Full disclosure: I really like being productive. I get an energy from it that pushes me to keep making progress on the next thing. Consequently, I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out ways and means of being more productive. From trying to implement Lotus Notes into my life at the age of 14, to spending too much time in podcast and YouTube rabbit holes, I have been observing how others organise themselves to get more done for a very long time.
Over that time, I’ve noticed that I essentially need three things to stay on top of what’s important:
A calendar (to know when things are happening)
A to-do list (know what things need to be done)
A review process (know how it went and what to change)
Now, this is all well and good. You can tick boxes, cross off items on a list and create time blocks forevermore in the pursuit of being MORE PRODUCTIVE. But the real question is: why? Why be productive at all?
If you asked people what productivity meant, most would answer along the lines of “Squeezing more things into my day/week/life”. Problem is, that treats us more as machines, than humans. We have a limit to everything we do. In Getting Things Done, renowned productivity author David Allen, says “Your conscious mind, like the computer screen, is a focusing tool, not a storage place. You can think about only two or three things at once.” But strangely, we push against this, convincing ourselves that we are multi-terabyte hard drives that can remember every single thing that needs to be done. Allen puts paid to this with one of his most famous quotes:
Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them…
Where does this supposedly misguided self-reliance come from? Perhaps it is rooted in the Protestant work ethic that Max Weber posited to have emerged in the latter half of the 19th century. He argued certain types of Protestantism were supportive of the rational pursuit of economic gain and the worldly activities dedicated to it, its subscribers seeing themselves and their actions as being endowed with moral and spiritual significance. John D. Rockefeller, the richest man of the time and one of the richest of all time, who also belonged to the Baptist church, embodied Weber’s thesis through steady dedication to a productive task, believing he was fulfilling his calling and applying himself with all-consuming devotion.
Times have changed since, but given the impact and influence of Christianity on the Western world, one cannot help think that an approach such as Rockefeller’s has had a deep and lasting effect on how we define work and productivity today. In fact, Weber argued that the foundations of our current capitalist system began during the Reformation, from which Protestantism emerged. Rockefeller incidentally was also part of the beginning of the philanthropy movement in the United States, donating hundreds of millions of dollars to causes he believed in, even starting a medical institute and Chicago University.
We admire those like Rockefeller who were able to create gigantic empires from almost nothing. Our obsession with the workaholism of start up entrepreneurs is a clear sign of that. We humans have loved seeing amazing things created for themselves and others for thousands of years. But we are not machines, we are creators.
In the same vein, what if we changed how we measure our productivity? Instead of making it about how many tasks are completed or how many projects we have running at the same time, what about another set of metrics? What if we measured it by positive contributions to the world or the kind of person we are?
Could we do away with the idea that if we just white-knuckle it, and simply DO MORE, we will be more ‘productive’? Such thinking places the emphasis on motivation, a finite resource, which changes with our every whim and emotion. Often we find ourselves deep in our own self pity, saying: “Tomorrow, I’ll be different”.
Making progress requires discipline. See what Jocko Willink says here about all of the motivational YouTube videos made about him…
Jocko nails it when he says:
If you only did what you were supposed to do when you were motivated, that’s leaving it to chance…
A high performer is not motivated to work on their endeavours any more than others, it’s that they continue to show up every day. They don’t quit. The author sits down at their writing desk each day, and if they only write 100 new words in four hours, they have still added to their pursuit. The athlete trains every single day, not because they feel like doing it, but because it is what’s required to perform at a consistently high level. It’s the process that leads to the performance.
In his book Building a Second Brain, Tiago Forte suggests that we are all creators, one way or another, and so we should create systems in our life that removes the clutter and noise from our head so we can unlock our creative potential.
Thanks to the internet, we have access to information beyond anything our ancestors could’ve ever imagined. So to be productive, we need a system that helps capture and distil the information and ideas we consume, rather than drinking from the fire hose and expecting it all to simply fall into place. Forte does this as he rediscovers and redefines the idea of the commonplace book. Once you have the system in place, then discipline is required to implement it and stick to it, so that you can create and produce.
The intention is for there to be a marriage of systems and discipline. In starting this blog, I’ve realised that I cannot write a blog post entirely from scratch. I need a way to capture ideas in order to distil them down into something worth writing about. The genesis of this post came from some random thoughts I had while on a walk. I recorded them on an app called Otter which turned them into text. (Hot tip: Use headphones, it looks like you’re on a phone call, rather than rambling to yourself.)
Rather than focusing on our output every second of the day, what if we pursue our contributions to the world and the improvement of our character - with the appropriate discipline and systems in place? You might find that your output increases in the direction you’ve always been hoping for…
If you do want to keep thinking about productivity, may I recommend:
Michael Hyatt (the OG that started it for me)