The Nothing Alternative

This is the pilot episode. The one with when nothing seems to work, the nothing alternative is the best alternative.

Hi there,

Every week I send an email where I document my journey towards craftsmanship. I touch on subjects like personal finances, parenting, or work. Today I’m writing about productivity.

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The Nothing Alternative

This is one of my favorite productivity tools (or hacks or tricks, call them as you wish). I use it at work, I’ve successfully used it in previous projects (like maintaining the Peppermint open source project) and it is part of my strategy for writing The Craftsman Newsletter. As a matter of fact, I’m using it right now as I’m writing this sentence 🙊.

“Write or nothing. It’s the same principle as keeping order in a school. If you make the pupils behave, they will learn something just to keep from being bored. I find it works. Two very simple rules, a) you don’t have to write. b) you can’t do anything else. The rest comes of itself.” — excerpt from Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength

So, how does it work:

Set aside time to work on your task. During this time you are allowed to do one of the following activities:

1. You don’t have to work on your task,

2. But you can’t do anything else.

And really, that’s all 🎉

While contributing to the Peppermint project I allocated each morning a pomodoro (or 25 minutes). During this time, I made sure that there were no distractions: my phone was on silent and out of reach, all the apps except my IDE were closed, Do Not Disturb was turned on, my family was asleep, my desk cleared, and I was properly hydrated.

Then, for the next 25 minutes, I followed the two simple rules from above:

1. I didn’t force myself to write any piece of software,

2. But I also didn’t do anything else: no reading, no scrolling on social media, no watching shorts or reels, no web browsing, no cat pictures or internet memes, no paying the bills, no going to the bathroom, no nothing.

I did however watch out the window, and stare at the keyboard or at the wall, and somehow I found myself writing the next piece of code. The momentum kept me going way past the 25-minute mark.

It’s a remarkable method to have in your productivity toolkit. I encountered it in Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength by Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney (which, by the way, it’s a book full of tricks and methods to harness you will power), where they described the approach Raymond Chandler took to writing his novels:

He believed that a professional writer needed to set aside at least four hours a day for his job: “He doesn’t have to write, and if he doesn’t feel like it, he shouldn’t try. He can look out of the window or stand on his head or write on the floor, but he is not to do any other positive thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines, or write checks.”

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I’m curious to hear about your struggles getting things done and how you will use the Nothing Alternative to overcome your challenges.

Best regards,
Alex from The Craftsman Mindset