Coaching practices for What to Stop Doing Productivity
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For What to Stop Doing Productivity, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- The hard part isn’t spotting the busywork
- I feel slammed all day yet at night I can’t point to where the hours actually went
- I can’t go ten minutes without glancing at my inbox or replying to a message, and every time I do I lose my place in the real work
- No system is going to save me
- I keep telling myself I’ll cut back on the things that drain me, but every single time the moment comes I cave and say yes again
Practices that may help
- Actively cut or delegate the trivial 80%
Systematically reduce or hand off activities in the bottom 80% of your impact distribution.
The Pareto Principle: 80/20 for Personal Productivity - The Not-To-Do List
The not-to-do list is a set of behaviors, tasks, and commitments you commit to stopping or refusing — permanently. Tim Ferriss argues that elimination is more valuable than optimization because low-leverage activities consume time that no amount of efficiency can recover. The approach is largely practitioner advice backed by mechanistic reasoning about opportunity cost and attention. - Audit a week of time to surface elimination candidates
Track how you actually spend time for 5–7 days before deciding what to stop.
The Not-To-Do List - Batch all reactive tasks into defined windows
Reply to email, messages, and minor requests only in scheduled windows — not continuously.
The Not-To-Do List - Simplify by reducing commitments
Regularly eliminate projects, roles, and obligations that don’t align with your most important work.
Zen To Done (ZTD), Made Practical - Write and commit to a standing not-to-do list
Turn elimination candidates into an explicit, reviewed list of permanent refusals.
The Not-To-Do List - Monitor system health indicators, not just outcome metrics
Output metrics tell you what happened; system health indicators tell you what is coming.
Systems Thinking for Personal Productivity - Eliminate recurring micro-decisions with standing rules
Convert repeated low-stakes decisions into rules so willpower isn’t spent on them daily.
The Not-To-Do List - Eliminate Q4 tasks systematically
Identify the recurring time-wasters — meetings, reports, subscriptions — and cancel, decline, or automate them.
The Eisenhower Matrix and Delegation - Align daily work with meaningful goals
Ground your MITs and projects in goals that genuinely matter to you, not just what is urgent.
Zen To Done (ZTD), Made Practical
Related concerns
- How To Say No Productivity
Regularly eliminate projects, roles, and obligations that don’t align with your most important work.
Simplify by reducing commitments
- Not To Do List Tim Ferriss
The not-to-do list is a set of behaviors, tasks, and commitments you commit to stopping or refusing — permanently. Tim Ferriss argues that elimination is more valuable than optimization because low-leverage activities consume time that no amount of efficiency can recover. The approach is largely practitioner advice backed by mechanistic reasoning about opportunity cost and attention.
- Avoid List Productivity
Reply to email, messages, and minor requests only in scheduled windows — not continuously.
Batch all reactive tasks into defined windows
- Closed List Productivity
Reply to email, messages, and minor requests only in scheduled windows — not continuously.
- How To Be More Organized And Productive At Work
Structured procrastination, described by Stanford philosopher John Perry, exploits the procrastinator’s tendency to avoid the most important task by doing other worthwhile tasks instead. By deliberately structuring your list so genuinely useful work sits below a seemingly important but non-urgent top item, you can channel avoidance into real productivity. It is a clever reframe rather than a studied intervention, but the psychological observations behind it are sound.
- How To Be More Productive At Work Book
Parkinson's Law — "work expands to fill the time available for its completion" — was originally a satirical observation about bureaucracy, but it describes a real phenomenon: open-ended time allows tasks to grow through perfectionism, distraction, and scope creep. The practical application is setting tighter-than-comfortable deadlines to compress work quality without materially reducing output quality. Evidence is mixed and highly task-dependent.
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