Stop being so damn productive

Productivity is an economic term. Investopedia writes:

Productivity compares the level of input with the output. The input may be labour, equipment, or money, and the output may be a good or service.

Personal productivity is a bit trickier to define, tricky to measure. Yet…we live in the world of productivity tools, hacks and pundits who show how to you use 10 different tools to achieve exactly the same result, but with a slightly different UI and, sometimes wildly different price tag.

Moreover, we live in the world, which somehow perpetually attempting to make us more productive while simultaneously making a lot of us feel guilty when we are not productive.

To add to that, productivity today, is often associated with learning.

Not learning anything = not improving yourself Not improving yourself = not being productive

But learning is consumption, not production.

If being productive means to produce, how did consumption got into this equation? Today to be “productive” we need to…read newsletters, Slack messages, memos, 100’s of other documents, read blog posts, watch courses so that…what? We produce something? What is this something? What do we actually produce if we mostly consume?

Knowledge Work Productivity

People who produce tangible physical things see the fruits of their productivity in buildings, freshly bakes croissants and banh mi in the morning. The output is measured, quantified.

For knowledge workers things are far less defined, and far more ethereal.

We produce knowledge in various forms. If we produce more knowledge, does it mean we are more productive? Probably not. Looking at all the high-volume low-quality slop it is easy to see why.

Does it mean then if we produce lower quantity of knowledge, but of a higher quality - are we productive? This sounds counterintuitive since we associate productivity with more things, not less. Higher quality is not more, these are two different axis. In which case aiming for being more productive is a fools errand, unless the goal is to produce more slop indeed.

That leaves quality. If we take that instead of quantity as something to strive for, what do we need? Well, the same ingredients - time and energy. But more of both. Since both cannot be created, but only reallocated, both can come only from being less…productive. Learning less, consuming less.

Consuming less, producing more.

Stop being so damn productive. Produce.

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