humble to brag. I know it. I get it. I’m with it. I’m a midwestern boy—or better yet, a Great Lakes boy. Talking about your accomplishments—or even just talking about yourself too much—is not something we’re comfortable doing, and if we do, our friends will help us find our way back down a peg or two, lest we get too big for our britches.

But hopefully this post is reaching folks who aren’t my regular readers, folks who don’t know anything about me. So I think it’s helpful to just briefly describe the kinds of things I’ve got going on, see the opening paragraph. Those are the sorts of things I’ve found some success with. I’m not a big wheeler-dealer productivity circuit speaker, I’m just a dude with a bunch of part-time jobs who has found a modicum of success. I still let too many things fall through the cracks and I’m still not as productive as I wish but maybe my standards are malformed.

So all that to say, I’m uncomfortable with my own title for this post. I keep hearing my inner critic saying “Oh, you’re sOoOoO pRoDuCtIvE huh, Park? Look at you Mr. Productivity Czar. Wow, you’re soo successful and skilled at life, aren’t you?”. So, if that’s what you’re thinking right now, you’re in good company.

But even while I recognize it’s gross to put oneself up on a productivity pedestal, I also recognize that many people in my audience at least think I’m a productive person. I regularly get comments on my ParkNotes YouTube channel and here on Substack asking how I’m ‘so’ productive and asking for productivity tips. So I figured I’d think a little bit about my varied projects and the habits I use to work on them and see if I could abstract out some principles or tips to help my readers with their own productivity.

I am a notebook czar—I’ll cop to that. But again, I’m not a productivity czar. I don’t read a whole ton of productivity stuff and I think most of it is cringey-turned-in-on-itself-like-an-in-grown-nail trash. I’m wary of (and weary of) productivity gurus who just talk about productivity but don’t seem to be doing anything other than talking about productivity. They’re like a mirror trying to reflect its own image. So, with that said, I don’t know if I’m stepping on this or that guru’s teachings in this post. And additionally, I don’t know how beneficial these tips will be for you in your own context, but if you’re a writer/academic/education YouTuber/public speaker or any sort, then they should be useful for you.

Is that enough uncomfortable preambling? Hopefully.

Here are some of the ‘tips’ I’m abstracted from my own experience of manically jumping from project to project. Hopefully some will be beneficial to some of you.

Spin Multiple Plates At Once

Most of the jobs I have let me work at my own pace. I don’t have to clock in at any certain time, what matters most is the end result. I do have deadlines and without them I’d be completely toast, but from the time I agree to produce something to the deadline I am free to work on that project whenever I want.

This is really helpful for me because I have bad brain days where why executive function isn’t functioning. Everyone in my family has ADHD and I’m the only one who hasn’t been tested yet but I’m pretty sure I have a heaping dose of it. Having jobs which allow me to work when I can coral my attention is really beneficial for me.

This is not feasible for everyone. But if you have a side gig that you’d like to work on outside of your work schedule then this should work for you as well.

I like to work on many projects at once and sort of triage which one’s are most important at a given time—I spin multiple plates at once and when one gets a little wobbly I give it some more attention. Having lots of open projects can feel like you’re walking around with your shoes untied, but it can also be really rewarding. Imagine you’re at a sticking point in one project. If that was the only thing you had going, it could be pretty deflating. But if you can just pivot to another project you’re working on and make some progress on it, then you won’t feel like a total unproductive loser. Maybe that other project just needs some time to breathe. Instead of stepping away and twiddling your thumbs until the inspiration or solution strikes you, get to work on something else.

Now, some stuff takes long sustained mental effort, so don’t punt on those tasks too soon. It’s easy to favor easier tasks and start checking off your todo list but be honest with yourself and give the hard tasks their due or you’ll never get them done.

But when I’m finding it impossible to continue on with a particular project at particular time, not necessarily because I’m stuck on a hard puzzle—I actually love that part of a project—but because I just have a sort of mental block, I can jump over to another project as a way to hijack my procrastinating tendency. I told myself I have to work on my science fiction novel today. It’s on the calendar. I gotta do it! Mmmm screw you and screw your calendar. I’m not doing that. Maybe I’ll binge watch Firefly. No, don’t do that. Can I interest you in some Consolation of Philosophy? Why don’t you take that up and read it. You have another companion essay due next Wednesday. Might as well read a few pages of that as long as you’re not writing. Okay fine, as long as I don’t gotta write today.

Boom. Failed at my plan A but successfully diverted my procrastination into another active project. You can’t do this too much or you’ll only spend 15 minutes on each project but if you can work on a couple for 60 to 90 minutes each then you’ll have made some real progress through procrastination.

I march forward in multiple projects at once, making progress on many. When the due date on one project gets a little too close, I triage my time and focus in on the project that due. I don’t have to do it all at once, I’ve already been putting in work on it, so I don’t have to start from scratch, which is the hardest part.

Probably don’t start as many projects as I’ve started. There is a point of diminishing returns and I may have found it.

So here are the tips:

Work on multiple projects at once—but not so many that you’re overwhelmed.
‘Procrastinate’ on one project with another to trick yourself into remaining productive.

Maximize your time.

There’s only so much time in the day so if you want to be productive, you have to maximize your time. I’m not saying go and eradicate your leisure time. You can’t work all the time. But if you work a 9-5 job and want to make progress on your own projects in addition to that, something’s gotta give—and it better not be time with your family!

Take time from those passive ‘leisure’ activities like binge watching, infinite scrolling, and maybe even playing video games. Now maybe your project includes a commentary on some show or maybe it’s writing about or making videos on some video game. Cool. Then those passive activities can actually help you with your projects. But be honest with yourself. These time-sucks are… time suckers. You can get your side projects done, but not if you’re surrendering all your free-time-attention to someone else’s project.

Instead, choose leisure activities which may also help you in your projects. Now, if that starts to feel like work, it’s no good and won’t be leisurely or enjoyable. But use that time that you normally spend passively binge watching shows or scrolling through various infinite scroll attention traps to read a book that at least has the potential to help with a project you’re working on. Maybe I’m writing a short story about a wise old wizard. In my leisure time I might read the Quotable Mark Twain, which is a commonplace book of Mark Twain’s aphorisms and maxims and sayings. Reading that book is enjoyable and rewarding in and of itself, but reading it in the same time frame that I’m writing dialogue for a wise wizard can help prime my pump for creating good wizard sayings.

Double Dip. I have a lot of projects and jobs that overlap. When they do, I can sometimes kill like one hundred birds with one stone. If I’m preaching a sermon for my church on Jonah then I’m probably going to be speaking on that in my ministry talks and we’re going to be reading that in the Bible studies I lead and I’m probably going to be writing a short story about some themes I found in Jonah and I’m probably going to lead my family in some devotion on it and I might invite the scholar who wrote one of the Jonah commentaries I’m using onto my podcast to talk about his or her work and the Book of Jonah. It’s really, really nice when this situation plays out because I can double, triple, quadruple dip on stuff I’m learning. It looks like I’m being über productive but I’m just maximizing what I’m learning and using it in multiple contexts.

I said above that I like to work at my own pace and then I’ll prioritize those things with the closest due dates but sometimes I have multiple due dates coming up on the same week. When I have too many to triage in my normal way, I have to start scheduling times to work on different projects. If you have multiple interests you’re actively investigating or multiple projects you’re actively working on, you might find it helpful to give yourself different days to work on them. Maybe Tuesday and Thursday mornings you have 2 hours to write. Cool. That’s when you for sure write. If you can sneak in some extra time here and there that’s great too but you know you have at least those 2 hours on Tuesday and Thursday. Protect them. If you absolutely just can’t get past a mental block one of those days, procrastinate with another project so at least you’re still making progress.

Rest. For real. Actually take a break from making progress and being ‘productive’. Do something that’s not going to straightforwardly advance your career or your projects.

I get recharged when I look for frogs and turtles in lily ponds. There’s no way for me to monetize this and if there is DON’T TELL ME. I don’t want to know. I just want to relax and enjoy nature’s splendor. Looking for Blanding’s and moss covered snapping turtles, admiring North American bullfrogs, finding upload chorus frogs, and watching the cycle of water lilies just does it for me. It has no financial utility, it’s just good for my soul. It’s necessary, for sure, because it refills my tank and if I don’t get out into nature then I’ll want to die and I’ll lose all interest in my projects anyways. But it’s not straightforwardly advancing my work, and that’s why it works.

Here are the abstracted tips:

Take time from your passive media consumption to give to your projects
Choose leisure activities that have the potential to help your projects
Double dip: use the work you’re doing in one project across your others when possible
Schedule times to work on specific projects, if you must procrastinate, do it with other projects instead of mindless passivity
Make at least some time for leisure that recharges you and does not straightforwardly advance your work

Build on Your Previous Work; Use Notebooks

I’m in the pocket of Big Notebook. I have to propagandize you with notebook stuff. You should’ve expected this. But I’m able to make a lot of progress on different projects because of my insane notebook collection. I write down every thought I deem “good”. They all go into my catch-all pocket notebook along with actionable tasks, stats, and everything else I need to remember.

From there I migrate my ideas into various notebooks dedicated to those kinds of ideas. When I initially migrate them, I try to flesh them out enough that I’ll 1. know what the heck I was thinking when I wrote down the idea, and 2. I’ll have enough information to start running with the idea later on if I decide to. So if it’s an idea for a short story, I give an outline of where I want the story to go and the philosophical idea(s) I want to utilize. If it’s an idea for a blog post, then I outline the post, maybe include a couple of good lines I want to toss in, and I’ll reference books and pages numbers that inspired the idea along with some resources to check out, e.g. “see the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy entry on ‘holes’ before you write this!”.

I’ve talked about notebooks a lot on my ParkNotes YouTube channel and here on Parker’s Ponderings under the Notebook Philosophy section, so I won’t say too much more here. But I will say that I was very well prepared for my 3 Master’s degrees by the time I got to graduate school because I’d been researching philosophy and theology for 5 years beforehand and I kept lots of good notes in my notebooks which I was able to pull on during my formal studies.

Additionally, I started writing blog posts to help teach what I was learning to others and to help myself learn more deeply as well. I still pull from these old blog posts often, whether it’s to refresh myself on an idea I took a deep dive on, or to find the resources I used in the footnotes, or to grab huge block quotes I don’t feel like typing up again. I almost never copy and past over my own writing because I can usually say it better now and I usually want to say it different than I did back then, but it’s really helpful to have a record of my old work to pull from. It’s actually plagiarism in an academic setting to just copy and paste your old work and present it as if it’s a new paper you wrote for your professor, so I never did that (and again I never wanted to do that because my old stuff wasn’t graduate level research) but I wrote a bunch of papers in grad school that I can retool and use here on my blog no problem! I already put in the work and have the papers. I might as well make them a bit more accessible and share them with my audience.

Take good, detailed notes in notebooks dedicated to particular subjects.
Use notebooks to remember what you’ve learned, capitalize on it, and reflect back on your notes so you don’t have to keep re-learning what you’ve learned.
Build on your previous work. Repurpose, retool, redo the stuff you’ve already worked so hard on when you can.

Passion

If it feels like death to do it, you’re going to find every reason not to do it. I won’t say always follow your passion or anything that hokey, but you really do need to enjoy what you’re doing if you want to do it well. If it’s not rewarding work it’s going to be hard to find time for it. Find a way to be passionate about your soul-sucking 9-5 until you can find a new one. Pick side projects that actually excite you; things that feel hard to stop working on. Sometimes we pick projects that we like the idea of or that we’d like to be known for doing but which we actually hate the process of doing. Being a writer sounds pretty cool. The process, can often feel like you’re killing yourself, but for those who enjoy writing it can also be an exhilarating experience that sucks you into a new world for hours at a time. If you hate writing but want to be known as a writer, you’re probably going to have a bad time.

find projects that actually excite you or figure out how to force yourself to be excited about the work you have to do, or both.