What's So Gourmet About Productivity?
Hiiiiiii!!!! I’m so excited to have you read my first post on The Plog!
Now lets get down to tick tacks.
You’ve most likely been through so many "productivity" binges. You watched a video at 1am. Someone with a great voice and probably all the “right answers” told you to wake up at 5am, journal, cold-plunge, batch your emails and touch grass etc, all before your workday starts. You felt “gingered”, you even bought the planner. And then by Thursday you were back to answering messages at midnight and trying to finish a project from last week before the deadline by daybreak, wondering why the “high” didn't last.
That's the Fast Food version of Productivity. It is cheap, it is everywhere, it tastes like motivation for about twenty minutes, and it leaves you hungrier than before.
I experienced it and then got tired of it. So I started cooking differently.
The gourmet part
Think about the difference between a drive-through meal order and a proper dish of ofe nsala with pounded yam, someone actually cooked for you. Same basic ingredients, but one is engineered to be consumed fast and forgotten, and the other was made with attention. Good sourcing, a little technique and the intention that you'd enjoy it, not just survive it.
That's the whole idea behind Productivity Gourmet.
The goal isn’t to do more things, faster, until you burnout, the goal is to build a way of working that actually nourishes you, one that protects your time and your attention so you can spend them on the work only you can do or maybe like doing that brings you either fulfilment and income; less grinding, more taste.
Having fewer 47-step morning routines and instead better systems that quietly run in the background while you get on with your life. Automation is one ingredient in that, so is a good template, a firm boundary, and the confidence to let some things go either through delegation or just by virtue of growth. And the technique that ties it all together is just paying attention: to what actually matters, and what only feels like it does.
The Chef
My pen name is Adaeze. A true foodie as you will come to tell by my writings (kos what is life without a good meal eh?). I help service businesses run smoother, and I'm a little obsessed with one question: how do you work well without working yourself into the ground?
When I am not working, I am reading Chinese to English novels or bingeing a Netflix series or getting some sunshine per doctor’s orders or even just exploring another way to experience life from the indoors.
Some of what am learning to build are good systems. Some of it is knowing what to say no to. And yes, some of it is automation, a skill I'm still building one tool at a time, with things like Zapier, Airtable, Make, Base44 and a lot of other platforms. I'm not here to perform expertise (or as we say in Nigerian parlance - ITK ”I too know”) I don't have. I'm here to share what's actually working as I figure it out.
What's on the menu
This blog is where I share the recipes.
Some days that's a practical breakdown of something I use to keep my own work sane. Some days it's an honest opinion about the way we're all told to work. And some days it's just me thinking out loud about running a business and trying to do it with a bit more intention.
No fluff, no "10 apps that will 10x your life," no gatekeeping. Just the good stuff, plated properly.
If that sounds like your kind of meal, pull up a chair, know I'm glad you're here.
Oya, let's cook.