In this article I share the personality traits that help me be pretty productive, the things you can easily copy and an action question that could help you have a bigger output.

A bit of context

"Daniele, how do you manage to do all of this?" that's a question that I often get asked by Service Design educator friends. As now the question came a few times, I thought I'd write down a few notes here for future reference.

Reasons that aren't that easy to copy

There are a few things that are just "personality" traits that help me without me having done any effort. These are things that I feel can't be really copied, either you're born with them or not.

• I'm an introvert, so having a job where I spend time with people and have a family means that I already have enough social time without having to go out every evening for drinks. I spend the time that many people spend socializing creating stuff.

• I'm not a perfectionist: the stuff that I create is full of grammatical mistakes, full of early ideas, and isn't perfect. And as I'm not a perfectionist, I live well with that. A perfectionist would die pushing out stuff that has the level of rawness that my content has.

• I have an impostor syndrome: I feel like an impostor. So, producing stuff is the drug that makes me feel I know more than what I feel. The drug doesn't work, but at least it has some positive side effects: it makes me productive.

Reasons that you can copy easily

Then, there are a few other reasons where I feel it might be easier to copy what I'm doing.

• I communicate what I do: I've learned to show my work. We all work, but how many of us take an extra minute to document our work and then share it?

• I have numbered or repeating promises: I force myself to send a newsletter every week. This then pushes me to have something to say in that newsletter. The same goes for my books. I've promised myself that I'll write 5 books in the Service Design Principles series up until my kid finishes his first year of school. That also is a motivating goal.

• I have routines to work on these goals: I have a set of routines or habits that I try to do every day, and in those, there is writing.

• I focus on daily routines: I try to stick to daily routines, so if I miss them a few times, I still have made some progress over the week. If my routines were weekly, if I missed them a few times, I would have made progress only over the month.

• I've turned my defects into differentiators: the elements I've listed before as not easy to copy are what many could see as problems: I'm not detail-oriented, I feel like an impostor, I don't like to spend time with people. But when you change the perspective they can become differentiators. I think this attitude is something that others can copy.

• I take shortcuts: For example, I don't write long stories; I write short ones. When possible, I use tools that make me faster.

Action question

What are personality traits you have that usually are seen as issues? How can you use those as strengths?