Seinfeld’s Productivity Secret

A recent article on Medium quotes from a delightfully old Lifehacker article where a young Brad Isaac asks Jerry Seinfeld if he had any tips for a young comic. The advice is gold, and not just for comics:

He said the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes and the way to create better jokes was to write every day… He revealed a unique calendar system he uses to pressure himself to write. Here’s how it works.

He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.

He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. “After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”

“Don’t break the chain,” he said again for emphasis.

What I love about this is that it’s what I’m trying to do every day on this blog: not breaking the chain. And then I thought that it would be cool if there was some type of visualization for this unbroken chain, and sure enough, WordPress.com’s Stats → Insights has me covered:

stats-insights

Skipping one day makes it easier to skip the next.

Not today.

8 responses to “Seinfeld’s Productivity Secret”

  1. LOVE the end quote. Good words Matt, good words, thank you mightily for posting this, just what I needed at this moment.

    Rod Salm

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