Productivity refers the effectiveness of your efforts.
Effectiveness can be framed in terms of how well your actions bring you closer to solving the problems you’re working on.
It’s important to make a distinction between behaviors that make you feel productive vs. behaviors that actually are productive because on the surface they can feel the same.
Here are some common behaviors that often make people feel productive but aren’t terribly productive in practice:
- Checking the e-mail inbox every few minutes and responding to e-mails super quickly.
- Maintaining standing meetings on the calendar that have lost their purpose.
- Pontificating about what will be done.
- Wearing sleep deprivation like a badge of honor because “hustle”.
- Booking every square inch of your calendar with meetings.
These actions are false signals of productivity precisely because while they might make you feel productive they rarely bring you any closer to solving problems you set out to solve — unless of course the problems you’re trying to solve involve faster e-mail response times, meeting with the same people as many times consecutively as possible, improving your speech-giving skills, pretending to be super human, or looking really busy.
The way to not fall prey to seemingly-productive-but-not-really behaviors like the ones mentioned above is to ask yourself 3 questions of the actions you’re thinking about taking:
- Will this action really yield a result that will bring me closer to solving the problems I’m working on?
- For routine actions: is it sustainable?
- Is this the most efficient way to achieve the outcome I’m looking for?
Auditing each action you take in this way might seem like overkill, but consider that your ability to make long term progress towards your goals in life depends greatly on where you choose spend your time.
I think with so much study coming out about sleep - it is very sad that there are many people who do #1. I believe 50cent said somehting lik
I think with so much study coming out about sleep - it is very sad that there are many people who do #1. I believe 50cent said something like I will sleep when I dead. Many have quoted that to me and I just shake my head.
I am guilty of #2 but I do it deliberately to close off part of my day to prevent anyone from booking a meeting. I hate meetings in the morning. Meetings are slotted for the afternoon when nothing more productive can happen.
Also
I admit that there was once a phase in my life where I thought it was reasonable to get only four hours of sleep a night. Of course I could never manage it because I'd either end up sleeping in or taking naps during the day.
But if you were to ask me what my plan was I would straightface tell you that I want to sleep four hours a night so that I could work like a hustler. What the hell was I trying to work on during that time with such a ridiculous regimen? I can't even tell you.
I do think that one of the greatest privileges that a person can have in the world of productivity is a lack of a need for sleep. Some people generally just do well with less than others.