Why I’m Anti-Productivity (and you should be, too)

Image created by author, © the author assumes responsibility for the provenance and copyright.

⚡️ This piece was created for my email newsletter. You can read the original here.

“Being efficient without regard to effectiveness is the default mode of the universe.” — Tim Ferriss

Busyness is a disease.

Being busy is a combination of lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being busy is a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions you should be taking.

In fact, if it was my job to keep you from getting anything important done, I would just try to keep you as busy as possible.

Here’s the fix, and how wasting time leads to an intentional (and actually productive) life:

Efficiency vs Efficacy

Most things you do make no difference.

Let’s say I have 5 things I could do at work, but I only have 4 hours:

• Option A: Do 4 things that take 1 hour each
• Option B: Do 1 thing that takes 4 hours

I should opt for Option A, right? After all, I’m completing 4x as many tasks.

But what if I add this wrinkle:

• Option A: Do 4 things that take 1 hour each, and each one would make us $500
• Option B: Do 1 thing that takes 4 hours, but would make us $8,000

While real-life scenarios are never quite so obvious, this example highlights the difference between efficiency and efficacy:

• Efficiency (aka productivity) = doing things quickly.
• Efficacy = doing the right things.

What you do is infinitely more important than how much you do.

An Intentional Life

“Oftentimes, in order to do the big things, you have to let the small bad things happen.” — Tim Ferriss

A few weeks ago I wrote about The Wall of Red Lights.

Every morning you wake up and stand 6 inches from a wall covered in red lights. Your job is to hit out as many flashing lights (each one representing a problem in your life) as you possibly can. The more lights you get out, the better. Then you repeat the process the day after.

This is our default setting — to be efficient without considering whether we’re being effective.

The other option is to ignore the lights, look through the wall, and focus exclusively on the actions you need to take to reach your ideal life — to take a step back, “waste” some time thinking, and then choose what to work on.

This is an intentional life.

An Effective Day

I’m a glutton for productivity. I have a seriously hard time not choosing Option A.

To combat my natural inclination to be aimlessly “productive”, here’s my recipe for maximizing efficacy:

1. Before starting work, I write down the 3–5 things that are the most important or are making me the most uncomfortable (most important usually = most uncomfortable, with some chance of rejection, conflict, or embarrassment).
2. For each item, I ask: “If this were the only thing I accomplished today, would I be satisfied with my day?”
3. Then I ask: “Will moving this forward make all the other to-do’s unimportant or easier to check off later?”
4. Circle the items I’ve answered “yes” to for at least one of these questions.
5. Block out 1–3 hours to focus on ONE of them for today. No distractions.
6. Let the rest slide (they’ll still be there tomorrow).

This is how you create massive outcomes while everyone else is being held captive by the tyranny of the urgent.

⚡️ This piece was created for my email newsletter, In Pursuit of Capital.

Every Sunday, I share simple, actionable ideas to help you work less and earn more.

You can subscribe here.