7 Productivity Myths to Stop Believing
“My goal is no longer to get more done, but rather to have less to do.”
~ Francine Jay
I notice that I'm a little bored with productivity advice at the moment.
The underlying premise is that we have to be useful in the world. The demand to always be "on" dominates our society and has too many of us feeling guilty for tending to our needs.
There are so many myths and stories we tell ourselves about productivity, which hurt us far more than help us. These are some of the stories I notice most often that keep people, that keep me, from enjoying the "success" we desire.
1. Busy is productive
How often do you complain about being busy yet continue to over-schedule yourself?
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In part, this is a defence mechanism - I wrote recently about how busyness is a highly effective strategy to keep us safe. It also comes from a belief that doing more will eventually mean we achieve more. It's a bias towards action and away from stillness.
The key difference between being busy and being productive is focus. The clearer you are about your values, priorities and needs, the easier it becomes to focus your energy and attention on what matters most, including your need for rest, play and pleasure.
The antidote is doing less with more intention and presence.
2. You need to be more organised
Speaking as a naturally organised person, getting organised is a one-way ticket to procrastination. The same with "optimising" your productivity systems.
Being organised simply means the things you need the most are close at hand, the things you need often are easily found, and the things you need rarely are out of the way but easily retrieved when needed. Organisation has to meet your needs, not some imposed ideal notion of sterile minimalism.
The antidote is to be organised enough to meet your needs.
3. Copy the habits of successful people
Productivity books, blogs and articles are full of examples of what so-called successful people do.
There are three flaws to this:
It assumes we all have the same definition of success. Sure, Elon Musk is a multi-billionaire but he works 80+ hours a week and always appears pretty unhappy and unstable in anything else I read about him.
It's statistically unreliable. There's no proof that these people are successful because of or in spite of these habits. And for every successful person who has this habit, there are many with the same habit who aren't.
It promotes the idea that success is all about one habit, like what time you get up. Success in any definition is so much more complex.
The antidote is to use others as an inspiration in your exploration of what works for you in this particular season of your life and be open to it evolving as you do.
4. You have to maximise your time
Focusing on squeezing the juice out of every moment of the day only serves to remind us that those moments are limited and that we "waste" a lot of them doing things that "aren't productive".
That's a lot of air quotes because I want to highlight the built-in bias and stories we have about what the right way to use our time is.
There is no right way to be productive and focusing on time management simplifies the complexity of being human to the point of farce. And it keeps us stuck in this loop of believing that we should be achieving all the time. Sometimes, "productive" looks like deep, focused work to complete a task and requires us to filter out unrelated thoughts and distractions. But that's the worst approach to creativity which needs us to be open to ideas and connections we've not spotted before.
The antidote is to manage our energy, rather than our time. By following our own cycles of rest, creativity, action, and precision, we can embrace our full productive range. Figure out the times of the day/days of the week or month that are best suited to different types of productivity for you and work with that chedule more.
5. Set big goals
I feel exhausted just thinking about the demand of the world of self-improvement to set the most ambitious goal possible. And if it's not exhausting, it's overwhelming and daunting.
Setting goals that are too big and too distant only serves to demotivate us and see us fall short. It turns out that how we experience life has much more to do with being successful than focusing on goals.
The antidote is to focus more on the how than the what, and to eat the elephant one bite at a time by building powerful daily habits
6. Structure is always/never the answer
The binary nature of advice about structure should be your first red flag here. I've seen some people say that structure is terrible for creativity. Others say that creating a strict routine is the solution to all your productivity woes.
My reply is "both, and". We need both structure and flow. Action and rest. Compassion and discipline.
Too much structure and militant discipline often comes with a heavy dose of judgemental self-talk and rigidity. Too little and flow becomes flaky, unreliable and lacking in resilience. Productivity requires us to be light and open as well as grounded and focused.
The antidote is embracing both in the right measure for you, what Jocelyn K. Glei calls tender discipline.
7. I work best under pressure
This is one I hear a lot and I simply don't believe it. Everything I know about the nervous system tells me that we get less intelligent, less creative, and less kind when we’re stressed.
My own experience is that I didn't have an alternative. The only way I knew how to get stuff done was under pressure, whether in the form of a deadline or an expectation.
It is true that some activation of our nervous system helps us focus for short periods of time. Our bodies and brains are incredibly adaptive and we might even be able to keep this up for a couple of days. But the system is designed to respond to acute stress, followed by a period of rest and integration, and so staying in this heightened state comes at a cost.
Staying in a high-stress, always-urgent mode will work for a while. Until it doesn't and usually that is in the form of exhaustion, ill-health, burnout, or even a heart attack.
The antidote is resourcing your nervous system so it has the capacity to respond to stress and then give it chance to recover and reset.