A Rant about Productivity

This was originally published on superyesmore’s The Human in The Machine.

In certain (developed) countries, where a healthy amount of productivity role models hail from, productivity has been pretty much nailed down to a science.

Form habits, create schedules, minimize distractions etc etc. Obviously, I’m simplifying things a bit but bear with me. It’s exponentially easier to adhere to the rules of productivity where there’s infrastructure to do so.

I was reading this article about Bill Gates being very productive back in the day.

“Gates, his business partner Paul Allen, and a Harvard math student named Monte Davidoff spent two weeks in the school’s Aiken lab. Gates was particularly relentless, forgoing studying for exams to build the software.”

This happened in 1975; 42 years ago. Gates was in a university where electricity was constant, there was a lab with working computers that had recent enough software for him to build what he needed to.

When I was younger I read a ton of productivity & self-help books. Books that told you how to become rich the way this person became rich. Books that were were written by people who had a completely different life context. Now, I’ve grown to harbour a (possibly unreasonable) dislike for them.

It’s not that the writers had any harmful intents, it’s just quite annoying that people within my own environment think that these resources are made for them. I hate getting quotes about what Bezos said a couple of years ago. I don’t want to know what Zuck thinks you should spend your time doing. Because more often than not, they’re talking about being hard working and productive in a completely different environment. One that doesn’t resemble mine at all.

There are a couple of things I’d like to touch on before I proceed:

• I am in no way claiming that I experienced the worst possible effects of the country I was born in. I’m fully aware that I had it better than most.
• I am also not trying to diminish the hard work done by some of these people. What I am trying to do is to highlight how impressive it is to be comparable to those people in an environment that is actually doing what it can to keep you from being productive.
• One can argue (correctly) that some of these books and quotes aren’t claiming that their examples apply to every context. X’s philosophy is supposed to be a mental model. It’s supposed to be a tool that helps you challenge yourself and find the underlying principles for success by transplanting said principles and figuring how to apply them. The goal is to transplant philosophy and mental models and tweak and re-apply them in our own contexts. I understand all of this but I think that there’s too much focus on the examples as opposed to the underlying mental models. I also think it’s important to tell our own stories because it’s easier to emulate a mental model when the examples apply directly to your life.

The thing about being a software developer (and I’m sure it applies in many other fields) is that your work can almost immediately be seen by almost anybody anywhere in the world, and as such be judged by the same metrics they judge every website or application they see. Your users or clients don’t care about your environmental context, they have no reason to consider just how much harder it was for you to build something worthy of consideration.

Being efficiently productive in Nigeria if you’re middle class or below is impossible. It gets significantly easier to be all round efficient with productivity as you move up in socioeconomic class.

For most of Nigeria, to be productive to the point of standing out (worldwide), something has to give. For me that thing was sleep. It wasn’t a horrible thing for me because I can function adequately on little-to-no sleep but it’s obvious to see how it could have deleterious effects on work output. You need to be aware of what compromises you are making and whether it is indeed a valuable compromise or not.

Productivity (in my field) is a pain because it’s impossible to accurately predict when there’ll be electricity and internet services, though better and cheaper these days, are very unreliable and relatively expensive (compared to the mess that’s our minimum wage). Furthermore, transporting oneself from one place to another in Lagos takes way more time than it should because the public transport system is as dysfunctional as everything else.

You have to come up with really smart ways of maximizing the amount of time you spend working/learning and the amount of money you spend doing so.

I would train myself to wake up immediately the sound of the ceiling fan materialises as that tells me that there’s now power for my laptop. I also made sure I fell asleep in Danfo (public buses), long enough to make it possible for me to stay up after spending 3 hours in traffic on my way back home from a long day of interning (for N20,000/month but so far unpaid for 4 months), but not miss my bus stop.

One thing about falling asleep in a Danfo is that you might wake up without your smartphone; the trick is to get a seat by the window, and then put your phone in the pocket on that side. I also used to make sure my hand is rested on that pocket. Another trick is to plug in earphones so that whoever wants to use one for pickpocket practice has to first figure out how to unplug that without waking you up.

You have to be brutally economical with battery power usage for things like your laptop and smartphone. You have to make/save enough money to make sure you can buy one of those mobile Wifi + VERY limiting data plan packages. You have to understand that you also have to make sure you’re paying for data on your phone because your ISP will be unreliable.

You have to take on more than you can chew, but you have to make sure you chew it. You have to make sure every job or contract you land, you learn as much as you can while doing it, because that’s pretty much the only time you have to learn. You can do this by aiming to do much higher quality work than you were paid for.

You also have to make sure that everything you do, every Naira you make brings you one step closer to being able to afford these basic (but expensive) amenities. Because only then can you truly begin the journey of actual effective productivity.

This is in no way an exhaustive list of things to do to be productive in Nigeria (or similar environments). It’s mostly just me complaining. However, I do intend to write more constructive actionable stuff about this topic every now and then; things that worked for me, how to choose your own compromises etc. Hopefully, people will find them to be relatable and helpful.