This is one of a set of posts on common misconceptions about productivity and work. I call them Lies About Productivity. I’ll address some ‘lie’ and suggest a new mindset that is helpful toward being effective, not exhausted – Do Busy Right.
The Lie: It’s human nature to understand how to be productive, select your most important work, and do it. This one is not a lie of commission, but a lie of omission. Very few people actually talk about the nuts and bolts of managing our own work. Therefore, you’re left to your own devices, lacking sound guidance.
- The problem of not actually knowing how to ‘be productive’
- Knowledge work is a relatively new phenomenon, so the vast majority of people don’t know how to manage knowledge work; schools haven’t learned to teach it
- You have a human brain and it’s behavior, habits and biases support or defeat your ability to make it do what you want it to do
- ‘Every system is ideally constructed to produce the results you observe’
- There are clear principles about how human brains work
- Symptoms of believing that we just know how
- You’re constantly feeling a nagging sense that “there’s gotta be a better way” and “does it have to be this confusing and stressful”
- You spend a ton of time and mental energy trying to understand various ‘systems’. You’re actually researching solutions to the problem. But you have a full time job already
- Each new system feels like “it doesn’t fit you”, so you try to pick and choose components to cobble together. Actually, you have never been given a good definition of what a system should be able to do for you.
- The tactics that other people are using (‘daily to-do list’ and managing from your email inbox) are a constant temptation. “If you do what you see other people doing, you’ll be just as broke as they are”. You may even be slightly embarrassed to bring these topics up.
- You haven’t been able to stick in a system long enough for habits to build and take hold
- The new mindset about productivity training
- Move away from tips and tricks to a single unified system that incorporates actual knowledge and experience on how our brains really work
- Stop focusing on managing you time and start focusing on deploying your attention (there’s another whole episode on this)
- Results of the new mindset
- Your toolset works for you, rather than against you
- You stop wasting time looking for things and planning poorly
- You feel calm and confident about your work because you are actually managing it, rather than letting it manage you
- You are able to stick with it long enough to build habits
- Once you’ve built habits (and not until then), you’re in a position to add tweaks and incorporate other areas of your life
- Tools you’ll need
- A place to keep your backlog of tasks and ideas
- Features to help you manage and maintain that backlog
Knowledge about how to be productive is not taught in schools or on the first day on the job. But it is available. The solutions are quite general and don’t have to be exquisitely refined for each individuals mode of thinking, career specialties, or other distinctive characteristics. Since we are not taught these things, we need to think like a student, not like a productivity systems engineer. The Do Busy Right podcast is one of my attempts to make productivity knowledge more widespread.