How to Increase Productivity as a Part-Time Creator

If you work 9-to-5 and are trying to build part-time

Hey Part-Time Creator,

This week I’m talking about one of my favorite topics —productivity. So if you’re struggling to find time to build alongside your day job, let’s dive in.

Read time: 5.3 minutes

---

This newsletter is going premium 🔥

This newsletter goes premium today! See here for more. This is the last day you can get 33% off your first year. Today is the last day to get the deal :)

---

In 2020, I started writing online. In 2023, I had one of the most successful years of my life. By 2024, things were slowing down, and I was running out of steam. Things had taken a turn at work. I was taking on more responsibility, working later, and consuming work thoughts. I found myself in a position where I was trying to do everything and getting nowhere fast.

In this post, I’ll describe the step-by-step process that helped me turn things around and return to peak productivity in January of this year (without losing my love of the game).

Here’s the process I followed, hopefully these will help you, feel free to interchange them and add more steps:

1. Don’t keep adding to the list

2. Create space for internal conversation

3. Re-establish your core principles

4. Big, slow decisions

5. One thing a day

Let’s get into it.

Recognizing early signs of burnout

My first problem was recognizing that I had a problem. Too often it takes a long while to realize that you have a problem and by the time you do, sometimes the damage is done.

61% of U.S. professionals feel like they’re burnt out or edging towards burnout. But recognizing the early signs of burnout can be difficult if you’ve not experienced it before.

I felt this uneasy sense of dread and an unrelenting desire to switch off my computer and go and hide away for a bit. I tried journalling, I tried taking time off writing, I tried slowing down, I tried sucking it up. It all left with this same sense of unease.

I would list all the things I’d need to do, sit looking at the list thinking it was this enormous mountain that I’d never be able to climb. I’d sink back into my chair, consumed by the idea that it was all getting too much, and then, eventually, trot off to watch Netflix and forget about it all.

I had these competing voices in my head. On the one hand, I wanted to lean into the stuff going on at work, to work extra, to do more, to take on more. On the other hand, I knew building online was a better ROI. But every time I went to do that, I felt stuck and hazy. I didn’t know what to do. I had several parts of me all in conflict with one another.

And what it meant was that slowly things dropped off. I felt overwhelmed and stuck so I squashed most of my online ambitions for other competing priorities. Which meant I stopped writing for a few months.

For me, it was all signs I was burning out, here’s the things I saw on a daily basis:

• Fatigue — feeling exhausted before I’d even started the day.

• Frustration — constantly feeling overwhelmed and then frustrated at my overwhelm.

• Decreased productivity — both the above then meant my output was considerably less than usual.

• Lack of motivation — all resulted in a lack of motivation and a desire to switch off.

Like most things, I realized my productivity problem stemmed from other things. It wasn’t until I unpicked them that would I nail this productivity thing. Here’s how I did it.

Step 1: Don’t keep adding to the list

Most days would start with facing a huge list of ‘things’ to do with no idea where to start. I couldn’t work out what would take priority, I didn’t have the energy to try and work through it all. There were constant competing ideas that never got resolved — it was this cycle that never ended.

After a little while, I realized that piling on the things to do was causing me to drown. I wanted to do so many things, and as I just kept staring at the list, none of those things actually got done and I was just adding to the weight. As the weight got heavier and heavier, slowly, I felt myself sinking.

I got in the habit of just continually adding to the list without thinking much about the size and scale of that thing. I would casually add something like ‘explore new product idea’ without much thought of what that might entail and how much effort that would take.

I needed space to breathe and figure out what I really wanted to do. It meant that it delayed any action and kept me stuck for way longer than I needed to. What I needed was some time to think about the things that I really wanted to do and the things that were ‘nice to have’ and the things that my mind actually needed to function.

Key action points:
If you are 30% less productive than usual for 7–14 days.

❌ Stop adding to the list — don’t add a single new thing to your to-do list.
✅ Find 1 hour in the next 3 days — where you can spend time on the following steps.

Step 2: Create space for internal conversation