Why productivity is the last thing you need to worry about
Don't waste your time doing trivia efficiently
It’s hard to progress very far on Substack, Bluesky or your favourite podcast-delivering medium (or indeed Medium) (or indeed Indeed) without encountering advice about productivity. Most professionally-focused content is littered with life hacks, apps and techniques that will help you shave seconds or even minutes off your day. What a time to be alive.
Batch your emails. Get up even earlier. Make sure you do the hardest or least palatable jobs first. All good advice (and all things I try and do), but there’s no point in being productive unless you’re being productive on things that are worth your productivity.
Productivity and Efficiency are quite similar – essentially they are both about getting something done with the minimum amount of time and effort, with no resource wasted. Getting more done. But before you can do something efficiently, you need to have prioritised – is the thing you’re doing the most worthwhile thing you could be doing right now? Is it a good use of your time?
Prioritising effectively is an art in itself – you need to consider importance, urgency and impact. Who it’s for. Whether doing something that seems trivial now is worth it because it unlocks something else, or because it means you don’t have to worry about something else.
But even better than prioritising is scheduling. As Shane Parrish and many others have said, don’t tell me your priorities, show me your calendar. There’s no point in determining your top three priorities for the week (or top 5, or 10), if you’ve not allocated the time to do them. Get the most important things into the calendar and stick to what you’ve arranged.
Scheduling has the added advantage that it gets the job off your to-do list and just makes it part of your week. If everything’s in your calendar, you don’t even need a list – just follow what you’ve already decided to do, in the order you’ve decided to do them.
And if you find that you have more items on your list than you can fit into your week, well you were never going to get them all done anyway. You’ll need to get rid of some of that work before you try and schedule it. More on that shortly.
So Schedule rather than Prioritise, and only then think about Productivity.
But wait. Do you even need to do the thing? Couldn’t it be automated? Couldn’t we get AI to do it, or some other tech? Most apps now are ‘powered by AI’, just as they were ‘powered by Blockchain’ a few years ago and prefixed by Cyber a few years before that.
Actually, any decent office software comes with a whole pile of in-built tools to automate your workflow. If you’re going to sort out the Inbox, set up workflow rules so it never gets in that state again. If you’re receiving a lot of mail you don’t want or need, get yourself removed from distribution lists, or unsubscribe.
It’s also about doing a job just once if it’s something that needs to happen regularly. If you have a regular presentation that includes weekly or monthly data, did you know you can get the slides to auto-update for you each time? And that you can ask ChatGPT to write a Python script that will parse and organise all your Excel data before you automatically update a Powerpoint slide to present it?
But remember, you can only automate what you can understand. Get to know how to do something well first, then you can figure out how to never have to do it again.
Of course, if you’re getting a lot of work coming your way that would be better done by someone else, you might want to delegate. Delegation isn’t just about getting work off your desk, it’s about finding the right person for the task. Who can do it the best or the most quickly? Who has the most relevant experience now, or alternatively, who would benefit the most from gaining that experience this time?
We’ve all been given garbage work dressed up as ‘gold-plated development opportunities’. But delegating the right way can help both you and the delegatee (yes, that’s a word, probably. It is now anyway).
So delegate, then automate, then schedule and prioritise and only then think about your productivity.
Delegate >> Automate >> Schedule >> Productivity
But wait, there’s still an elephant in the room. Are you and your team bouncing around tasks that actually, no-one needs to do? Have you looked hard enough at what you can delete or decline? Too often, we don’t question why work is being done – if something has been delegated to us, or it’s a task or responsibility we’re used to having, then we can just accept it without a second thought.
Without that pause, you’re at risk of finding the least bad person to do the work, and guaranteeing that someone’s time gets wasted. How many emails could be safely ignored, or should never have been sent?
I’m amazed how often as a team we can debate the best way to do something, or the team or department in which it should best sit, without first being certain that it’s even work worth doing at all. We consider the when (what’s the deadline) and the how (how best to get the job done) but not the whether (does this even need doing?)
Everyone’s time is precious – if it’s not a good use of your time, is it a good use of the person’s that you’re passing it down the line to? If not, then delete, don’t delegate.
The key questions therefore are:
Prioritisation – Is this a good use of your time?
Delegation – Is this a good use of someone else’s time?
Deletion – Is this a good use of anyone’s time?
What all of this means is that, by the time you get to worrying about your productivity, you should have spent time (or have a process in place) to whittle down all the things you could be doing, to only the ones that are absolutely a good use of your valuable time.
Don’t waste your time doing trivia well. Don’t produce excellent garbage. And definitely don’t spend your time being busy or looking busy at the expense of actually adding value. You’re better than that, and your time is worth more.