Saying No To Productivity — a guide
This happened to you: you’re having a nice day, minding your own business, then an ad (or person) pops up saying: “Improve your productivity by 700% with this one simple trick! Won’t you try it? I mean, come on”
It can be a tool, a gadget, a method or an idea. I refer to all those things that are designed to save you time as “productivity boosters”, and they all seem to follow this basic logic:
Time something takes you now - Time it would take with the booster = New time you magically created = Profit
But this formula is both wrong and dangerous. You don’t want to find yourself living a dystopian nightmare of waking up every day at 5, eating only drinkable meals, exercising while driving, while listening to audiobooks with the silent parts cut out, while spending “quality time” with someone, listening to “productive music”, tracking everything you do, and so much more, you need to draw a line somewhere.
Sometimes the best productivity tip is: don’t worry too much about productivity. But this isn’t to say that all productivity boosters are bad. We’ll see below how and when to choose the ones that will be useful for us. But to filter them out, we first need to know how to say no to the rest, without giving in to the FOMO they produce. So here’s some tools to help you deflect productivity booster offers without feeling bad about it:
Reasons to say no to productivity boosters
1. It’s impossible to measure productivity.
You can’t measure the productivity of a task in isolation. Let’s say you wake up every day one hour earlier and in that time read a book a week, without missing anything except sleep. Sounds productive, right? But can you measure the slight decline in focus you may have accumulated over time? Or the mistakes you’ve made because you were just a bit more tired than usual? Does it leave you just a bit more drained in the evenings when you spend time with friends or family?
Humans are not machines, which makes it hard to define, let alone measure, a holistic “productivity” metric. You may be able to do an isolated task faster, which is great, but not necessarily meaningful. Which leads me to the next point:
2. Decreasing “net” time doesn’t necessarily decrease “gross” time
If what you’re doing requires some thought or planning, it might not matter if the technical aspects of it take more time, because you’re using this time to think.
Say someone offers you an autocomplete tool that helps you write emails much faster by guessing what you want to say. Will it actually help you write emails faster? I’m not so sure. It might only mean that instead of thinking while you type, you think afterward.
Some things will just take the time they take. And it might be for the best, because:
3. Doing things fast is dangerous
We always feel that doing things faster is better, especially when it’s something we do often. But some things are better done slow.
When a programmer wants to deploy their code, they usually have to type a command, for example, git push. We sometimes do it dozens of times a day, so it makes sense to create a shortcut for it and type less, for example, gpsh. Right?
I say: Wrong. Typing gpsh saves you about 0.1 seconds every time. But running this command when you shouldn’t have costs you orders of magnitude more time in correcting it. So one mistaken gpsh that could have been prevented by having to type git push (which gives you slightly more time to realize you’re on master, or have local changes, or it’s Friday, or whatever), undermines all the productivity gains you will ever get with gpsh.
4. An hour today is worth two tomorrow.
Optimizing your productivity in the long run means you’ll always find ways to spend time now which will save you time later. There are endless tools, tricks, tutorials, books, keyboard shortcuts, faster computers to buy, stuff to automate, etc. You can spend a month optimizing the next one, only to find out you don’t know as much as you could have, your competitors have passed you, and your needs may have changed.
Combine that with the previous point, and you may find that it could take you way more time to get your ROI than would make it worthwhile.
And Lastly:
5. Focusing on productivity isn’t focusing on what you like
(unless you like productivity on its own, for some reason)
It’s common knowledge that a happy worker is a good worker. Make yourself happy by doing what you like doing. Opt-out of productivity boosters you don’t want — be happy. It will pay off.
So now that we know why we don’t have to try every productivity booster we find, let’s talk about how to sort those things and understand what’s right for us.
What to ask yourself when considering a productivity tool
Will this make me work faster, or will it make me work less?
Most productivity boosters allow you to do the same things faster. Cram an entire workout in 5 minutes, eat breakfast on the way to work, hear podcasts in half the time, etc. Some do more than that: they allow you to do fewer things.
For example, a vacuum cleaner lets you collect dust faster than you would with a broom or cloth. But a washing machine lets you have clean clothes without doing any of the wet, soapy work.
The second type has its problems and benefits. Less work means fewer worries, but the work may not happen as expected (as in the law of leaky abstractions), but importantly, it doesn’t have the issues mentioned above.
Not that things-that-make-me-work-faster are never good. Vacuum cleaners are a great example, which is evident from question 2:
Does it sound fun?
If something sounds fun, and you feel that you want to use it, then it’s likely that this thing will solve a pain point you actually have, as opposed to something that you only do because you want to be “productive”. Moreover, if it sounds fun, you’ll probably learn it much faster and use it more often, making it more valuable.
Why am I even considering it?
Productivity in general is a good thing. It can help us become better at what we do, and give us more free time (which we hopefully won’t spend being productive). It’s a means to an end.
But as we know, if something might work in some cases, you can count on thousands of people trying to sell you that it will definitely work in every case. They’ll try to convince you that this one tip, or device, or tool, or book, or whatever can make your life better in almost every way, and it doesn’t matter if it’s fictitious (like learning a handstand in 5 minutes), what matters is you clicked, or better yet: subscribed.
It’s worth thinking about why these tactics work on us, how they create the fear-of-missing-out that makes us think we can (and must) always be more productive.
Productivity tools are like diets. They may be great and help you in different ways, sometimes dramatically, but you should also take them with care, and not assume that everything that works for someone else will surely work for you. It’s great to try things, especially if they were recommended by someone you trust, just make sure the productivity tools work for you, and not the other way around.
