Discipline-free systems beat forced productivity

Why do some days feel effortless while others require heroic amounts of willpower to accomplish anything? This question used to haunt me.

I’d wake up on Monday full of determination. I’d power through my to-do list, resist distractions, force myself to focus on difficult tasks. Halfway through Tuesday, I’d be exhausted. By Wednesday, I was running on fumes. It’s barely midweek yet even simple tasks felt impossible.

I thought the problem was me. Not disciplined enough. Not committed enough. Not productive enough.

Turns out, I was asking the wrong question. The problem wasn’t my willpower—it was my dependence on it.

Willpower delusion

We worship willpower in productivity culture. We admire people who wake up at 5 am, who resist every distraction, who push through resistance. We treat discipline as the ultimate virtue.

But here’s what Sönke Ahrens discovered studying Niklas Luhmann’s work: “Not having willpower, but not having to use willpower indicates that you set yourself up for success.”

Read that again. The goal isn’t to have more willpower. It’s to need less of it.

Luhmann wrote 90,000 notes and over 50 books. When asked how he stayed so productive, his answer was surprising: “I only do what is easy. I only write when I immediately know how to do it. If I falter for a moment, I put the matter aside and do something else.”

He wasn’t being glib. He’d built a system that made productivity feel easy because the work was always interesting, always achievable, always flowing naturally from one task to the next.

Most of us do the opposite. We force ourselves to work on things we’re stuck on. We fight our natural resistance. We treat productivity as a battle against our own nature.

And we wonder why we’re exhausted.

Why willpower fails

Willpower is a limited resource. Psychologists call this ego depletion—every decision, every act of self-control, every moment of resisting temptation drains your mental battery.

This is why you can resist the biscuit tin at 9 am but raid it at 9 pm. This is why you can focus on difficult work in the morning but doom-scroll Twitter in the afternoon. Your willpower depletes throughout the day.

But it’s worse than that. Every tiny decision drains willpower. Choosing what to wear. Deciding what to work on next. Figuring out where to file a note. Resisting the urge to check your phone.

By the time you sit down to do actual creative work, you’ve already spent half your mental energy on trivial choices.

This is why Steve Jobs wore the same black turtleneck every day. Why Barack Obama had only grey or blue suits. They weren’t being eccentric—they were conserving mental energy for decisions that actually mattered.

The same principle applies to note-taking and knowledge work. If your system requires constant decisions—where should this go? what tag should I use? should I save this?—you’re bleeding willpower before you even start thinking.

Designing for laziness

The secret to sustainable productivity isn’t becoming more disciplined. It’s designing systems that work with your natural laziness instead of against it.

Ahrens puts it beautifully: “Every task that is interesting, meaningful and well-defined will be done, because there is no conflict between long- and short-term commitments. Having a meaningful and well-defined task beats willpower every time.”

Let’s break that down.

Interesting: If you’re forcing yourself to work on something boring, you’ll need willpower. If you’re genuinely curious about something, you won’t.

Meaningful: If you can’t see why something matters, you’ll need willpower to do it. If you understand its significance, you won’t.

Well-defined: If you don’t know exactly what to do next, you’ll need willpower to figure it out. If the next step is obvious, you won’t.

This is why my note-taking system transformed my productivity. Not because it made me more disciplined, but because it made discipline unnecessary.

How systems remove friction

My old approach to writing an article looked like this:

Decide on a topic (decision fatigue)
Remember what I’ve read about it (mental strain)
Search through highlights and bookmarks (friction)
Figure out what I think (cognitive load)
Organise my thoughts (decision fatigue again)
Actually write (finally!)

By the time I got to step 6, I’d already exhausted myself. Writing felt hard because I was trying to do six different cognitive tasks simultaneously.

My current approach:

Notice I have 20 permanent notes about a topic
Review and arrange them
Write by translating notes into prose

See the difference? The thinking is already done. The organisation happens naturally as I review. The writing is just connecting thoughts I’ve already developed.

No willpower required. The system makes the work easy.

The switching strategy

Here’s something else I learned from Luhmann’s approach: when you’re stuck, don’t force it. Switch.

This contradicts everything we’re told about focus and persistence. We’re supposed to power through resistance, finish what we started, not let ourselves get distracted.

But Luhmann demonstrated something remarkable: switching between projects when you’re stuck is more productive than grinding through resistance.

He always worked on multiple manuscripts simultaneously. When he hit a wall on one, he’d move to another. This meant he was always working on something that felt easy and interesting in the moment.

I’ve adopted this approach in my own work. I have several articles in various stages of development. When I’m stuck on one, I switch to another. I’m not procrastinating—I’m choosing the work that’s ready to be done.

This only works because I have a system that makes switching frictionless. All my notes are connected. All my projects draw from the same reservoir of thinking. Moving between them doesn’t feel like starting over—it feels like continuing a conversation from a different angle.

The psychology of flow

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s research on flow states found that optimal experiences happen when challenge matches skill. Too easy, and you’re bored. Too hard, and you’re anxious.

Most productivity systems ignore this. They tell you to tackle your hardest task first, to eat the frog, to push through resistance.

But if a task is too hard in this moment—if you don’t have the energy, the context, or the clarity—forcing yourself to do it won’t produce flow. It’ll produce anxiety and exhaustion.

A good system gives you options. Multiple things you could work on at different difficulty levels. When you’re fresh and energised, you tackle something challenging. When you’re tired, you do something easier. When you’re stuck, you switch.

This isn’t being undisciplined. This is being strategic about your mental energy.

Building willpower-free workflows

So how do you design systems that don’t require willpower? Three principles:

1. Remove decision points

Every decision is a tax on your mental energy. Remove as many as possible.

For notes, this means having a clear workflow. Fleeting notes go in one place. They’re processed the same way every time. Permanent notes follow a standard structure.

I don’t waste energy deciding where things should go or how they should be formatted. The system decides for me.

2. Make the next step obvious

Ambiguity requires willpower to overcome. Clarity doesn’t.

When I sit down to write, I don’t start with “what should I write about?” I start with “which cluster of notes is ready to become an article?”

The next step is always obvious because I’ve been building toward it incrementally through my notes.

3. Work with natural motivation

Don’t force yourself to work on things that feel difficult right now. Instead, have multiple things you could work on and choose the one that feels easiest.

This requires having a system where all your work is visible and accessible. I can see all my note clusters, all my draft outlines, all my half-formed ideas. When something feels ready to develop, I develop it.

The compound effect

Here’s the beautiful thing about willpower-free systems: they compound over time.

Every note you write makes the next note easier. Every connection you make creates possibilities for future connections. Every article you complete leaves behind permanent notes that feed into future articles.

Contrast this with willpower-based productivity. Every act of forcing yourself to work drains your reserves for tomorrow. Every time you push through resistance, you make resistance stronger.

One approach gets easier over time. The other gets harder.

I used to think productivity was about becoming the kind of person who could force themselves to do difficult things. Now I understand it’s about becoming the kind of person who rarely needs to.

Not because I’m lazy—though I freely admit I am—but because I’ve built systems that make the work inherently interesting and the next step always obvious.

Starting point

You don’t need to rebuild your entire workflow overnight. Start with one area where you’re currently relying on willpower.

Maybe it’s forcing yourself to process your inbox. Maybe it’s making yourself write even when you have nothing to say. Maybe it’s pushing through a project that feels stuck.

Ask yourself: how could I redesign this so willpower isn’t required?

Could you process your inbox at a specific time when you’re naturally most energised? Could you build up notes instead of forcing yourself to write from nothing? Could you switch to a different project instead of grinding through stuck points?

The goal isn’t to eliminate all effort—deep work requires focus and energy. The goal is to eliminate the friction that makes starting feel harder than the work itself.

As Ahrens reminds us, highly successful people succeed “not because of strong willpower and the ability to overcome resistance, but because of working environments that avoid resistance in the first place.”

Build the environment. Skip the suffering.

Your future self—the one who’s actually getting work done instead of just thinking about getting work done—will thank you.

Next in this series: How to think outside your brain—why our memory is terrible at storage but excellent at connection, and how external notes free your mind to do what it does best.