Time to get off the Productivity Treadmill
Why is there so much writing on personal productivity?
On the face of it, the concept of productivity should be simple: how to do consistently high quality work as efficiently as possible.
Despite the variety of productivity systems on offer such as GTD, the Pomodoro Technique, Kanban etc., the ingredients are all pretty much the same across the board.
When you work, just work. Turn off notifications and use a timer. Keep to-do lists and break down big projects into smaller, easily executed steps. Take regular breaks. Do harder work when you’re more alert.
In theory, then, you should just pick a relatively sound system and make tweaks until you get into a good rhythm, and then voila! You’re more productive.
And yet in practice, what tends to happen is people will try one approach for a while and then discard it when they read about something new, only to repeat this process a few months or even weeks later. And every day there is someone with a new blog or list on how you can be even more productive.
To understand why this happens, we need to first look at the concept in behavioural psychology known as the Hedonic Treadmill. Wiki defines it as “the observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes.”
For example, if you suddenly start to make a lot more money than you used to, you’ll feel happier for a little while, but that happiness will dissipate as your expectations of what you can do with that money rise as well. Sure, you can suddenly afford to buy your own house for the first time in your adult life, but it doesn’t take long after that before you’re pining for a detached unit right in the heart of downtown instead of your duplex in the suburbs.
Productivity operates along similar lines. Maybe you decide to start keeping a daily to-do list, setting a timer and taking regular breaks. You suddenly feel like you’re getting a lot more done in a shorter period than you used to. Great!
But no long after you begin to wonder: how do you know for sure you couldn’t be even more productive? And what if you’re not as productive as you think you are? Maybe your co-workers, who never seem to web surf as much as you, are more efficient (it doesn’t cross your mind that the reason they don’t slack off is because they need a lot more time to do the same amount of work).
And what about those days when your productivity system breaks down completely, and you end up refreshing Tweetdeck for two and a half hours instead of writing that outline you’re supposed to finish? Surely there’s a system out there somewhere that will also prevent you from ever straying off track?
The problem I think is that for most of us who are not in the widget-making business, where productivity is literally about producing more things faster, productivity is extremely difficult to measure. For example, you may already be extremely productive relative to the average worker but not know it. Meanwhile, your productivity means you are given more work to do, causing you to fall behind, making you further question your productivity!
Or maybe you have managed to get a lot of work done in a shorter period, but believe your work could be of higher quality (which is true for nearly everyone on earth). Or perhaps you think you have gaps on your CV that you want to fill, or maybe you question why you don’t go home every single day glowing with a sense of mission and accomplishment and happiness and yadda yadda yadda.
Today’s productivity hucksters cleverly take advantage of this inbuilt uncertainty surrounding the concept of productivity by tying it to incredibly wealthy and successful CEOs and investors, such as those on the list I talked about last week — Ray Dalio, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk etc. The idea here is that there is some system that will literally make you as successful as one of these insanely wealthy outliers.
Shitty listicles with titles like “The 5 Things Elon Musk Does Before Every Meeting” propagate the idea that Musk’s success comes from his finely tuned and expertly executed productivity system, and not something murkier like, say, winning a random variation lottery that stretches back to the success of PayPal.
This will, of course, encourage you to keep consuming productivity systems/hacks/tricks garbage until you feel you are one day reasonably close that same, impossible-to-reach ballpark, a day that will almost certainly never arrive. Along the way, you will constantly agonize whether you’re working hard enough and seek out as many productivity hacks as possible to convince yourself you are.
The reality is you’re far better off just finding a system that works for you, adjusting it as you go along, and accepting that it may bear little outcome on the future of your career once you separate out myriad other factors like your industry, your boss, your geographical location etc. More on this some other time…
