Productivity is a terrible end goal
Hitting 30 last year felt like the slow-onset of a manic episode- tension slowly ratcheting up, an impending sense that I had not done enough.
The creeping feeling in my stomach reached a crescendo of anxiety in the last week before my birthday arrived and then the clock ran down to zero.
Then, nothing…. followed by total bliss.
The timer had lapped, beginning a new cycle.
A new decade.
Suddenly I was hit square on by the realisation of the total arbitrariness of numbers and an overwhelming sense of beginnings and possibilities.
With it came a sense of the potential and opportunities to take stock and just go at it again afresh but with the accumulated knowledge of a lifetime.
Before I knew it I was overstretching myself again, scheming towards an idea of busyness that felt second nature to me.
It got me thinking about what that feeling actually was and where it came from.
I realised that I was frantically doing things in a haphazard way like throwing roulette chips down at random and hoping one of them hits a jackpot.
There was absolutely no method to the madness.
So why was I still doing it?
I have addictive tendencies and mindless busyness is a hot vice.
Like any other drug it gives us the feeling of momentum and progress, agitating for the sake of agitating and all the while stripping us of our time and energy.
Even a gambler can go all in on multiple squares and leave without a penny…
Mindless busy-ness is so systemic that even when we have time away from our main jobs we are encouraged to pursue side-hustles in the never-ending pursuit of financial freedom.
Supposedly the idea behind this is an early retirement with infinite wealth….
My friends mother was a high-profile corporate lawyer once.
When my friend and I were teenagers she was never at home on the weekends or in the holidays. She was always abroad on business trips.
Two years before retirement she was diagnosed with a degenerative brain disease…
The notion that the pursuit of productivity and optimisation is an investment for the future is a bold gamble at best.
That’s not to say that we shouldn’t have goals, build nest eggs and pursue our dream careers.
Often, however, aspects of our dream lives can be lived in the here and now.
If we take the mindless busyness of productivity out of our working lives, we free up the time that can be spent with loved ones or on passion projects.
This in turn raises our spirits because these activities are not results dependent and make us more likely to actually drive us towards our goals by inspiring and invigorating us.
Optimising our time on other hand by …
- creating never ending checklists
- moving swiftly from one activity to the next
- identifying as a person who wears stress as a badge
…doesn’t create more time in your schedule — it creates a feeling of guilt that we haven’t done the things we wanted to do — nor have we been using the time at work to maximum effect.
Instead I’m learning that :
Real productivity = PIP (Priorities + Iteration / Pace )
Priorities
There are hundreds of things that I feel I should or could do but very few things that I want to or have to do.
Once we stop and think about it, we’re not actually as “busy” as we tell ourselves (and, repeatedly, others). Really we are just infatuated by the endless number of things we could do.
There will be moments when, for good or for ill, we feel confronted by our unrealized possibilities; they may even, through their persistence, shape us — Joshua Rothman
Being a jack-of-all-trades for a time is a good way to get to know yourself in your teens and twenties but eventually the focus will have to narrow…
Scattered attention, contrary to popular belief, doesn’t keep doors open, it closes them.
Progress compounds and when you spread yourself too thinly the fruits of your labour are minimal and sparse.
Write down all the things you feel you should be doing and then ask yourself why you feel that way. How many of these things could be struck from the list with little to no ill-effects on your life?
How many of them are pipedreams that can give way to your real dreams?
If you’re just starting out this can be a tantalising but also an overbearing prospect.
Choose an area that you want to specialise in and a maximum of three areas to dabble in, without so much as thinking about how they might generate results.
Hone your skill like a medieval master craftsman and let your hobbies be just that — a hobby.
These days everyone is looking to optimise various streams of income. It would seem that if you’re not getting financial compensation for every single thing that you do, then you’re not optimised.
(This way of thinking is toxic but sadly on the rise.)
It sucks the fun out of the things that once gave you joy.
But not everything has to be monetizable.
If you want to be more creative in your professional domain start a totally new activity if just for the sake of play and experimentation, independent of results.
Watch as it naturally seeps across into your sphere of work without force and brings levity into your life.
Iteration
When productivity is the ultimate goal, behaviours become linear and brittle.
“How many” or “how much” of a given task can I do in ‘X’ amount of time” is a catastrophic way of measuring skills.
We’ve all met someone whose expertise robs them of the ability to see things in a new way or from a new perspective.
You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
Repetition leads strain, boredom, apathy and eventually, disengagement.
Iteration on the other hand leads to flow, creativity and engagement.
Those small moments when we check in on ourselves, zoom out and refocus by shifting tactics, playing with alternatives and developing intuitively are infinitely more productive than hammering out the same thing time and time again.
It also allows for the possibility that maybe what we thought we wanted in December becomes totally irrelevant by March — plans change and milestones are only marked by things you consider to be important at any given moment in your life.
If you are iterating then you are riffing on a theme and stacking relevant skills that can be applied even if priorities change from one year to the next.
Pace
There’s a quote; you know it already:
People tend to overestimate what can be done in one year and to underestimate what can be done in five years.
And now one you don’t know from a goofy friend of mine:
Sometimes the trite things are the right things!
Pace can be your best friend or your worst enemy depending on which type of person you are.
If you have extroverted tendencies you may feel like you have to show something for the time you put in after every session. It can be demoralising when that almost inevitably doesn’t happen.
Learning to expand the time-frame whilst being consistent is probably the most difficult part of the puzzle. Waves of enthusiasm about a goal or project can often peter out over time.
If you lack conviction in yourself time can compound against you increasing that nervous energy and internal voice that tells you not to persist.
Crucially however it’s where the magic happens.
When maintained over a steady period of time, carefully selected priorities and diverse methods of execution alongside divergent thinking can amplify your productivity into sublime immeasurability.
The reason why PIP (Priorities + Iteration / Pace ) is so effective is because this metric is unique to you and can not be measured by anyone else’s metrics of productivity nor their definition of busyness.
Freddie Kift
I write about language, communication, flow, collaboration and technology.
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