Epictetus’s productivity method starts with a filter: Is this mine?
Original: Epictetus Ran a Better Productivity System Than Any App You’ve Bought by JA Westenberg. List extracted by AI.
Separate what you control from what you don’t. Your judgments, choices, desires, and actions are yours. Other people’s decisions, opinions, deadlines, mistakes, markets, algorithms, and outcomes are not.
The practical method is simple:
- Ask whether something is your responsibility.
- If it is, act on it. Decide what to pursue, refuse, change, or accept.
- If it isn’t, don’t turn it into a task. You can offer an opinion or influence someone, but their response remains their responsibility.
- Judge yourself by your own actions and choices, not by outcomes you don’t control.
The important twist is that productivity begins with refusing work, not capturing more of it. Modern productivity systems tend to treat everything that reaches you as something that must be processed. Epictetus would first ask whether it belongs in your jurisdiction at all.
The core question is therefore:
Is this mine?
If it is, do something. If it isn’t, let it go.
//
Coté: avoid dressing for the task you want, instead dress for the task you were hired for.
Leave a Reply