Why You Don’t Need To Read Those Productivity Guides

Productivity guides are killing me.

Every day, I’m bombarded with titles like:

“How to achieve your goals within THE NEXT MINUTE”.

“Use my method to TRIPLE your output”.

“OMG I’m SO awesome, here’s how you can become more like me”.

Confession: I’m stupid enough to read them.

My diagnosis: they mainly just parrot each other — the majority hardly contains interesting new information.

Write-ups about productivity are a dime in a dozen. (Did someone say clickbait?)

Still, they succeed in making me feel bad: seeing all these titles makes me anxious that I’m not productive enough.

I don’t want to be the loser who missed out on the latest lifehack.

Fear Of Missing Out

What is the real reason that such guides spread like wildfire?

These days, many of us feel like we need to read every new article, jump on every new trend, experiment with every new method, wake up even earlier.

Indeed, the purpose of (reading about) productivity-improvement has shifted from productivity itself to a subtle form of Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO).