Undo – How history's outliers got stuff done

Could there be more to habit building than “just showing up”? On those days when you can’t find the inspiration, is there anything you can do to help keep you on track?

While we might not come up with a paradigm-shifting idea, we are capable of putting a dent in the universe, and putting something on the permanent record of the Internet.

How you can use this law of nature, work, productivity and creativity to focus on the stuff that will have the biggest impact, and eventually ditch the rest.

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Being a creative person in this most digital of decades means needing to be good at more than one form of creative expression. That means thinking like a polymath, and luckily we have history’s greatest multi-hyphenate to learn from.

Let’s spend a bit of time today with some of the women of productivity history, some of whom you know, some we’ll meet for the first time.

If you have to meet any kind of regular publishing schedule, you’ll know how time can stretch out into infinity until the night before you have to hit Publish, when suddenly it feels like you have to cram 8 hours of work into 30 minutes.

But Benjamin Franklin had a neat little system that helped him keep on top of his commitments, and all it takes is a pen, some paper, and a watch.

Inbox Zero is a pretty good way of organising your email, but behind the system is a dude who stepped off the hamster wheel of productivity, got some perspective, and became one of the Internet’s true treasures.

Simple mistakes are more common than it’s comfortable to admit. But there’s a dirt-simple technique that has dramatically reduced the number of preventable deaths, and it’s stuff we can use to make our own lives run more smoothly.

Thanks to Ayesha Khan of Every Single Sci-Fi Film Ever* for lending her voice to Mark's silly opening sketch.

When things look bleak, either in your head or out in the world, being “productive” is probably the furthest thing from your mind. We live in difficult times, no doubt, but two outliers a hundred years apart, fought oppression, propaganda, and dehumanisation all while under their own personal dark clouds.