I don't drink coffee. I've never drunk coffee. Caffeine doesn't agree with me - never has. This used to feel like a confession, something slightly embarrassing to admit in professional settings where coffee isn't just a drink but a personality trait. The first meeting of the day, someone offers you a coffee, and you say "hot chocolate, please" and watch the brief flicker of confusion cross their face. As if choosing not to be caffeinated is a character flaw.
I've come to see it differently. Not drinking coffee is the most productive thing about me. Not because hot chocolate has magical properties. But because it represents a refusal to participate in the performance of productivity - the cult of optimisation, the hustle worship, the idea that you need to be wired and grinding at all times to do meaningful work.
I've shipped fourteen products. I can't write a single line of code. I don't have a morning routine. I don't wake up at 5am. I don't have a productivity system. I drink hot chocolate. And I think the hot chocolate might be the point.
The productivity industrial complex
There's an entire industry built around making you feel like you aren't doing enough. Productivity apps. Morning routine videos. Books about habits. Podcasts about optimisation. The message is always the same: you could be doing more. You should be doing more. Here's the system, the hack, the framework that'll help you squeeze every last drop of output from your waking hours.
The language tells you everything. Optimise. Maximise. Hustle. Grind. Scale. These are words borrowed from machines, applied to humans. The implicit assumption is that you're a system to be tuned, a process to be improved, an engine to be revved higher. And the fuel for this engine, of course, is coffee. The universal symbol of productivity culture. The drink that says: I'm working. I'm alert. I'm in the arena.
I've never identified with this culture. Not because I'm lazy - I've worked extraordinarily hard at various points in my career, and I'm working hard now. But because the performance of productivity and the reality of doing good work are often at odds with each other. The person who posts their 5am workout and gratitude journal and perfectly optimised morning isn't necessarily doing better work than the person who slept in, had a slow start, and then spent six hours in a focused creative burst. They're just performing harder.
How I actually work
My rhythm is irregular by design. Some days I work eight, ten, twelve hours straight. I fall into a project and lose track of time. Ideas connect. Things click. I build, test, iterate, ship. Those days are electric. They're the days when the best work happens, when entire products come together in a single obsessive session.
Other days, I do nothing. I browse. I read. I look at other people's work. I watch football. I take my son somewhere and don't think about products or projects at all. These days feel unproductive, and productivity culture would tell me I'm wasting them. But I've learned that the nothing days aren't nothing. They're input days. They're the days when I'm absorbing, noticing, collecting the raw material that becomes the next burst.
This is how creative work actually happens. Not in the smooth, optimised, daily-routine way that productivity culture promises. But in bursts. Uneven, unpredictable bursts of intense focus followed by periods of apparent inactivity that are actually periods of quiet accumulation. The history of creative output backs this up. Most great work wasn't produced on a schedule. It was produced in obsessive sprints by people who also spent long periods doing very little.
The coffee metaphor
Coffee is a stimulant. It creates artificial alertness. It overrides your body's natural signals about when you're tired and when you're sharp. It lets you push through when your brain is telling you to stop. This is useful if you're doing work that requires sustained attention to routine tasks. It's actively harmful if you're doing work that requires creativity, because creativity doesn't come from pushing through. It comes from the space between the pushing.
Hot chocolate, on the other hand, is comfort. It is warmth. It's a signal to yourself that says: slow down, pay attention, enjoy this. There's no urgency in a hot chocolate. Nobody ever slammed a hot chocolate and said "right, let's crush it." Hot chocolate is patient. It invites reflection. It pairs better with staring out the window than with smashing through a to-do list.
I'm not literally arguing that hot chocolate makes you more creative. That would be absurd. But I'm arguing that the mindset behind choosing hot chocolate - the willingness to be slow, to be comfortable, to reject the performance of intensity - is a more honest foundation for creative work than the jittery urgency of the coffee mindset.
Shipping without grinding
I built fourteen products without a productivity system. Without a morning routine. Without coffee. Without hustle. How? I cared about the things I was making. That is it. That's the entire system. When you genuinely care about a project - when it scratches a real itch, when you can picture the person who will use it, when the problem interests you deeply - you don't need caffeine or discipline to work on it. You need to be stopped from working on it.
The productivity industry exists because most people are trying to force themselves to do work they don't care about. If you need an elaborate system of habits, apps, and stimulants to get yourself to work, the problem isn't your productivity. The problem is the work. Find work that makes you lose track of time, and productivity takes care of itself.
This is easy to say and hard to do. I know that. Not everyone has the luxury of only working on things they care about. Jobs require things that are boring. Bills require compromises. But the principle still holds even in constrained situations: the closer you can get to working on things that genuinely matter to you, the less you need the productivity apparatus.
The anti-hustle manifesto
I'm forty. I have a young son. I live in London. I'm not grinding at 5am. I'm not optimising my calendar into fifteen-minute blocks. I'm not tracking my deep work hours or gamifying my output. I'm drinking hot chocolate, watching Forest when they're on, taking my son to the park, and building things I care about in the time between.
And the work is good. Not because I've optimised the process, but because I've optimised the selection. I choose projects that excite me. I work on them when the energy is there. I step away when it isn't. I trust the rhythm, even when it looks irregular from the outside. Even when it doesn't photograph well for LinkedIn.
The secret nobody in productivity culture will tell you is that most of the advice is for people doing work they hate. If you love the work, you don't need a system. You need boundaries - to stop, to rest, to remember that you're a person and not a machine. The problem isn't getting started. The problem is knowing when to put the hot chocolate down and go to bed.
So here's my counter-narrative to every hustle post, every morning routine video, every "how I 10x my output" thread: slow down. Choose better. Care more. The quantity will take care of itself when the quality of your choices is high enough. You don't need to grind. You need to care.
And you definitely don't need coffee.
