The Secret To Being More Productive. Do Less Immediately!
Personal productivity has always been one of my passions, or maybe it’s more an Achilles Heel that steals my focus and energy under the guise that I am being productive; at the same time, I am researching how to be productive! Think about that one for a minute! Do we spend more time being productive or learning to be productive?
“Joining a Facebook Group about creative productivity is like buying a chair about jogging” — Merlin Mann
It starts simple enough. Maybe you want to manage your email or calendar better. Then you come across articles on being more productive, unique processes like GTD, the Pomodoro Technique, Zen to Done, or Don’t break the chain. If you stopped reading now, I’d recommend taking pieces of each method to build your perfect system. Then stop reading about productivity.
Unfortunately, most of us do not stop here; we continue to enjoy the content. We read more and more with the hope that we’ll find a secret technique or a new tool that solves our productivity problem. However, it doesn’t happen, and we don’t realize we’re just focusing on the process.
“If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.” — Bruce Lee
You begin researching and trying tools like Evernote, Todoist, Asana, Friday, and Trello. Best case, you use only one, but I’m guessing you need to use all of them, which becomes overwhelming. Then you are looking at tools like Monitask, Rescue Time, and Toggl to perform time tracking and see where your day went. At this point, the processes and tools have stolen your day, and you are ineffective.
It has a name: Productivity Porn.
Real Porn is dangerous because it distorts our ideas of what sex should be and can reduce pleasure by disrupting expectations of the experience. The same is valid for productivity Porn. We can define it as being attracted to reading about — and trying out — new productivity apps and systems rather than actually knuckling down and implementing them consistently. It becomes a type of procrastination, and we remain in a state of permanent preparation for getting to work instead of working.
“You know you’re addicted to productivity porn when you are listening to podcasts of David Allen talking about stuff he’s written — stuff you’ve read. — James Bedell (Medium.com Author)”
When I realized I had a problem, I minimized my system and got to work. Agreeing with myself that being messy and disorganized was ok as long as I was creating and not consuming. I focused on a simple process and iterated on it. A word of caution because self-improvement of your system can also be procrastination. Change your system based on your metrics, not because you read something or someone recommended a new tool.
Stop trying to implement everyone else’s “perfect” process! There isn’t one! For example, want to be a successful writer? Google “The daily habits of famous writers,” and what you will read are recommendations for habits like writing at the same time every day. You will not see a successful authors toolset, but for an amateur writer, you will. Professionals focus on habits that create outcomes — they are making things.
Productivity Porn is a dangerous hobby because we enjoy it, and can easily convince ourselves that it’s a valuable use of our time. It is not. Focus on output and not process.
I realize recommending tools and techniques in this article goes against the very recommendation I am making, but we do need one process, and a simple one is most effective. Think Occam’s Razor, the principle of parsimony which states: “the simplest solution is almost always the best.” A problem-solving principle that argues that simplicity is better than complexity. I recommend the simplicity of lists. Here are three books that can provide some context. I’ve added quick-read links here.
If you’ve made it this far, thank you, and please post your own experiences in the comments to help me and others learn and be more effective.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
