I've tried it all.

The Pomodoro Technique, time blocking, digital minimalism, waking up at 5 AM, and something called "monk mode" that involved deleting all my social media apps for a month while subsisting on meal replacement shakes.

Each viral hack is supposed to unlock a hidden reserve of focus and discipline. They each work for about two weeks before you find yourself back at square one.

I'm proud of my body of work - I look back on it and I know I've written enough, said enough, to have mattered.

But none of it was "hacked" by any measure. It happened in the boring margins, on unremarkable Tuesday afternoons when I opened my laptop and worked // Did the Thing.

We have a cultural obsession with optimization. Every successful person gets interviewed about their morning routine. As if their achievements depended on whether they meditate before or after their cold shower.

We dissect the habits of great artists and entrepreneurs, looking for the reproducible formula. Did they wake up early? Did they take walks? Did they keep a journal? Was it a bullet journal?

Surely there must be some trick, some leverage point that separates the wheat from the chaff.

What nobody wants to hear: most people who achieve something worth talking about get there through years of sustained // boring, work. They showed up. They stayed focused on their particular thing. Simply put, they had both intractable patience and the determination to ignore distractions for a sustained period of time.

Our protestant "striving" mistakes the sweat of intensity for progress. The person who works eighteen-hour days for three months and then burns out hasn't achieved more than the person who works six-hour days for three years. In fact, they've achieved considerably less. Intensity makes for better stories, but consistency actually builds things.

Social media rewards visible bursts of activity. You can post about your new productivity system, your ambitious goals, your monk mode month, locktober etc. You get likes and followers for performing optimization. But you don't get progress.

I think about people who announce they're going to "grind" for the next six months to launch their startup or finish their book or transform their body. Working hard is fine, but framing it as a sprint suggests that achievement is about peak intensity rather than sustained presence. Six months of grinding is easy compared to six years of showing up. Anyone can do a hard sprint. What's tough: maintaining your focus when the initial excitement has worn off and you're in year three of a project with no clear end in sight.

You have to be willing to spend years in relative obscurity, working on something that might not pan out, improving at a rate too slow to make for "good content." You have to resist the temptation to constantly optimize your process and just trust that showing up consistently will compound into something worthwhile.

We're surrounded by people selling shortcuts, and we want to believe that there's a faster way. Every guru is implicitly promising that you can skip the boring middle part and get straight to the results. But the boring middle part is where everything happens. The breakthrough insight comes after years of accumulated understanding. The great novel emerges after years of craft development. Etc.

If you actually accept this, you'd probably spend less time thinking about productivity and more time just working. You'd pick something to focus on and stay focused on it, even when it stopped being exciting. You'd measure progress in years rather than weeks. You'd stop looking for the hack and start building the patience to work on something for a long time.

None of this makes for a compelling productivity blog post. You can't sell a course on "just keep doing the thing for a decade."

So it goes.