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Productivity Judo

Jason's meta-strategy for getting things done: most productivity tactics work at least once, nothing works forever, and the real skill is rotating between them before novelty wears thin. Rather than searching for the perfect system, treat productivity like judo — use the opponent's momentum against them. When one tactic loses its grip, swap to another. The rotation itself is the system.

The term appears in newsletter #220 (2024-09-29), drawing on his own experience as an ADHD founder who has "NEVER been able to stick to a single task management system."

The Core Insight

Most things work at least once, nothing works forever. And that's ok. Your brain likes novelty but like a movie or song you've experienced many times, it can wear thin.

This is a direct refusal of the productivity-industrial complex. The entire genre of productivity advice — GTD, bullet journals, Pomodoro, time-blocking, Notion setups — assumes that the right system, applied consistently, produces consistent results. Jason's experience is the opposite: every system works beautifully for a while and then stops working. The failure isn't in the person. It's in expecting novelty to be sustainable.

The judo framing matters. Judo doesn't rely on being stronger than your opponent. It uses leverage, angles, and timing. Productivity judo uses the temporary lift of novelty rather than the unsustainable grind of willpower. When a tactic goes stale, you don't push harder — you switch.

Four Categories of Tactics

Jason organizes his rotating tactics across four domains. The rotation happens within categories and across categories.

1. People

  • Body doubling. Working alongside another person who is also being productive. In person with a friend or partner, virtually via Cuckoo or Flow Club, or passively through "study with me" livestreams on YouTube.
  • Explicit partnership. Tie your project to someone you respect. Interview them. Build something specifically for their use case. The personal relationship makes abstract work concrete.
  • Accountability groups. A buddy or group chat checking in daily on new habits. Jason has run these repeatedly.
  • Bets with consequences. Public losses — donation to a charity you dislike, posting an ugly selfie — create real stakes. He uses this with clients.

2. Environment

  • Change location. Coffee shop, friend's place, different part of the house. Sitting to standing.
  • Use a different tool. Jason wrote Weirdly Brilliant in Canva, not Google Docs. The unfamiliar interface removed the productivity baggage of his usual writing tools.
  • Pick the right playlist. He can't write with lyrics; others can. Electronic beats-heavy (Brain Food, Electronic for Productivity) or binaural beats via Brain.fm.
  • Document publicly. During his 30-day book writing challenge, he made near-daily public vlogs. Visibility becomes accountability.

3. Task management

  • Rotate where tasks live. Notebook → Apple Reminders → post-it → whiteboard → index cards. When a list gets stale, move the live items somewhere else and let the old list die.
  • Finish first, write later. Sometimes a long list is paralysis-inducing. Do the thing, then write it down just to cross it off — "a pile of crushed enemies in your wake."
  • "Don't do it, just prepare to do it." For tasks of unknown size, just do the opening move — read the email, review the doc — without committing to the whole task. Often the whole task gets done anyway.
  • Shitty Zero Draft. A brain dump / bulleted list with zero quality standard. Learned from Ben Putano.
  • Catch inspiration when it lands. David Allen's 2-minute rule in reverse: if you suddenly feel like doing a task you've been avoiding, switch to it immediately, even if it breaks your plan.
  • Ride the roll. When you're on a productive streak, stay on it a little longer. (Jason notes this is why he's sometimes late to things — the last 10 minutes were the most productive part of his morning.)

4. Energy management

  • Match tasks to energy, not schedule. Planning fun things even when work isn't going well. A great book on procrastination argued that we sometimes procrastinate because we fear we'll never have fun again if we start — so plan fun things to preempt that rebellion.

Why This Works for ADHD Brains (and Most Others)

Jason explicitly frames this as ADHD-friendly, and the approach maps cleanly onto what's known about novelty-seeking and dopamine regulation. A single system requires sustained dopaminergic engagement with the same stimulus, which ADHD brains (and arguably most brains) can't produce indefinitely. Rotation keeps the dopamine flowing by keeping the stimulus novel.

But the deeper point generalizes beyond ADHD: no one has willpower that compounds indefinitely on a stale system. People without ADHD can push through longer before switching, which masks the dynamic. Jason's argument is that the dynamic exists for everyone — ADHD folks just hit the ceiling first.

The Anti-System Position

This article is a quiet polemic against the aspirational productivity culture. Jason is not offering a better system. He's saying the category is wrong. You don't need a better productivity tool — you need permission to keep changing them.

This connects to his broader antidiscipline frame: motivation driven by curiosity and challenge outlasts motivation driven by rules and punishment. Rotating tactics is how you preserve curiosity. The same task, in a new tool, in a new location, with a new song playing, is functionally a new task.

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