Ace Productivity
| Type | Team Size | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Me, Myself and I | Group Collaboration | The Academic System | Software | 1 | 2-10 | 11-30 | 30+ |
Over the last decade or so, the world has become obsessed with maximizing productivity. Here, I offer a different approach, following Occam's razor. One should strive to be more efficient all the time, yet has to recognise that we all have our limit, and no matter how much one may be driven, there is a point when productivity turns on itself and reverses its momentum. In other words, one can maximize productivity, but this is never an end in itself, and instead we need to act on our productivity again and again until we may have optimized it, even if it may be only for some time. Productivity is like a living organism, and while some may have more gentle creatures as their pet, to most it is a dragon that breathes fire, and this mythical creature demands a constant and brave fight. All allegories aside, productivity has no recipe, whatever the internet and its gurus want you to believe, yet productivity has at least one safe haven: Routine. Whoever strives productively for decades has mastered one thing quite clearly: themselves. Waking up, starting your daily routine up to the point that you actually start your routine, that is to become productive, is the main goal one needs to master before being productive at all. Yet this is again a conundrum in itself, because the creature's productivity needs to be hatched, nurtured, and fed on a daily basis until it grows up. What all productive people share is thus a clear vision on how they could be productive, without being the least productive, at least for now.
Motivation
The first step in becoming productive is hatched out of the recognition that one needs to be productive to excel. Life presents goals, and in order to reach these goals, we have to overcome ourselves and our inner laziness. For some lucky few motivation is the sheer appetite to thrive, towards knowledge, output or whatever else. It can always be a great orientation to this end to see what others of the great did in order to gain productivity. In any discipline, what is the difference between a master and a novice? As Jerry Seinfeld said so clearly: “It’s tonnage” - the sheer amount of hours you put in. Being directed towards this vision of mastering your craft may spark the motivation you need to get started. Every minute that you spend brings you closer to your best performance. Another version of this sounds like this: "if nothing else will work - work will work." These mantras always helped me a lot to get going, because I knew early on there is a light at the end of the tunnel. How? This is hard to answer, but there are arguments that being engaged early on in long term goals helps to understand that if hard work helps us thrive towards one direction, it can also help towards other directions. To me, it was surely being engaged in martial arts and musical instruments that helped me gain an early understanding of long term investments into something. There is a wider consensus that a repetitive routine seems to be beneficial for any task that demands a certain mastery of your own productivity level. Sports is often highlighted but equally suitable is learning an instrument or any fit that is rather repetitive. For some, it seems, long walks may even suffice. We can thus conclude that learning to master a repetitive skill or task helps us to embrace the routine animal inside of ourselves, and thus we can translate these learned routines and apply them to anything else that we want to achieve. Now that we have concluded about our inner world, let us move more to the outside world. What is needed to ace productivity concerning the very setting of our workplace.
Routine
Some people can work wherever they want. This doctrine became a whole movement, which the global digital nomads tried to fill with meaning for decades, and some may even achieve this. While thus some may be able to establish their perimeter where they hang their head, most productive people are deeply ritualistic when it comes to their routines on how they work. Deep down, this is often a reflection of their early years and how they learned to thrive towards a more productive self, yet overall we talk about deeply constructed or almost encapsulated settings. This does not always mean that it is shielded from the outside world, as some of the world literature was literally written in boheme cafe settings that the digital nomads try to emulate. Yet most productive people have deeply designed spaces that they made and choose, and that they guard against anything perceived as a disturbance. These disturbances do not originate really in the outside world, but the outside world can become a catalyst that disturbs the inner equilibrium that these productive folks try to establish and then maintain for as long as possible. While thus all days have an end, the definition of "long" is not focussed on the individual day, but more on a succession of days that should ideally go on as long as possible. In the case of productive people, the underlying hypothesis is that this goes on forever. There is always the prevalent rumor of productive people who lost their way, or had one lucky break and were effectively one-hit wonders. These are either not really productive people, or they are just judged wrongly. Most of them are as productive as they were before or after, but may have struck a certain Zeitgeist particularly well. These are often complicated cases that are exciting to uncover in biographies, but should not further concern us here. This section focuses on productivity that is designed and embedded into settings that are planned, repetitive, and reliable. In other words, productive people depend for dear life on routines that they tinker with and perfect as best as they can. Rhythm is the key, and this is easiest if it is a rhythm in sync with their inner clocks and their outer surroundings. Alas, this is hardly ever the case, because we are fluctuating animals, and so is the outside world, certainly. Yet productive people learned to surf their inner waves of change, and may well learn to adapt to outside changes. Yet it is the outside changes that may often have to pay the higher price, because they can be better tamed after all compared to the inner voices. Productive people demand an often severe compromise form their surrounding, and set themselves into a state that is as distant from the outside world as they need to. Yet once the work is done, productive people are often needy and quite demanding on the outside world. This is a constant compromise, and in many cases a chain of negotiations and bargains that is never ending. Productive geniuses often have their perimeter well established, and their outside world either learned to live with it or was powered into obedience. The biographies of almost all productive people are characterized by either a deep love of their surrounding people for them, or a tragic chain of power games. There are of course many ways to productivity, but it seems that there is little room between tolerance or negotiation for gaining productivity. Indeed are these very lines a tolerance of my very surrounding that allows me to write this text instead of doing something else. Yet let us move to something substantial and concrete. What are productive settings?
The Workplace
Any form of productive setting is a setting that allows us to be productive, it is as simple as that. Yet to achieve this setting is far from trivial. Just as one learns a martial art, which is often a succession of learned grades characterized by belt color, one can become a black belt Dan in productivity. Just as in martial arts, this is a fight with oneself, and an endless chain of reputations and learning. One starts best at a desk, because this is after all the space that was designated to be a place for work and productivity. I for myself can work everywhere, and always could, but over the years I have to acknowledge that this is neither practicable nor desirable. Having a designated place to work allows you to do what is so hard to achieve. Find an endpoint, which we all need at the end of the day. You may get up from your desk, and do something else. Combining work with a place is crucial for your brain to get into work mode, because we are learned animals, and rely on such instinctive associations that we all may construct for ourselves. Many productive people in addition have rituals that are associated with their craft of work, which can be anything ranging from a coffee to wearing a particular morning coat. These are often catalysts that indicate that the productive time starts now. It is old news that starting is the hardest, and yet we learn it every day again. After a few minutes you are either in the flow or have to acknowledge that you have nothing. Either way, one has to start. Being productive from then onwards is usually a ratio of practice that builds stamina. Writing for 10 hours is torture when you have never written before, but may well be the ritual of a seasoned writer. Yet writing for 10 hours straight may be impossible for most productive writers, which is why these long stretches need to be trimmed down into palatable bite sizes. Many famous writers draft in the morning and edit in the afternoon. Others have more productive stretches as night owls. A key goal of any productive person is to break down the gigantic goals that we all thrive towards into a size that still merits any recognition of progress, but is still small enough to allow for a recognition and design of a daily practice. My typical writing consists of 300-500 words, which for me is a mere unit of text I produce. Most thoughts that I write have 4-5 units, which is nothing more than a beginning, several main points, and an end. Yet this internal structure became so internalized over the years that this is the building block of anything that I do, and all other tasks are clocked in either as obstacles, catalysts or mere distractions of the main goal, that is the writing of several units of text. In order to achieve this goal, I have five places between my alternatives. My desk in the office, which is a place of frequent distraction yet sometimes deep focus, especially at the beginning and end of each day, and around lunch, which I typically skip. The second place is my desk at home, which is my sacrosanctum, and a place of long stretches of work that is often quite painful, but necessary. I have two comfortable chairs that serve as mere alternative places of less distraction and are hardwired into my brain of places that demand productivity. I'm sitting in one of those armchairs right now. The last place is the rest of the world. Since I mostly write under the shielding sound of music, my noise canceling headphones are my main shield against the world, and I often change location to force myself to begin writing a text -which is easy- but to also finish it in the same location -which is hard, but at least I stand a fair chance there as compared to any of my desks. Once you mastered the places where you work and learned to map your inner rhythms, there are no more excuses. Seinfeld put it even more bluntly, as he declared all lack of productivity as laziness, which is harsh, but I believe true.
The Reward
The last component of productivity is the reward, that is what happens if you are done with your work and expect nothing less but a thunderous applause. I am here to explain that this will probably never happen, and for most productive people is also less needed than one thinks it is. Confirmation is often restricted to an inner circle of friends and partners who know us, and may agree that we did something right, and the overall outcome of our productivity is worthwhile. This does not restrict itself to writing but can be any piece of work that demands an elaborate regime of productivity. I had the privilege to work closely with some of the most productive people I know. I always made it a point to thank for excellence whenever I saw it, which was always appreciated, but never the main motivation of these productive people. This brings me to my last point, and the explanation why the current trends of social media to dissect and construct productivity as a goal is not only misleading, but simply an impossible task. All productive people are always driven by something beyond them, and thus shoulder a persistent and deep personal motivation that no youtube video to date was ever able to capture. Productive people have deeply personal reasons that define their urge to go on and insist on the importance of their work, way beyond and reason that can be explained or understood by anyone at a glance. Yet in the biographies and interviews with productive people one can understand that there is a shared understanding that there is something beyond oneself. Why else would productive people be driven to such lengths to try and go on forever. Even the gratification domain of social media can bring you to a certain point. Yet the productivity of real aces demands a decade of learning at least, a clear embedding into the outside world that they still depend on and interact with, yet on their terms to avoid distractions and other starting points for procrastination. Yet lastly productive people are productive because they want to be productive. Many -or some would argue most- productive people are well beyond a personal narcissism, and are instead aiming at a higher goal they even may not see in the beginning, or for a long term while they are on the way. Yet in order to ace productivity, it is not the goal to serve as the main motivator. Instead you start with the way, and this may form into a means towards a goal. Still, the path towards a productive life starts the least with a goal.
Links & Further reading
YouTube Channels
https://www.youtube.com/@TheMinimalists
https://www.youtube.com/@timferriss
Books
Abdal, Ali. 2023. "Feel-Good Productivity: How to Do More of What Matters to You."
Sasaki, Fumio. 2022. "hello, habits"
The author of this entry is Henrik von Wehrden.
