What Does It Mean To Be Productive?
Productivity is a word we all use a lot, but don’t have clear definition around. We know we all want to be more ‘productive.’ There are productivity apps and productivity tools. But do we mean productive at work? Productive at home? Productive in our hobbies?
The word productivity, I think, can be broken down into this definition:
To be productive means to be effective at externally rewarding tasks.
This definition was chosen very carefully.
Effective: to be efficient. To get something done fast and well.
Externally rewarding: People don’t usually speak of being productive with respect to, say, relaxing. Relaxing is important, but we don’t refer to it when we speak of being more productive, because it is internally rewarding.
Tasks: People don’t speak of being productive for things which have no endpoint. The idea is that if we are productive, we complete tasks faster and with better quality.
I think this is a terrible conception of productivity. It blinds us to a lot of the value of productivity advice.
Productivity advice tends to be written with an eye toward accomplishing more work tasks, but that’s not exactly its goal. The goal of productivity advice is…
