I get asked this question constantly. People want to know how I get so much done. So here is what actually made the biggest difference for me.
Delete all social networks from your phone
You can still check everything on your desktop. But having them on your phone is poison. You unlock your phone to check the weather and 20 minutes later you are watching someone rank their top 10 movie soundtracks. Every single time.
I deleted Instagram, X, LinkedIn, and YouTube from my phone about a year ago. I still use all of them, just on my computer, at my desk, when I actually mean to. My screen time dropped by almost two hours a day. Two hours. I did not change anything else.
Kill all unnecessary notifications
The only notifications I have left are from the messengers I use to stay in contact with family and friends. Yes, I even turned off email notifications. There is never an email emergency. If something is truly urgent, people will call you.
I check emails twice a day. Morning and afternoon. That is it. Everything else can wait. The constant buzzing and badge counts make everything feel urgent when almost nothing is.
Track your time
I use an app called Rize that automatically tracks everything I do on my computer. At the end of the week I get a full summary of where my time actually went. It is uncomfortable. You think you worked six hours on music, but Rize tells you it was three hours and 40 minutes, and you spent an hour and a half on email.
If you are a music producer working in a DAW, check out Aevum. It is a time tracker built specifically for producers. It runs in the background, tracks your sessions automatically, and breaks everything down by phase: composing, arranging, mixing, mastering, sound design. No timers to start, no forms to fill out. It just works.
Out of sight, out of mind
This works both ways. Put your phone in another room and you will forget about it. Want to take supplements regularly? Put them right where you see them when you get out of bed. Want to avoid distractions? Throw them in a drawer.
Your environment does more for your behavior than willpower ever will. I stopped trying to be disciplined and started making the right choice the easier one.
Get into agentic workflows
No matter if you like AI or not, it is inevitable. And I am not talking about using ChatGPT, which is horrible in my opinion. I am not talking about learning automation. I am talking about working with agentic workflows inside applications like VSCode, Antigravity, or Cursor.
I use them daily. Finding companies to work with, writing personalized emails, coding small apps, writing scripts that speed up boring tasks. Hours saved every week. This is not some future thing. This is right now.
Talk instead of type
Unless you are already a fast typer, get an app like Wispr Flow. You talk into your computer and it writes your emails, documents, chats, messages, and posts way faster than your fingers ever could. I use it for almost everything now. Emails, Slack messages, even parts of these blog posts.
These are not hacks
These are just decisions I made that changed how my days look. None of them are complicated. Most of them took five minutes to set up. The hard part is actually doing it instead of bookmarking the idea and forgetting about it.
What are your biggest productivity wins? I would love to hear them.
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