The Single Best, Scientifically Proven Method to Increase your Productivity

We’ve all been there. A well organized to-do list, hand written, prioritized even, staring us down on a Monday morning. “I can bang this out by 2pm, no problem.” The next thing you know is 6:52pm, you’ve only just scratched the surface of your list, and have no idea how to account for all that time between opening your email and furiously rushing out the door.

Yesterday, I received my issue of Doctor Scientist Quarterly. After cruising through an in-depth analysis on the interconnectivity of 1920's string theory and the Higgs Boson (spoiler alert: it was mostly a rehash but I did appreciate the new perspective on decay which detailed that Higgs is heavier than ~346 GeV/c2, and twice the mass of the top quark, and for a Higgs mass of 126 GeV/c2 the SM predicts that the most common decay is into abottom–antibottom quark pair, which happens 56.1% of the time), I was struck by a headline, “Behavioral scientists from Yale, Oxford, and Hillman college identify the primary activity hurting your productivity.” That’s a super long headline — that’s because Doctor Scientist Quarterly does not mess around.

With the fervor of a zealot I dug for that buried nugget of deep fried wisdom that would solve all my productivity ailments. And there it was, like a beacon in the night guiding my vessel to safe waters — from Dr. Dwayne Wayne himself:

“After decades of research and analysis, we can confidently proclaim that the single best, scientifically proven, method to increase your productivity is simply to stop reading articles about how to increase your productivity. Articles about increasing productivity recently surpassed Candy Crush as the single worst offender of time lost amongst humans.”

It’s science.

The End