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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: A database of effective productivity recommendations, published by Ben Williamson on June 17, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. As part of Effective Self-Help’s research into the most effective ways people can improve their wellbeing and productivity, we’ve compiled more than 100 practical productivity recommendations from 40 different articles written by the EA community. The result is this database on Airtable. Please take a look and see what you find useful! To the best of our knowledge, this table includes the recommendations made in every prior post offering productivity advice written on the EA Forum, LessWrong, or by someone connected to the effective altruism and rationality communities. You can view the list of articles included here. Let us know if there are articles we’ve missed. Link here: This database is intended as a living document and remains a work in progress. We would love to hear your thoughts on how we can make this most useful, whether in the comments or via a private message. In the next fortnight, we will publish a preliminary report into increasing productivity, synthesising and more thoroughly evaluating many of the recommendations included in this database. The rest of this post provides an explanation of how the database works, why we made it, and a few of its potential limitations. How does this table work? As a whole, the table has 110 recommendations across 9 categories. If you’re unfamiliar with using Airtable, we recommend this short explainer. Key points to note are the following: Many of the cells contain more information than is visible at the top level. Click on a given cell and then the arrow in the top right to see everything written there. Airtable allows for easy filtering and sorting. Most usefully, you can: organise the results by category (including filtering out any your not interested in) rank them by cost (either per-month or one-off) We’ve split the recommendations into the following rough categories: Mental/Physical health Working efficiently (helps you work faster) Working effectively (helps you prioritise better/ work on the most important thing) Distraction blocker (helps minimise time spent off-task) Extensions (software or browser add-ons) Security (file and account backups/ safety) Coaching/ Training Finances Misc. Why did we build this table? Productivity as a mechanism for increasing impact If you’re reading this article on the EA Forum, it’s a fairly safe bet that you’re either currently working on one of the world’s most pressing problems or hold serious aspirations to do so in the future. By increasing your productivity, you can increase the value of your output (and the size of your output) for a given day/week/year of work. In doing so, you increase the endline impact of your work. Theory of Change: Recommendation implemented -> Increased work output (more work done per day and/or value of output increased) -> Increased impact. While the gains we can expect from many of these changes are very small, many also seem very cheap and easy to implement. Stacked together, implementing several recommendations could produce notable increases in your productivity, and by consequence, your impact. For a rough estimate of how this may translate into impact, see this Guesstimate model. For a note of caution on translating increased productivity directly into increased impact, see this comment. Productivity is trainable “In low-complexity jobs, the top 1% averages 52% more [productivity] than the average employee. For medium-complexity jobs this figure is 85%, and for high-complexity jobs it is 127%” (Hunter et al., 1990) We believe these significant differences in productivity are largely trainable. Given that very few people recieve any formal education in working effectively and efficiently, it seems highly like...