By Colby Kultgen
Make Consistency Feel Easy, My New Favorite Productivity Tool, and Raw Dogging Your Walks
Read online / Read time: 4 minutes
Today at a Glance:
• My new favorite productivity tool
• A mindset shift to help you show up more often
• A 20-min weekly challenge for better thinking
• A story about patience, carpentry, and Harrison Ford
• A quote that hits like a freight train
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My new favorite productivity tool
Every week, I get messages from companies asking me to promote their products.
To be honest, 99% of them are a waste of time.
Flow is different.
I've been using it for the last few weeks, and I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s cut my typing in half.
It’s an AI voice dictation app that transcribes and formats your words in real time—so you can just speak and let it do the work.
Hold a shortcut, start talking, and that’s it.
No typos.
No weird formatting.
Just clean, natural text.
And yeah, it’s way faster than typing.
You can try it for free here.
How to make consistency feel easy
People always say, "Showing up is half the battle."
But in reality, it's more like 80%.
If you can consistently show up, you’ve already overcome the biggest obstacle to success.
So how do we make it feel automatic?
There are basically two levers we can pull:
- Make starting easier (duh).
- Make skipping harder.
To make starting easier, it all comes down to lowering the activation energy of whatever task you're trying to do.
Here are 3 of my favorite ways to achieve this:
- The "next tiny move" - When you're stuck or overwhelmed, ask: What's my next tiny move? Not the whole project. Just the next step.
- Remove friction in advance - Lay out your gym clothes the night before. Prep your meals on Sunday. Eliminate excuses before they show up.
- Commit to your calendar - What gets scheduled gets done. Block time for the things that matter—and honor it like any other appointment.
To make skipping harder, you need to make the discomfort of avoidance so high that going through with your commitment actually feels like the easier option.
Here are 3 strategies I use:
- Commit financially - Pay for a class, a course, or a coach in advance. Money is the ultimate motivator, use it to your advantage.
- Get an accountability buddy - Find someone with a similar goal. Check in regularly. You’re less likely to ghost your goals if someone’s expecting you.
- Anti-rewards – Set a consequence for skipping. If you miss your workout, you owe your friend $20… or worse, you donate to a cause you hate. Nothing lights a fire like a little pain.
Make it easy to start.
Make it hard to skip.
Do that, and showing up becomes your default setting.
A challenge we should all take on this week
Ok, friends, here's our challenge for the week:
At least one 20-minute walk with no phone, no music, no distractions.
I know for me, nearly all of my best ideas come on walks like this.
And the research backs it up.
One of my favorite studies comes from neuroscientist Dr. Nancy Andreasen:
After noticing that highly creative people—Einstein, Mozart, da Vinci—all carved out time for what she called “free-floating periods of thought,” she decided to study what was actually happening in the brain during these idle moments.
What she found was surprising:
The brain wasn’t quiet at all. It was lighting up.
Connecting ideas. Making sense of experiences.
She called this state REST — random episodic silent thinking.
So if you’re walking without distractions and your mind starts to drift?
You’re not wasting time.
You’re doing some of your brain’s most important work.
P.S. Can we all agree that “raw dog” is a hilarious term?
A story about lengthening your timeline
I loved this story shared by Billy Oppenheimer (Ryan Holiday's research assistant):
Before he was Han Solo or Indiana Jones, Harrison Ford was a carpenter.
In 1964, Ford moved to Hollywood to become an actor.
“But I arrived on a metaphoric bus full of people who had the same ambition,” he said.
So he came up with this plan to prevail over the competition:
As Ford spent time around the other aspiring actors on that metaphoric bus, he became aware of something:
Most of them were in a hurry.
They were in a hurry to “make it” or to make lots of money or to prove something to someone.
Whatever the reason, most were on a tight timeline.
So Ford's plan was to do the opposite: to lengthen his timeline.
To do so, Ford said, "I had to have another source of income. So I became a carpenter."
“By doing carpentry," he explained, "I was able to wait it out.
And as the years went by, the attrition rate eliminated many of those people from the competition pool until finally, there were only a few of us left on the bus from that entering class.
I always saw life that way—you just have to find a way to stick it out, to prevail.”
Key takeaway: If you can lengthen your timeline, you greatly increase your odds of winning.
Staying power is underrated.
A quote I think about all the time
Charlie Munger on self-pity:
"Generally speaking, envy, resentment, revenge, and self-pity are disastrous modes of thought.
Self-pity gets pretty close to paranoia… Every time you find your drifting into self-pity, I don’t care what the cause, your child could be dying from cancer, self-pity is not going to improve the situation. It’s a ridiculous way to behave.
Life will have terrible blows, horrible blows, unfair blows, it doesn’t matter. Some people recover and others don’t.
There I think the attitude of Epictetus is the best. He thought that every mischance in life was an opportunity to behave well. Every mischance in life was an opportunity to learn something and that your duty was not to be immersed in self-pity, but to utilize the terrible blow in a constructive fashion. That is a very good idea."
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A feeling we can all relate to 😂
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Have a great week!
—Colby
