Photo by Luís Eusébio on Unsplash

Productivity is Dead. Long Live Productivity!

Work, Meta-Work, and Why We Fail to Recognize the Most Valuable Things We Should be Managing

I would never be so bold as to say that we’ve been looking at productivity all wrong, but I’m going to come close to saying that. I’m doing that because over the past few years, I’ve begun to realize something important about being productive. I’ve come to realize that being productive is a trivial goal.

I recognize that checking items off of a list you’ve made for yourself feels great. I do it every day (or try to). But my worry is that like many things that makes us feel good, managing our tasks as we do in the productivity community can have downsides. And I think that productivity — viewed as project and task management — does have a downside: it makes us look at the wrong things, which serves to make us productive at the cost of being effective.

So first, I want to make a distinction between productivity and effectiveness. Then, I will explain what we should do instead of focusing on tasks & projects in order to become effective.

Productivity vs. Effectiveness

I still use the word productivity to describe what I write about. But ultimately, that’s just for the sake of convenience; it’s…