Stop Trying To Be More Productive

Chasing productivity for the sake of being productive is pointless

When I was working in my old office job there was one thing I was struck by more than anything else.

The constant desire from management to be more productive.

My job was to handle cases of mis-sold insurance and decide whether the customer was eligible for compensation or not.

It sounds easy enough but it wasn’t. This scandal had included all of the biggest banks in the UK and they were forecast to pay out billions and billions in compensation.

If they could find a way to avoid paying as much as they could, they would. Some cases were easy to settle, some were difficult, this was the nature of the job.

However, despite no case being the same as another, our managers constantly wanted us to clear more and more cases.

This was despite there being a gigantic backlog of cases. So much in fact, that the job is still ongoing, despite the deadline to claim coming to an end in August 2019.

High productivity was the buzzword in the office. Those that beat their targets were lauded, those that didn’t were pulled for meetings, put on plans and pulled from ‘the project’ as it was called if they failed to improve.

We received no rewards for being more productive, no bonus, no thank you gifts, just an acknowledgement that we should keep doing what we were doing and, if possible, do more.

Being productive is important, but it shouldn’t be your sole aim. If you want to be productive for the sake of being productive, what are you achieving?

It’s time to realise that we are humans, not robots. We do not need to squeeze every last drop of productivity out of ourselves. Work hard, of course, but realise that there are more important things in life than work itself.

Productivity Porn

In my old office job, the managers had a variety of tools to keep on track of how productive we were.

They had computer systems which told them how long we had been working on a case, how many we had done and how this compared to the rest of the office.

We also had to log into telephones that tracked how long we were at our desks. Needed the toilet? You had 10 minutes during an 8-hour shift to go.

Some of us got around this by staying logged into our phones when we left our desks, but soon emails were flying around the office with reasons why this was a no-no.

As you can see we were monitored heavily. I understood the need to track cases, racking how long we were at our desks struck me as irrelevant and dystopian.

It smacks of a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be human. We are not machines. We need to eat, we need a break from the screen, we need to go to the toilet every so often.

Limiting staff to 10-minute toilet breaks during a shift is not only demeaning it is inhumane. After all, we were only cleaning up the mess the banks had made in the first place. We weren’t the ones that mis-sold insurance on mass.

The irony of all this was that the managers did not do any cases, some of them were even unaware of how they were resolved. This begs the question of how were they in a position to tell us we should be more productive when they did little to improve it and knew next to nothing about the processes involved in the job?

This is the fallacy of what I call productivity porn. The managers wanted us to be more productive because it made them look good when they went to their daily meetings with their bosses.

Instead of asking us to be more productive, it would have been better to consider how staff would be encouraged to clear more cases instead of assuming they would want to.

They had placed productivity above everything else and forgot that the people they were managing were actually people and not numbers on a screen to be manipulated.

Work smart, not hard

If you want to be successful, you’re going to need to work hard. There’s no getting away from this. Very few people are lucky enough to be successful while working haphazardly.

Trying to be more productive is the first step that a lot of people take. This starts with the best of intentions, but it often leads to people chasing productivity instead of critically looking at their working practices.

You may think working 12 hours a day will guarantee success, but if you're spending those 12 hours on pointless tasks then it won’t.

It’s much better to work smart for 6 hours than it is to work hard for 12.

If you search the internet you will find a plethora of articles detailing how to be more productive. Some of these articles will have merits, others won’t, but they miss a fundamental point, why do you want to be more productive?

If you want to be more productive for the sake of being more productive, then what’s the point? The need to be more productive should come from a desire to improve your life in some way.

Working for 12 hours a day is not going to improve your life in the short-term and there’s no guarantee it will improve it in the long-term either.

When you sit down to work you need to ask yourself what you’re goals are, the reasons for your work and how you can improve your working practices to get their quicker.

Productivity is an easy word to trot out in these circumstances but without a clear direction, it’s pointless. Instead of increasing your productivity, aim to work smarter.

Utilise your time better, set clear and definable goals, don’t assume because you’re working longer that you will see results. This is far from inevitable.

Increasing your productivity without a plan will just lead you to become disillusioned with work a few months later.

A scenario which kind of defeats the purpose of wanting to be more productive don’t you think?