Condensed notes from Sam Altman's productivity essay, the original source behind the widely shared summary Ben Lang posted in June 2025.

1. What you work on

The single highest-leverage decision. Everything else is downstream of it.

• Direction beats speed. Moving fast in a worthless direction is worth nothing, and picking the right problem is usually the most ignored part of productivity.
• Build strong independent views. If you always agree with whoever you spoke to last, that is a warning sign.
• Protect thinking time specifically for deciding what to work on. Altman uses reading, time with interesting people, and time outdoors.
• Delegate towards what other people genuinely like and are good at, on the basis that everyone is most productive doing work they enjoy.
• If you have disliked the work for a sustained period, treat a major job change as the reasonable option. Short-term burnout is different and usually resolves with time off.
• Surround yourself with smart, productive, positive people who do not belittle your ambitions. The cost of the opposite kind is the mental space they occupy.
• Careers compound. Being slightly more productive and slightly better every day produces an enormous gap over decades.
• You can learn anything you want, and faster than you expect. That confidence is itself a productivity gain.

2. Prioritisation

Three pillars: get the important things done, refuse the unimportant ones, and keep lots of lists.

• Keep written lists for the year, the month and the day. Altman prefers paper, with a star next to genuinely important items and no categorisation or task sizing.
• Rewrite the lists often. Re-transcribing forces you to reconsider everything on them.
• Prioritise for momentum. Start and end the day with something you can visibly make progress on.
• Say no ruthlessly, and do non-critical things in the fastest way available.
• Decline most meetings and conferences, but keep deliberate space for chance encounters. Around 90% of random meetings are a waste and the other 10% justify the whole practice.
• Book meetings at 15 to 20 minutes or a full 2 hours. The default hour is usually wrong.
• Protect your best hours. Altman blocks the first few hours of the morning entirely and pushes meetings to the afternoon.