Feeling Productive vs Actually Productive

Do not aim for feeling productive rather aim for actually being productive.

You might wonder, what's the difference?

An example of making myself feel more productive is reading tech news on tech crunch or watching educational YouTube videos. At first, it might seem that I have learn some new things therefore it is time well spent.

However if we look closer, we realized that we are nowhere closer to our goal than the day before. Doing stuff that are actually productive such as coding my startup and doing niche research actually brings us closer to our goal and we should optimize for that.

I began to realize that most of the things that are actually productive takes time and we can only saw the result gradually. Spending hours debugging feels like a waste of time. Spending hours trying out other products might be boring and it might seems like we do not learn as much as watching a Khan Academy videos.

But I always remind myself that as long as the activities that I am doing bring me closer to my goal, then I am actually being productive.