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Zeratsky: Isolated productivity hacks fail without a repeatable system

John Zeratsky · Making time for what matters | Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky (Authors of Make Time, Character VC) · Feb 11, 2024 · at 19:00

John Zeratsky (co-author of 'Make Time' and partner at Character VC) discusses why people struggle to maintain focus when relying on one-off productivity tricks.

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“If you're just stuck and you're looking, you're sort of grasping for hacks, you know, you're sort of like, oh, I read it, read this really, you know, this blog post about this thing. I'll try it. That might have some short-term Effect, but ultimately you're probably not going to stick to it. You're probably going to fall back into that place of overwhelm and disappointment and burnout. But we find that if you have a system that you can use the system and you can return to it and continue to build on an experiment that you can make more, more sustainable progress on these things.”

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