The comment usually attributed to Albert Einstein is that insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting a different outcome, or words to that effect.

For someone who regularly blogs about the primacy of productivity, I have a number of annoying habits that harm my productivity. They’re not mistakes as such, and I’m not insane, but they are silly and for that I am stupid.

One of them is that I almost never unsubscribe to emails from companies that I haven’t re-engaged with after the initial engagement. I argue to myself that I don’t open the email, and it only takes me a second or two to read the subject line and hit delete. When there are 20-50 of those emails a day, every day, it adds up, especially taking its toll on my attention and mental budgets.

Another peccadillo is the process for creating a new text document for writing. I was doing some personal writing the other day and I like to start a new document for each page, because each subject in the project I’m working on is no more than a page. Each new document comes up in the default font, which is not my favourite font, so I write a few lines, highlight them all, and change the font. Every single time.

Finally, I got round to searching the help function for how to re-set the default font and 2 minutes later my new docs were appearing in the lettering I like.

Why didn’t I do that a thousand documents ago? Madness…