Summary

Productivity is not about being constantly busy or filling schedules, but about doing less through intelligent restraint and focusing on high-quality tasks.

Abstract

The article challenges the common misconception that productivity equates to waking up early and maintaining a packed schedule. It argues that true productivity is characterized by a state of flow and ease, aided by intelligent planning and understanding the nature of tasks at hand. The author emphasizes that being productive means making fewer, but more meaningful and high-quality decisions, akin to the approach of experts and successful investors like Warren Buffet. The article suggests that by reducing the appeal of unproductive activities and creating an environment that fosters better habits, one can naturally gravitate towards more fulfilling and efficient use of time without relying on excessive willpower.

Opinions

The author criticizes the productivity content that promotes unsustainable and unhealthy lifestyles, advocating for a more balanced and thoughtful approach.
The article praises content creators like Ali Abdaal and James Clear for providing valuable insights on productivity and personal improvement.
It is highlighted that busyness is often confused with productivity, with the former being a hectic and anxiety-driven state, while the latter involves poise and intelligent foresight.
The author suggests that people should spend more time thinking about the direction of their lives and less time on trivial decisions, aspiring to a state of mind that questions and evaluates personal efficiency and enjoyment.
The article advises that doing less does not equate to procrastination; instead, it is about strategically avoiding activities that do not contribute to one's efficiency and focusing on those that do.
The author recommends practical steps to reduce the appeal of distractions, such as converting a phone's display to black and white or removing tempting apps, to enhance productivity.
The article concludes by summarizing that busyness should be avoided, productivity requires intelligence and longevity, and that eliminating unproductive actions allows productive ones to thrive.

Productivity Means Doing Less, Not More

There is a misconception that productivity is about waking up at 5 a.m. and filling your schedule to the brim. The reality is slightly less crazy, and much more effective.

Productivity as busyness

All of us want to live more fulfilling lives. For many of us, this means ceasing to shirk our responsibilities. To try to do this, we look to others who seem to have solved the problem. Luckily, there are uncountable amounts of videos, podcasts, and articles out there to draw inspiration from. Unluckily, many advocates for unsustainable, unhealthy, or otherwise all-around unreachable ideals.

I am one of those people; I used to watch lots of productivity content on YouTube. It was partly about trying to become better at doing my thing, but partly to live vicariously through these people who seemed so efficient and happy. I longed to stuff my schedule full of tasks, repeatedly failing to start my mornings at 5 or 6 a.m. and often getting sidetracked by social media.

Now, to be sure, there are some great content creators on this topic. Two of my favourite are Ali Abdaal and James Clear. Whether you want to be a better student, or just read more often, these two have you covered.

The problem in this over-saturated space is that what lots of people are fetishizing is busyness, not productivity.

The state of busyness is a cluttered one. It is a state of rapid-fire progression through tasks backlit by anxiety. It is more about feeling like you are being productive, rather than actually being productive. Everything is a hectic mess when you take on busyness.

Productivity as intelligent restraint

Productivity proper is something much different from its cousin busyness.

At its best, productivity has an inner dimension of ease and poise. It is something akin to a flow state where the boundary between subject and object blur.

Productivity, unlike busyness, occurs in the context of intelligent foresight. The productive person is slower to start because they figure out the nature of the problem that they are dealing with. They don’t go in all-guns-a-blazing like the busy person. The productive person shares this trait with people who are experts in their domains, they understand that the correct formulation of the problem is much more important than jumping to immediate conclusions.

In an interview on investing, Warren Buffet once said that he used to leave his students with a stamp card as they left school. The twenty-odd spaces on the stamp card represent the total number of investments the person could make over their career. This is being productive.

If you could make 5 high-quality decisions in one year should be happy. For, in reality, many of us spend more time considering the best model of our next purchase than we do thinking about steering the ship of our lives into waters we want to be in.

Take, for example, academic achievement. Those who are best at studying not only spend more time studying but they spend more time thinking about studying.

What we should aspire to is the state of mind that is doubtful and questions ourselves and our endeavours. Think about it: what are the odds, out of the universe of configurations that your life could be in, that you are operating with the most efficiency and enjoyment?

Doing less ≠ procrastination

When you cease to do things that are not themselves an efficient use of your time, those things that are more efficient come easier. You do not need herculean acts of will to make progress.

One of the best ways is to make the things you don’t want to do less appealing and easy to fall into.

For me, that means being on my phone less. This is because once I’m on it, it is a black hole that warps and wrecks my days. So, how can you make your phone less appealing if you are flawed and possessing a very finite resource of willpower like myself?

Put your phone into black & white
Delete things like YouTube (if you really need to watch a video, resolve that it will be when you sit down at your computer)
When you want to get work done, place it in a different room or somewhere you need a step stool to reach.

If you can simply apply this principle of making things less appealing and easy for many things in your life, your day will naturally get filled with things that are more conducive to your better nature.

Realize that the less you do, the more concentrated an effect those things can have.

For example, many people have currently deluded themselves into thinking they understand anything about the stock market. In a massive bull market, everyone looks like a genius. This fantasy will come crashing down at some point and the hangover will kick in and people will wonder how they could have been so naïve. So what if, instead of falling into this trap, you took the advice of Mr. Buffet and read the best books you could find on investing and slowly and methodically tried to build and refine a skill?

Many people who are into productivity are in it for short-term gains so they will not apply this to their life in any meaningful way.

In summary

Busyness, seductive as it is, must be avoided.
Productivity requires applying intelligence and aiming for longevity.
Ceasing what isn’t productive allows what is to flourish.

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