On May 4, 1886, an unidentified man ignited a stick of dynamite. He was somewhere in the middle of a crowd in Haymarket Square, Chicago. The incident, which took several lives, became known as the Haymarket Massacre.

A century later, psychologist Daniel Gilbert drew on the incident in the introduction to his book Stumbling on Happiness. In the book, Gilbert tells the story of the Haymarket Martyr — an innocent man who was falsely charged and executed for causing the explosion.

I have a theory about procrastination. I blame cavemen. You can learn more about that theory here. Long story short: if you struggle with a short attention span, procrastination, overwhelm, or distraction, this one is for you.

I’ll admit I wasn’t always a productive person. I couldn’t keep up with all the phone calls and paperwork and gym memberships that come with proper adulting. But that’s why I’m so pumped about the Strongweek Method. It made me a productivity machine.

I’m so excited about this one I’m not even putting it through Grammarly. (So pardon the typos.)

So here’s the thing. Getting stuff done usually works like this:

Step 1: A…

Before he wrote A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglass Adams cleaned chicken sheds. It was not a glamorous way to make an income. But that’s the kind of job you get when you are a procrastinator.

Douglas Adams was such a procrastinator that a publisher locked him in a hotel room. The publisher gave him a typewriter and placed a supervisor in the room next door. It was all to make sure he met his deadlines.

But “I love deadlines!” He complained, “I like the whooshing sound they make as they go by.”

What Adams’s publisher knew was that…

I used to have a coworker with a giant whiteboard on his desk. Across the top, he’d scrawled,

“Top 5 Things This Week.”

Every Monday, he’d write down the five things he needed to get done that week. As he got them done, he’d draw a line through them in red erasable marker. Every Friday, he’d wipe the whiteboard clean — ready for a new Monday.

As my career progressed, prioritizing tasks became a fundamental part of my job. I kept thinking back to that whiteboard. …

Marketers spend hours workshopping titles. We A/B test email subject lines. We run blog titles through keywords tools. We show website hero messages to focus groups.

Then we look at that all-important button right beneath it all — the button we need our audience to click — slap “learn more” on it, and call it a day.

In marketing, we have an expression: no one buys a drill . They buy the hole the drill makes. Everyone should own a good drill, but unless you work in construction, you’ve never wanted to “learn more” about one.

Let’s say you’re looking…

At Strongweek, we usually focus on mobile apps. But the Strongweek Method works in #bujo too!

In fact, the Strongweek Method is ideal for bullet journals. Since Strongweek doesn’t rely on dates, times, and notifications, you get 9 perfect pages to make your own.

So how does it work?

Usually, when you make a To-Do List, you write down all the tasks you need to get done. You add dates, or you leave them in a long list. It might look nice, but it’s stressful having all those tasks to do.

The Strongweek Method organizes tasks by due-time-period instead. You…

There’s something urgent you’ve got to do next. There’s something your boss wants from you. There’s something you need from a coworker. You promised your significant other you’d get some chores done.

You can’t do it all at once. You need to prioritize.

You read a blog post about urgent vs. important tasks. It’s a great concept, but it doesn’t help when so many things are important and urgent. A Google search turns up something called a “priority matrix,” but you don’t want to spend 20 minutes a day bucketing tasks into “now” or “later.” You need to know:

Out…

There are a football and a UC Berkley baseball cap on top of a row of lockers behind Ben Foster. When he gestures at them, his right wrist comes into view on my laptop screen.

I lean closer. Ben is something of a Silicon Valley product management guru, so he has a direct line to all the coolest tech products. He’s running a unique Product Academy, helping DC area entrepreneurs transition their companies from Service- to Product-driven during the pandemic. That’s why he’s agreed to a hatchpad interview to help promote the program.

What catches my attention is Ben’s unusual…