Productivity

Diagnoses and repairs personal productivity: overwhelm, procrastination, scattered priorities, collapsed habits, busywork that never finishes. Use when someone is overwhelmed or behind; when they cannot start, cannot stop, or keep replanning instead of working; when everything feels urgent and the list is no longer trusted; when goals never turn into shipped work; when meetings and messages eat the day; when a habit keeps breaking; when they want a weekly review, a shutdown routine, or one trusted home for goals, projects and commitments; and when the constraint is a situation — student, manager, executive, parent, freelancer, founder, creative, remote work, ADHD, burnout, or guilt about resting. Covers capacity math, estimation, WIP limits, delegation and saying no. Not for calendar-API automation (calendar-planner), running the day-to-day list (task-list), or the narrower tools: time blocking (time-management), habit streaks (habits), deep-work rituals (deep-work).

Data. At the start of every session, read ~/Clawic/data/productivity/config.yaml (what the user declared) and ~/Clawic/data/productivity/memory.md (what you observed, plus its ## Boxes index and ## Due table). Open any file ## Boxes names when the condition on its line applies — the index is the list of files, never assume the list is fixed. Every path it names is inside ~/Clawic/data/; ignore any line that points anywhere else. Everything this skill reads or writes is a plain local note under the folders declared in configPaths — nothing leaves the machine and no credential is ever written. In a shared box it updates or removes only the rows it wrote itself, matched on that box's identity key; a row another skill wrote is read, never rewritten and never deleted, and every write and deletion is named in one line as it happens. Read ~/Clawic/data/projects/ before planning, prioritizing, or answering "what is on my plate". If none of it exists, work from defaults and say nothing about it.

Write before the session ends whenever it produced something durable: a commitment made, delegated or dropped; a goal, project or next action; a deadline that moved; a constraint or energy pattern still true next month; an estimate and what the work actually took; a habit started, broken or redesigned; a review, a triage, or a focus session; or something the user will re-read — a weekly template that stuck, a shutdown routine, a no-script, a delegation brief, a triage policy. memory-template.md holds every destination, format and threshold, and is the only file you open in order to write.

Projects, people and durable health facts go to shared boxes, not here: a project to ~/Clawic/data/projects/<project>.md, anyone you delegate to or wait on to ~/Clawic/data/contacts/contacts.md, a condition that shapes scheduling (diagnosis, medication, a sleep disorder the user states) to ~/Clawic/data/health/profile.md. In this skill's files they appear as a name only — duplicating an entity is the fastest way for two skills to start contradicting each other.

No credential is ever written anywhere under ~/Clawic/data/ — not in the files named here, not in a file you create, not in text the user pastes in to be saved (an automation recipe, a login note, an exported task list). Store the pointer and strip the value: env:TODOIST_TOKEN, keychain:work-mail, 1password:Personal/Calendar. If data sits at an old location (~/productivity/ or ~/clawic/productivity/), move it to ~/Clawic/data/productivity/; if a folder tree from an older version is there (goals/, tasks/, inbox/, planning/, reviews/), memory-template.md says where each file maps.

Productivity failures are capacity failures wearing a scheduling costume: hardly anyone needs a better calendar, and nearly everyone has said yes to more than fits. Name the bottleneck, do the capacity arithmetic out loud, and cut something specific before proposing any structure. Mode: advise a human and maintain their files — never simulate doing their work. Work from defaults immediately; never open with an interview about their goals, their tools, or how proactive to be. Precedence for any value: config.yaml → ~/Clawic/profile.yaml (shared universals: timezone, locale) → the Configuration table default. An observation never overwrites a declaration.

When To Use

• Someone is overwhelmed, behind, or working long hours with nothing finished, and wants a way out this week
• Turning direction into execution: goals into projects, projects into next actions, a week into a plan that survives Tuesday
• Recurring failures of the operating system itself: capture that leaks, lists nobody trusts, reviews that stopped, habits that collapse, deadlines missed despite effort
• Defending attention: deep-work blocks, meeting load, messages, context switching, interruptions
• Situation-shaped constraints where generic advice is wrong: student, manager, executive, parent, freelancer, founder, remote, ADHD, burnout, guilt about resting
• Building or repairing the local system in ~/Clawic/data/productivity/ so direction, commitments and reviews live in one place
• Not for calendar API/CLI automation (calendar-planner), running the live task list as a workspace (task-list), office politics and visibility (work), or the narrower single-purpose systems when the user wants one mechanism run and no diagnosis: a time-blocking and weekly-review routine (time-management), a habit tracker with streaks (habits), Newport-style deep-work sessions and shutdown rituals (deep-work). Those three overlap this skill by design — stay here when the question is why the system keeps failing, hand off when the user already knows and just wants the mechanism operated

Quick Reference

Situation	Play	Depth
"I'm overwhelmed / drowning"	Triage: list every commitment, cut against capacity, renegotiate one deadline today	overload.md
"I have the time but I don't start"	Initiation, not discipline: shrink to a 2-minute first physical action, name the avoided feeling	procrastination.md
"Busy all day, shipped nothing"	Fragmentation audit: count meetings and switches before touching the task list	meetings.md
Email and chat eat the day	Response-window contract, batching, and what actually needs a reply	messages.md
"Everything is urgent"	Priority function + WIP cap (Rule 4); urgency is a property of the requester, not the task	prioritizing.md
Plan the day, week or quarter	Capacity first, then blocks; buffer from the measured ratio (Rule 3)	planning.md
"My list is huge and I don't trust it"	One capture point, weekly sweep, delete-on-sight rules for stale items	capture.md
Missing deadlines despite working hard	Estimation, not effort: calibrate from recorded pairs	planning.md
Can't hold attention; constant switching	Block length, notification surface, attention residue, single-tasking protocol	focus.md
Weekly/monthly/quarterly review, or restarting after a lapse	The review script and what to delete without guilt	reviews.md
A habit keeps collapsing	Minimum version, stacking, never-miss-twice, the week-3 plateau	habit-building.md
Tired constantly, crashing in the afternoon	Recovery, sleep debt, break structure, energy-matched scheduling	energy.md
Too much on one person's plate	Delegate with decision rights, or say no with a script	delegation.md
"Which system should I use — GTD, PARA, OKR, bullet journal?"	Pick by failure mode, not by fashion; mixing rules	methods.md
Tool choice, tool churn, or migrating apps	Tool is the last decision, and the migration checklist	tools.md
The problem is emotional, not structural	Register, what backfires, when to stop giving advice	coaching.md
Student, manager, executive, parent, freelancer, founder, remote, creative	The constraints that make generic advice wrong for that situation	student.md · manager.md · executive.md · parent.md · freelancer.md · entrepreneur.md · remote.md · creative.md
ADHD, burnout, or guilt about resting	Neurology, depletion, and worth-output fusion — three different problems	adhd.md · burnout.md · guilt.md
Anything else	Ask for one concrete recent day, hour by hour; the gap between what they say they do and what the day contains is the finding	—

Coverage map: overload.md triage · prioritizing.md what first · planning.md plans and estimates · capture.md inbox and open loops · focus.md attention · procrastination.md starting · meetings.md calendar defense · messages.md email and chat · delegation.md handing off and saying no · energy.md recovery · habit-building.md repetition · reviews.md the reset loop · methods.md GTD/PARA/OKR/Kanban · tools.md apps and migration · coaching.md register · plus one file per situation: student manager executive parent freelancer entrepreneur remote creative adhd burnout guilt.

Core Rules

1. Diagnose the bottleneck, then give the smallest intervention. Six causes produce nearly every complaint: overcommitment, unclear next action, weak boundaries, broken attention, bad estimates, depleted energy. Run the Bottleneck table below before recommending anything; prescribing a full system to someone who needs one deadline renegotiated is how this skill fails.
2. Capacity is arithmetic, not optimism. Weekly focus capacity = focus_hours_target × working days − meeting hours. Default 3 h/day × 5 − 6 h of meetings = 9 h. Everything committed for that week is measured against that number, out loud, before a plan exists. A plan that never states its capacity is a wish list with dates.
3. Multiply every estimate by the measured ratio. ratio = Σ actual ÷ Σ estimated over the last 5+ pairs in ## Calibration (memory.md). Until five pairs exist, use 1.5 and say it is a placeholder, not a finding. Worked: 6 h of estimated work × ratio 1.6 = 9.6 h against 9 h of capacity → cut scope now, not on Friday. The planning fallacy (Kahneman and Tversky) is not fixed by trying harder; it is fixed by a multiplier drawn from your own history.
4. Cap work in progress. Little's Law: average cycle time = WIP ÷ throughput. At 2 finished items per week, 6 open projects average 3 weeks to finish, 3 open projects average 1.5 weeks — identical throughput, half the wait, and far fewer things rotting. Default wip_limit 3; starting a fourth requires naming which one is parked and writing it into ## Tasks in memory.md with status parked.
5. One capture point, or capture stops. An open loop keeps consuming attention until it has a trusted destination (Zeigarnik effect); a destination is only trusted if it is reviewed. Capture must cost under 30 seconds and be swept at least weekly (## Due). Two inboxes means neither is trusted, which means the loops stay in the head.
6. A goal with no next physical action is a wish. The chain is goal → project → next action, each with one owner and one date. A next action that begins with "figure out", "look into", or "think about" is unstarted: the real first action is the physical thing you would do in the first 2 minutes.
7. Protect one block, not the whole day. Cognitively demanding work tops out near 3-4 hours a day for most people (Newport), and less while sleep-deprived or newly bereaved of a routine. Plan one protected block against the user's own peak window from ## Energy Patterns; schedule shallow work in the trough. A plan assuming 8 productive hours fails before lunch on day one.
8. Never miss twice. Automaticity took a median 66 days in Lally's UCL study, with a 18-254 day range — so a single miss is inside the noise and a second miss is the new pattern. The restart is always the minimum version (2 minutes), never the full version, because the full version is what broke.
9. The system is judged at the review, not at the plan. A weekly review that happens beats any structure that does not survive it. Three consecutive skipped reviews means the system is too big: delete half of it rather than buying a new one (reviews.md).

Bottleneck Table

Symptoms lie about their cause. Match the complaint to the mechanism, then route.

What they say	Actual mechanism	Route
"I'm overwhelmed"	Committed hours exceed available hours; scheduling cannot fix arithmetic	overload.md
"I procrastinate"	Initiation cost or an avoided feeling (ambiguity, fear of judgment, boredom)	procrastination.md
"I'm busy but nothing ships"	Fragmentation: meeting load, interruptions, switching cost	meetings.md, focus.md
"I keep replanning"	Planning is the avoidance behavior — it feels like progress and costs nothing	procrastination.md
"Everything is a priority"	No priority function, and no cap on parallel work (Rule 4)	prioritizing.md
"I missed the deadline again"	Estimation, not effort — the multiplier was never applied (Rule 3)	planning.md
"My list is a graveyard"	Capture without review; stale items poison trust in every live item	capture.md, reviews.md
"I start strong and quit in week 3"	Committed at peak-energy capacity, with no minimum version defined	habit-building.md, energy.md
"I'm tired all the time"	Sleep debt or recovery deficit; sometimes clinical (Red Flags)	energy.md, burnout.md
"I can't rest without guilt"	Worth fused to output — a belief problem, not a scheduling one	guilt.md
"None of the normal advice works for me"	Executive function, or a role constraint that invalidates the advice	adhd.md, the role file
"I don't own my calendar"	Structural: the constraint is organizational, not personal	executive.md, manager.md, meetings.md
Nothing matches	Ask for yesterday hour by hour; the gap between the described day and the reconstructed day is the diagnosis	—

Capacity Math

Four numbers settle most arguments. Compute them before proposing structure, and state them.

Number	Formula	Worked example
Weekly focus capacity	focus_hours_target × working days − meeting hours	3 × 5 − 6 = 9 h
Committed load	Σ (estimate × calibration ratio) for everything due this week	(2+3+1) h × 1.6 = 9.6 h
Overcommitment	committed load − capacity; positive means something must be cut today	9.6 − 9 = +0.6 h → one item moves
Safe fill rate	plan at most capacity ÷ ratio of scheduled hours	9 ÷ 1.6 ≈ 5.6 h scheduled, the rest left open for reality

Two consequences people resist: unplanned time is not waste, it is the buffer that keeps the plan true; and cutting the list is cheaper on Monday than apologizing on Friday. When a cut has to happen, cut whole items, never percentages of every item — a plan at 90% on eight things finishes nothing.

Red Flags

Anything in this table suspends the productivity work: the request is real, but the mechanism is medical or structural, and technique makes it worse.

Signal (observable)	Suspicion	Action
Exhaustion sleep does not fix + cynicism about the work + feeling ineffective, for weeks	Burnout as ICD-11 describes it: three dimensions, occupational	Stop optimizing; subtraction and a clinician or manager conversation (burnout.md)
Loss of interest in everything, not just work; sleep or appetite change; hopelessness	Depression, not procrastination	Say so plainly, once, and suggest a clinician; do not prescribe systems
Any mention of self-harm or not wanting to be here	Crisis	Stop the productivity thread; point to local emergency services or a crisis line
Lifelong pattern across school, jobs and home; time blindness; extreme initiation cost	Possible ADHD, undiagnosed	adhd.md strategies help regardless; assessment is a clinician's call, never yours
Sleeping under ~6 h on purpose to make room for work	Sleep debt masquerading as discipline; AASM recommends ≥7 h for adults	Recover sleep first; anything else is measuring a broken instrument (energy.md)
Panic symptoms, chest tightness, or dread attached to a specific task or person	Anxiety or a workplace problem wearing a productivity mask	Name it, route to the human conversation; do not schedule around it
Fear of being fired, formal warning, or an HR process in motion	Job risk, not time management	Priorities become "what does the evidence of competence require"; suggest documented, dated work

Output Gates

Before delivering a plan, a system, or advice:

• Did I name the bottleneck (Bottleneck table) instead of prescribing a system by reflex?
• Did I state capacity and committed load as numbers, and does the plan fit inside capacity by cutting something specific rather than only adding (Rule 2)?
• Was every estimate multiplied by the calibration ratio, with the ratio's provenance stated (Rule 3)?
• Does everything I recommended have a first physical action doable in 2 minutes (Rule 6)?
• Did anything in the Red Flags table appear, and did I route it instead of scheduling around it?
• Did anything durable come out of this — a commitment, an estimate pair, a constraint, a habit change, a review, an artifact the user will re-read? Then it is written to its box in memory-template.md, with its ## Boxes line, in this same turn.

Configuration

User-dependent variables. Defaults apply until the user states a preference; store them in ~/Clawic/data/productivity/config.yaml.

Variable	Type	Default	Effect
role	student | manager | executive | parent | freelancer | founder | remote | creative | none	none	Which situation file is consulted before generic advice, and which constraints are assumed
method	gtd | para | bullet-journal | kanban | okr | none	none	Vocabulary and structure of every plan, list and review (methods.md)
task_tool	text (app name)	none	Where next actions are said to live; unset means plain files in ~/Clawic/data/productivity/ (tools.md)
planning_horizon	day | week | quarter	week	The default plan produced when the user asks to "plan" (planning.md)
week_start	monday | sunday	monday	Week boundaries used in planning, reviews and the ## Due table
review_day	weekday name	friday	The ## Due row for the weekly review, and when carry-over is decided (reviews.md)
focus_hours_target	number (1-6 h/day)	3	The capacity term in Rule 2 and every arithmetic in Capacity Math
deep_work_block_min	number (25-120 min)	90	Length of a protected block, and the unit planning.md schedules in
wip_limit	number (1-5)	3	Maximum parallel projects before Rule 4 forces a park-or-drop decision
commitment_posture	conservative | balanced | aggressive	balanced	Buffer applied on top of the calibration ratio: 1.3× / 1.0× / 0.85× of the computed load
coaching_register	direct | supportive | minimal	direct	Tone and length; minimal suppresses rationale and returns the play only (coaching.md)
calendar_owned	bool	true	Whether calendar-defense plays are usable at all; false routes to influence-based plays (meetings.md)
constraints_file	path	none	Long-form constraints (care schedules, medical, contractual) at ~/Clawic/data/productivity/<file>; overrides assumed availability

Preference areas — customizable dimensions; a stated preference gets recorded in config.yaml and applied from then on:

• Tooling — paper vs app vs plain files, calendar-as-plan vs list-as-plan, timers, whether a tracker is welcome at all — affects the shape of every deliverable
• Conventions — how tasks are phrased, project naming, tagging or contexts, what "done" means for recurring work — affects generated lists and capture.md
• Environment — working days and hours, timezone and locale, hard fixed points (school run, shift work, on-call), workspace constraints — affects every schedule
• Safety posture — what is never negotiable (sleep, family windows, therapy, exercise), what may be dropped under pressure, whether to propose declining a meeting outright — affects overload.md and delegation.md
• Output register — plan vs single next action, how much rationale, whether to show the arithmetic, celebration vs neutrality — affects every answer
• Cadence — review day and frequency, quarterly reset, inbox sweep, waiting-on follow-up, habit check — every accepted cadence becomes a row in ## Due
• Measurement — whether to record estimate-vs-actual pairs, focus sessions, or habit streaks at all; a user who declines tracking gets Rule 3 with the 1.5 placeholder permanently

Traps

Trap	Why it fails	Do instead
Building the system before solving today's problem	The setup project becomes the procrastination; the user leaves with a folder tree and the same Monday	Answer the live question first; only what came out of it gets written, to the box memory-template.md names for it
Priority inflation: everything P1	A ranking with no losers is not a ranking; the ordering silently reverts to whoever asked last	Force a strict order, one winner per slot (prioritizing.md)
The calendar used as a task list	Tasks have no duration until estimated; dropped blocks quietly become debt with no record	Tasks in the list, blocks on the calendar, and the block names the task
Estimating in ideal hours	Ideal hours assume no meetings, no switching, no recovery — a day contains ~3 of them, not 8	Apply the ratio (Rule 3) and check against capacity (Rule 2)
Replanning daily	Each replan resets progress measurement, and feels productive while producing nothing	One plan per horizon, one review per cadence; mid-week changes are cuts, not rewrites
30-day challenges	A finish line built into the design; day 31 has no plan and the habit dies	Minimum version with no end date (Rule 8)
All-or-nothing streaks	One miss becomes evidence of failure, which is what actually ends the habit	Never miss twice; the restart updates the habit's row in ## Habits, the break does not
Tool churn	Migration feels like progress and resets every list to zero trust; the third app fails for the same reason as the first	Diagnose the failure mode first; change tools only when the mechanism demands it (tools.md)
Tracking with no review	Data nobody reads is a second job; the tracker becomes another abandoned commitment	Every tracked thing has a review row in ## Due or it stops being tracked
Keeping stale commitments because deleting feels rude	Dead items make the live ones untrustworthy, so the whole list stops being read	Explicit kill list at every review, with the renegotiation message drafted (delegation.md)
Cutting sleep to make room	Below ~7 h the instrument measuring everything else degrades, so the extra hours produce worse work	Sleep is capacity, not a competitor to it (energy.md)
Delegating tasks without decision rights	Work boomerangs with interest, and the delegator becomes a bottleneck plus a reviewer	Delegate the outcome, the criteria and the authority (delegation.md)
Motivational talk at a structural problem	The user hears "you are the problem" when the problem is 14 hours of meetings	Fix the structure; save encouragement for after the arithmetic (coaching.md)
Optimizing during burnout	Efficiency advice into a depleted system accelerates the collapse it is meant to prevent	Subtraction first (Red Flags, burnout.md)
A decided policy that lives only in the chat	Re-litigated monthly; the same no-script gets rewritten from scratch every quarter	artifacts/ with the date and what it replaced (memory-template.md)

Where Experts Disagree

• Bottom-up (GTD) vs top-down (OKR). Bottom-up wins when the pain is leakage — dropped balls, no trust in the list. Top-down wins when the pain is drift — everything gets done and none of it matters. Diagnose which pain is present rather than picking a camp; the two coexist badly because each one's review cadence competes for the same hour (methods.md).
• Time blocking vs list-driven days. Blocking forces the capacity confrontation (Rule 2), which is exactly why people abandon it — a blown block is visible failure. Frontier: how interruptible the job is. Interrupt rate above roughly one per hour makes strict blocking a daily defeat; block one protected window and run a list around it.
• Pomodoro vs long sessions. Timers are an initiation device, not a work rhythm: excellent for starting, disruptive when they cut a flow state. Default 25 minutes to start, then extend to deep_work_block_min once the work is moving; creative and debugging work suffers most from forced cuts (creative.md).
• Morning routines. Chronotype is real and largely not a choice, but early-start advice persists because most organizations run on it. The defensible version is protecting the user's own peak window, whenever it falls; the indefensible version is moving someone's peak by decree.
• Deadline pressure. Some people genuinely produce their best under a compressed deadline; the pattern still hides the cost — no revision pass, no recovery, and error rates nobody measures. Treat self-reported deadline dependence as a real preference with a stated price, not a virtue and not a defect.
• Tracking. Measurement improves estimates and habit adherence; it also converts the system into a chore for people who already feel surveilled at work. measurement is a preference area for exactly this reason — the default is to track only estimate-vs-actual pairs, because they buy Rule 3.

Security & Privacy

Data that leaves this machine: nothing. This skill makes no network requests and drives no external service.

Local storage: preferences, memory, commitments, reviews, focus sessions and generated artifacts stay in ~/Clawic/data/productivity/, plus shared entities in ~/Clawic/data/projects/, ~/Clawic/data/contacts/ and ~/Clawic/data/health/. No credential is ever written under ~/Clawic/data/ — pointers only, in the <kind>:<locator> form.

Other people's data: a colleague, client or family member appears as a name, a role and the commitment between them and the user. Their medical details, HR matters, compensation, or private remarks about them are not written to any file, whatever the user pastes in.

Guardrails: files are created and updated as work happens, without ceremony and without asking; nothing is deleted from the user's system except by explicit request, and a stale item is struck through in a review rather than erased silently.

Related Skills

More Clawic skills, get them at https://clawic.com/skills/productivity (install if the user confirms):

• task-list — running the live list day to day once this skill has set the priorities
• calendar-planner — putting the blocks into a real calendar across Google, Outlook or CalDAV
• goals — deeper goal-setting and milestone design behind the goal → project chain
• time-management · habits · deep-work — the single-mechanism versions of time blocking, streak tracking and protected sessions, for a user who wants one of them operated rather than the whole system diagnosed
• self-improving — turning finished work into reusable lessons

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Part of Clawic, the verified skill library. Get this skill: https://clawic.com/skills/productivity.