7 Stoic Productivity Strategies That Will Change Your Life

If you'd like to learn Stoic inspired, proven strategies for forming and breaking habits that will help you be more productive check out: https://dailystoic.com/habitsIn this video, Ryan Holiday outlines 7 Stoic strategies that have helped him write and publish 10 books in 10 years. The Stoics don't encourage shortcuts but they do offer real advice that can help you overcome resistance every single day. Talkspace is an online and mobile therapy company. Talkspace lets you send and receive unlimited messages with your dedicated therapist in the Talkspace platform 24/7. To match with a licensed therapist today, go to Talkspace.com or download the app. Make sure to use the code STOIC to get $100 off of your first month and show your support for the show. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

• 0:45Ryan Holiday?

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another weekend episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. As I say in today's episode, I don't know what the Stoics would have thought about productivity hacks. They probably would have thought it was hacky, but they were productive people. I mean, they had to be. Think of all that they got done. And I don't think it's egotistical to put out there that I'm a pretty productive person. I've written my books. I do this podcast. I do the Daily Dad podcast. I do the Daily Stoic and the Daily Dad emails every day. I do my weekly articles, do the monthly reading list. I do a lot. And on top of that, I've

• 1:28Ryan Holiday?

  got young kids, got a wife, I've got a little ranch, and I've got this bookstore that I opened here in Bastrop as well, The Painted Porch. So I've got a lot going on, and yet I managed to get it all done. And part of how I do that is through some of the productivity strategies that we're going to talk about in today's episode. The Stoics don't talk about shortcuts. They don't think they exist, but they do have some real advice that can help you overcome resistance every single day. We're going to talk about building a routine, managing screen time, we're talking about journaling, we'll talk about the scourge of perfectionism, about doing the hardest thing first. We're going to talk about focusing on small wins,

• 2:09Ryan Holiday?

  and of course, the power of no. Today's episode's great. Hopefully, it can give you some real strategies to be more productive. Check it out. These are seven Stoic productivity strategies that will change your life.

• 2:27Ryan Holiday?

  I don't think the Stoics would have liked the term productivity hacks. It seems like somebody looking for shortcuts, somebody trying to get something for nothing. I'm Ryan Holiday. I'm the bestselling author of 10 books, which I've written in less than 10 years. I have done it while having a day job. I've done it while raising a family. I've done it while having all sorts of other side projects. The Stoics did obviously think a lot about productivity. They had to get a lot of things done. Marcus Aurelius is the most powerful man in the world. Seneca is a playwright, a power broker, and a philosopher. So the Stoics did think a lot about how to do whatever it is you do well and to do it efficiently. So I wanted to talk about some productivity strategies from the Stoics,

• 3:12Ryan Holiday?

  things you can apply every single day, that we know the Stoics tried to apply every single day. And there are things I've applied in my own life. It is a real skill to be able to be efficient, to be productive, to do only what's essential, as Marcus Aurelius talks about. And that's what we're going to handle in today's video.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  It's humbling to think that Marcus Aurelius, the head of the most powerful empire on earth, had the same amount of hours in the day as you, just 24. So how did he get it all done? How did he have time to be a king, a philosopher, a writer, a husband, to pass laws and judge cases, to lead troops into battle and guide Rome through a terrible plague, and do this while remaining good without being corrupted by the temptations or the stresses of his position? Well, routine had something to do with it. Marcus Aurelius was a man of habit. All the Stoics were. They understood, as Aristotle did, that we

• 4:13Speaker 01

  are what we repeatedly do, that excellence is a habit. For Marcus Aurelius, the day started early. At dawn, when you awake, he wrote, "Know that you are getting up to do the work..." of a human being, there was no time for him to stay under the covers and stay warm. It was in the early morning, we think that Marcus did his journaling. He would spend a few minutes with the blank page, writing down his thoughts, clearing his mind, reminding himself of what was important. Next, he prepared himself for the day to come. "The people you will meet today," he said, "will be ungrateful and mean and shortsighted and frustrating." But Marcus knew that he could not let these people implicate him in their ugliness.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  He had to stick to what he knew was right. It was likely that Marcus Aurelius tackled his most important tasks first. He didn't believe in procrastination, and he wanted to start things when he was still fresh. "Concentrate on what's in front of you like a Roman," he said. "Do it like it's the last and most important thing in your life."

• 5:19Ryan Holiday?

  I get up early and my first rule is no phone. I don't use the phone in the morning for a minimum of one hour that I'm awake. No touching the phone. And it's because I don't want to be an item on somebody's to-do list. I don't want my email to decide how my day is going to go. I don't want random social media alerts to determine whether I'm going to be happy or upset or angry or distracted. So what I do instead is I go for a long walk. I put on a weight vest, I grab my two kids, put them in a stroller, and we go for a walk. As much as three miles every morning, it's a mile and a half from my house to the end of our road where our mailboxes are and back. We watch the sun come up, we look for animals, we pick up trash if we see by the side of the road, we play, we sing songs, it's the best.

• 6:04Ryan Holiday?

  And by the time I'm home, I'm in such an amazing headspace. And that's the perfect place to go into the next part of my day, which is I sit with a journal, one of them, the Daily Stoic Journals. And this journaling is just for me. The Stoics were about reviewing, the Stoics were about examining, asking yourself questions. My journaling is a conversation with myself. Anne Frank says, you know, paper is more patient than people. I love that. There's really no way to separate Stoicism and journaling. They're the same thing. You know, Marcus Aurelius's Meditations is to himself. It's his journal to himself. So the journal helps me clear my mind. It helps me get centered, helps me remember, helps me work on myself.

• 6:49Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca talks about putting each day up for review. And that's so important. You can't get better if you don't look honestly and with self-awareness at who you've been over the last 24 hours. So I want to see what I can improve, where I fell short. And the pages in my journal, they're just for me. I never will show anyone. I don't even often look at them myself, but it's the process of writing them down that helps me get better. People are intimidated by their sense of perfectionism. Churchill's totally right when he says perfection can also be spelled paralysis. It's when we obsess over getting it exactly right that we don't get down to do the dirty work of it. Right?

• 7:33Ryan Holiday?

  So I don't focus on the results. As they say in the Bhagavad Gita, you're entitled to the work, not the fruits of the work. So my job is to just get to work every single day. I'm very routine focused. I think you have to be routine. I think a lot of the reasons people procrastinate is because they're overwhelmed. Right? They have a chaotic life. They have a million things that they're doing. And because they have a million things that they're doing, they don't focus. So Marcus Aurelius says every day, every minute, we have to ask ourselves, is this essential? We eliminate the essential things from our life, from our routines, from our to-do list. Again, I have a short, tight to-do list every day. I'm writing chapter six, part two of the next book. Right? That's a big part of it for me.

• 8:17Ryan Holiday?

  I'm not thinking, I've got all these million things to do. No, I have my little piece in front of me today, and I'm going to tackle that thing. And by knowing what I have to do today and what I don't have to do, as Marcus says, we get the double benefit of doing less better. I'm a big believer too of tackling the big, hard parts first. Right, so I wake up, I tackle the hard thing for the day first. I think it's also when you're pushing things off till later. I'll do that in a couple of weeks, I'll do it when things slow down. I'll do it in the afternoon when I feel more like it. That's a recipe for never actually getting around to do it. Epictetus talks about how every situation has two handles. Grab the heavy handle, get the hard thing out of the way.

• 9:01Ryan Holiday?

  Don't even create room for procrastination to creep in. So this is a really key part of it, I think, is creating a schedule, a routine, a set of habits or systems that don't allow that procrastination to leap in. Seneca says, "Life without design is erratic." As soon as a system is in place, principles become necessary. And look, if you're all over the place, you're not going to default to doing your best work. The small wins, really important, as I was saying, a couple crappy pages a day. I know that if I do that, day in and day out, I will get a manuscript which I can then refine. If I am obsessed with the results, with what other people think, I'm not going to be in the best headspace.

• 9:42Ryan Holiday?

  By obsessing about what other people think by the results, that also contributes to being intimidated or overwhelmed because I'm nervous, right? I'm thinking, what are they going to say? What if I don't get it right? What if I don't do it right? And that's not a place you want to come from. So again, by zooming in and saying, what's in front of me? What do I control? What can I do well? What can I do to the best of my ability? Even if that's just a couple crappy pages a day, I've narrowed in what I'm supposed to be intimidated by. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

• 10:19Ryan Holiday?

  Power of saying no, again, is a big part of it, whether it's saying no to the news or saying no to all the things that are coming your way so you can focus on the things that matter. A friend of mine gave me this framed picture of Oliver Sacks, which has Oliver Sacks framed picture in it. But he had in his office a note, just the word "no," exclamation point. Meaning, you have to say no to almost everything that comes your way, right? Early on in your career, you had to say yes to everything. That's how you got where you are. That's how you got here. But to now do what you do and to do it well, you have to say no to all the things that are not that thing. I've talked to lots of sports teams and the performance coaches I talk about,

• 11:03Ryan Holiday?

  I talk to, particularly in baseball, stress this so much. They're like, "Look, to become great at sports, particularly baseball, you get great by swinging at pitches, right? That's how you make a name for yourself as a hitter. But once you make it to the major leagues, now it's all about plate discipline. Can you not swing at a pitch that's almost good enough? So you're waiting for the perfect pitch, right? Can you not fall for the deceiving pitches, the pitches that are designed to get you to swing that you actually have no chance of connecting with? This is really important. So for me, it's all about saying no. I don't say no enough, but I feel like if I'd said yes anymore, it would be a problem. But like, this is my calendar for today. Google Calendar, of course, the best calendar. But I have two things on my calendar. That's it. I actually tell my assistant,

• 11:48Ryan Holiday?

  if there's more than three things in the calendar, something got messed up, right? Like, my goal is to have as few things in the calendar as possible. When I look at my day and it's scheduled from 9:00 a.m. to, you know, 9:00 p.m. or whatever, that's not only not my idea of success, right? That's not winning, is I have to go do a bunch of things that other people want me to do. But I'm not going to do well at any of those things. So I'm just going from appointment to appointment. And so what my thinking is, if it's in the calendar, it means I'm not doing the main thing. I'm not writing. So it's awesome to be here today, but this take, this took one hour from writing from me, right? And so having to actually think about it in terms of cost is really important.

• 12:31Ryan Holiday?

  Having kids was really great for me in this sense too, right? Because it used to be you would say yes because you didn't want to say no to someone. You didn't want to hurt their feelings. But having a kid sort of crystallizes who you're taking that time from, right? It's like, "Oh, I don't want to say no to this person because I don't want to hurt their feelings." But in doing that, I'm hurting the feelings of the two-year-old, right? And who do I care? Care about more ultimately, right? We can often not take care of ourselves, but if we can personify who saying no to or saying yes to is hurting because you can't do everything, you can't be everywhere at once is really important. We're not good at calculating opportunity costs.

• 13:15Ryan Holiday?

  So we say, yes, we always think we can squeeze more stuff in. But what's harder to calculate is, okay, now in this meeting you had, or this presentation you are giving, or this code you are sitting down to write, now you're coming to it at 90% capacity instead of 100% capacity. And it's really hard to calculate what the costs of that are.

• 13:42Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. And if you didn't know, I also have another podcast and daily email. Every day I write something at DailyDad.com, which gets delivered to thousands of people all over the world. I record the meditations, just like this one, on the podcast for free. So if you're a parent, if you know a parent, if you're an expecting parent, I think you'd really like it. It's called Daily Dad, but it has nothing to do with gender. I'm a dad, that's why it's called that. We'd love to have you over at DailyDad.com. And of course, subscribe to the Daily Dad Podcast.