There are those who seek productivity in Scandinavian design applications, there are those who track the paper notebooks and there are those who expect to find it in beep and alert -based methods. Anthony Trollope found her on a pocket watch.
He was a mail official in Victorian England. Before signing, between 5:30 and 8:30 in the morning, He wrote 250 words every fifteen minutes. Without excuses. No inspiration. And so, book by book, they arrived More than forty novels.
His method, which James Clear rescued in One of his guides on habits and frictionshows a paradox: that in the era of automation and asynchronous flows, what we most need is something as simple as a fixed, measurable, short and demanding interval. Indirect discipline.
Trollope did not pursue Muses, replaced them with a system.
The great enemy of the great projects It is not the lack of talent, but indefinite delay. Postpone, PROCASTINE. Starting to write a book seems like such a tedious task that many prefer to plan it forever. Trollope reduced the scale until he stopped being overwhelming. A quarter of an hour. Two hundred fifty words. Nothing else. Nothing less.
When a novel ended, he did not rest or celebrate it: he turned the sheet and started the next in the same block. As if he understood that continuity is more powerful than motivation. And that the habit muscle is trained with rhythm, not with intensity.
It must be said that Trollope did not have to suffer the tyranny of today’s notifications and distractions (Slack, mails, messaging …), but despite that advantage, he cultivated the Attentional monogamy: One thing at a time and without looking at the clock except to obey it. The stopwatch as an accomplice, not as a tyrant. An advance of deep work.
Four daily blocks are more than one hundred per month. And fifteen minutes per block are nothing, until they are everything. Give to write about 30,000 monthly words when the rhythm is taken. And each block begins with a tangible victory, easy to reach. Instead of waiting for the perfect moment (which never arrives), I was adding one more page to the castle.
Trollope practiced deep work without calling it that, and without turning it into a ritual. He was less monk Zen and more worker of the word. And he reminds us that The important thing is not to write much, but always write. That time is not found. And that, perhaps, the only thing that separates the amateur from the professional is the ability to divide an Everest in a succession of fifteen -minute steps.
In Xataka | We do not need more productivity methods. We need to have a purpose again
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