False productivity

I agree with @Winkletter about feeling a fake sense of being productive posting tweets.

My perpetual struggle is getting realtime feedback loops on my day to dau tasks for my products. Most of the time, we don’t get immediate feedback. Writing a blog post for SEO might take months to pan out. Sharing your link on Reddit, maybe days or weeks. Building that feature that took weeks - might never help in moving the revenue. And so it’s sometimes hard to stay motivated.

But tweets do! Within a few hours you see how well or poorly it will perform. The impressions, like and replies are clear metrics of performance, beyond any doubt. I think that’s what I’m addicted to. The direct and immediate feedback. It plugs a gap in my day to day work on my products.

And that’s why it’s such a huge distraction for makers. It’s just easier to unknowingly gravitate towards work that gives immediate (and often dopamine-induced, pleasurable) feedback.

That’s why I have to set rules and boundaries on my consumption there now. Just 30min, max 1h per day on it.

And it’s helping.

More time building and shipping.

What other tasks of false productivity are there that we should avoid?