How to Accelerate Personally

Most productivity advice is garbage. Here's what actually works for compounding your capabilities over time.

I've spent years reading productivity books, testing systems, and watching what actually separates people who compound their capabilities from people who just grind harder.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: most productivity advice is designed to help you do more of the wrong things faster.

Getting better at emptying your inbox doesn't make you more valuable. Working longer hours doesn't make you more capable. Checking off more tasks doesn't compound into anything meaningful.

Real acceleration—the kind that compounds year over year—requires a different approach entirely.

The Compounding Mindset

Here's how most people think about self-improvement:

"I need to be more productive. I should wake up earlier and work harder."

This is linear thinking applied to a nonlinear problem. Working 10% harder gets you 10% more output. Maybe. For one year. Then you burn out.

Here's how accelerating people think:

"What can I learn or build that will make everything else easier?"

This is compound thinking. Instead of asking "how can I do more?", you ask "how can I become the kind of person for whom this is easy?"

The difference is massive over time. Linear improvement adds. Compound improvement multiplies.

The Four Leverage Points

After studying this obsessively, I've identified four leverage points that actually create compounding acceleration:

1. Learn How to Learn

Skills depreciate. What you know today will be less valuable tomorrow. The half-life of professional skills is now estimated at 5 years and shrinking.

But learning ability doesn't depreciate. If you can acquire new skills faster than they become obsolete, you're perpetually ahead.

Meta-skills that accelerate all other learning:

• Deliberate practice: Focused, effortful work on specific weaknesses with immediate feedback. Not just "doing the thing"—identifying exactly what you're bad at and targeting that.
• Spaced repetition: Reviewing material at increasing intervals to optimize retention. This isn't just for flashcards—you can space out practice of any skill.
• Teaching: The best way to learn something is to teach it. Explaining forces you to identify gaps in your understanding.
• Interleaving: Practicing multiple related skills in the same session, rather than blocking practice by skill type. Harder in the moment, better retention long-term.

These aren't productivity hacks. They're fundamental upgrades to your learning capacity. A 10% improvement in learning speed compounds every time you learn something new—which, in a changing world, is constantly.

2. Ruthlessly Eliminate Before You Optimize

Tim Ferriss has a principle: never automate what can be eliminated; never delegate what can be automated.

Most people skip straight to optimization. They find ways to do their email faster, run their meetings more efficiently, complete their tasks more quickly.

But the highest-leverage question is: should this be done at all?

Research on top performers found they're 55 times less likely to start projects they don't finish. Not because they're better at finishing—because they're better at not starting things that don't matter.

The hierarchy of productivity:

1. Eliminate: Does this need to exist? If not, stop doing it.
2. Automate: Can a system or tool do this? If yes, set it up once and forget it.
3. Delegate: Can someone else do this? If yes, get it off your plate.
4. Optimize: How can I do this faster? Only ask this after the first three.

Most people start at step 4 and never consider steps 1-3. That's why they're busy but not effective.

3. Protect Deep Work Like Your Life Depends On It

Cal Newport's research is unambiguous: the ability to perform deep, focused work is becoming both rarer and more valuable.

Here's what the data shows:

• The average knowledge worker checks email every 6 minutes
• It takes 23 minutes to fully refocus after an interruption
• Most people never have more than 2 hours of uninterrupted focus time per day

If you can protect 4 hours of uninterrupted deep work per day, you have double the focused capacity of most people. That's not a small edge—it's transformational.

How to actually protect deep work:

• Time block religiously: Schedule your deep work in your calendar. Treat it like a meeting you can't cancel.
• Batch shallow work: Email, messages, administrative tasks—do them all in designated windows, not scattered throughout the day.
• Create physical separation: Different location, different device, different environment for deep work. Make the context switch obvious.
• Set expectations: Tell people when you're available and when you're not. Most "urgent" things can wait 2 hours.

4. Use AI as a Thinking Amplifier

This is the new leverage point that didn't exist five years ago—and most people are wildly underutilizing it.

AI isn't just a tool for doing tasks faster. It's a cognitive amplifier that can multiply your thinking capacity.

Ways AI creates genuine leverage:

• First drafts of anything: Instead of staring at blank pages, generate rough drafts to react to. Your brain is better at editing than creating from scratch.
• Research acceleration: Ask questions, get summaries, explore tangents. What used to take hours of reading takes minutes of conversation.
• Thinking partner: Explain your ideas to AI and ask for critique. It won't give you the best feedback, but it gives you instant feedback—which is often more valuable than waiting for a human.
• Parallel workflows: Run multiple AI conversations simultaneously for different tasks. Multitask cognitively in ways that weren't possible before.
• Learning accelerator: Personalized tutoring on any topic, any time. Questions answered instantly. Explanations tailored to your level.

The people who figure out how to integrate AI into their cognitive workflows will have massive advantages over those who treat it as a novelty.

The Daily Practice

Frameworks are useless without implementation. Here's what accelerating actually looks like day-to-day:

Morning (before the world intrudes)

• Wake at least 1 hour before you need to engage with email/meetings/people
• 5 minutes: meditation or breathwork (80% of high performers do this)
• 5 minutes: journal—what's the single most important thing today?
• 2-4 hours: deep work on that single important thing

Midday (when focus naturally wanes)

• Batch communications: email, messages, calls in a defined window
• Meetings if unavoidable—cluster them together
• Administrative tasks and shallow work

Evening (compound the day)

• Review: what worked? What didn't?
• Plan tomorrow's single most important task
• Learning time: read, study, practice something that compounds your capabilities

This isn't complicated. It's obvious, even. But it's not common. Most people do the opposite: they wake up, check email, react all day, and collapse in the evening having done nothing that compounds.

The Uncomfortable Questions

Acceleration requires asking questions that most people avoid:

"What would I stop doing if I had to cut my work hours in half?"
Whatever you'd cut is probably the stuff that doesn't matter. Why are you doing it now?

"What skill, if I mastered it, would make everything else easier?"
That's the skill you should be learning. Not the one that seems relevant or interesting, but the one that's a genuine multiplier.

"What am I doing because it feels productive rather than because it matters?"
Inbox zero feels productive. Busywork feels productive. Meetings feel productive. Feeling busy and being effective are often opposites.

"If I could only accomplish one thing this year, what would create the most value?"
That thing should be getting most of your deep work time. If it's not, something is structurally wrong.

The Compounding Effect

Here's what happens when you consistently apply these principles:

Year 1: Marginal improvement. You're learning the habits. It feels awkward. You're not sure it's working.

Year 2: Noticeable gains. Your learning speed has improved. Your focus capacity is higher. You're eliminating more of what doesn't matter.

Year 3: Significant separation. You're visibly more capable than people who were at your level when you started. Opportunities come to you because you can do things others can't.

Year 5: Exponential divergence. The gap between you and people who grind linearly is enormous and growing. You've become the kind of person for whom hard things are easy.

This is what compound growth looks like in personal capability. Not getting 10% more efficient each year, but building the meta-skills and habits that multiply everything else.