A while back, one of my adult students asked me about productivity books I would recommend if I could pick only two. I thought this would be relatively easy answer for me, and I chose the two books in no time. However, it took several days for me to actually formulate my answer, as their question precipitated a fair amount of thinking about exactly what productivity is and why it’s important, and what its costs are. So when I finally answered, I did indeed recommend two books, but with a lot of caveats about the flipside of productivity and why it’s more about balance than anything.

The first book that I recommend to a lot of people is David Allen’s Getting Things Done. The GTD method at its heart comprises five steps:

1. Capture - collect all the stuff that is on your mind

2. Clarify - process stuff so you understand what they mean

3. Organize - put stuff into the appropriate places in your system

4. Reflect - review your system

5. Engage - do the appropriate things

In addition to these five steps, the GTD system guides you through a mental framework in order to understand what your project commitments are, areas of focus in your life, and a snapshot of your goals all the way from short-term up to lifelong horizons. With GTD, you’ll be able to collect all the relevant stuff, be able to process it, act on it appropriately, and have a strong view of where everything fits in with your life.

I’ve used the GTD system for the most part since 2007 and have noticed a substantive improvement in my material quality of life, mental focus, and overall direction in life. The only problem with using GTD is that it requires a lot of infrastructure and planning, which often gets in the way of the immediate action that is needed in order to bring projects to fruition.

Another book that I recommend is Mark Forster’s Secrets of Productive People: 50 Techniques To Get Things Done. Rather than trumpeting an over-arching system, Mark presents a toolkit of easy time and idea management concepts that can be quickly applied. Unlike GTD, there is no overhead of a huge system to maintain, and the emphasis is on starting things throughout the day rather than spending a lot of time building a system. On the importance of strong low-level systems (Chapter 18):

For major productive work you literally need to grow your brain so that it is capable of it.

This requires serious development of systems and routines so that they become so well practice that you don’t have to think about them. The more routines you develop to the stage at which you don’t have to think about them, the more your time will be freed up for creative activity. There is only one way to get these routines established in your life - only one way to get your brain to adapt to them. That is repetitive activity in the form of continued practice. This results in actual changes to the brain.

But the techniques you can get from these two great books isn’t the whole story.

Productivity can easily become a sucker’s game, where you can be led to believe that more work is better work. That is simply not the case and can lead to anxiety, especially if you work in the creative industries. Anne-Laure Le Cunff in her article about mindful productivity advocates for a more sustainable approach:

Mindful productivity can be defined as being consciously present in what you’re doing, while you’re doing it, in conjunction with managing your mental and emotional states. Mindful productivity is about calmly acknowledging and accepting your feelings and thoughts while engaged in work or creative activities. It’s a way to give us new perspectives on work, life, the creation process; helping us enjoy the work and better understand ourselves. Besides helping with focus, mindful productivity also helps us notice signs of anxiety or stress at work earlier and better deal with them.

Some of the techniques that Anne-Laure suggests include watching your thoughts and emotions, getting back into the flow, singletasking, cultivating your curiosity, and developing a growth mindset.

Another problem with taking productivity advice too seriously is overthinking and over-planning projects. Annie Mueller’s Is having a plan helpful? Not always looks at how the glorification and commercialization of planning tools is too often counterproductive towards the work that we actually want to get done:

The truth is that planning can be harmful to our productivity and efficacy and even enjoyment in life. 

Plans lead us to unrealistic expectations. We don’t know how long things will take, and instead of referencing our experiences, we believe our planned estimates. Then our plan doesn’t work, and everything falls apart. 

Plans can keep us from doing our best. Research shows that making a backup plan — what you’ll do in case things don’t work out — leads to poor performance. 

Plans can reduce our creativity. Over-planning — a common tendency among those who plan in order to combat anxiety— is the antithesis of the creative flexibility shared by successful entrepreneurs.

Annie’s approach emphasizes situational awareness and mindfulness in place of wasting time on plans that don’t always reflect the reality of a changing situation:

There are good plans and bad plans. Good plans are effective schedules and strategies for doing things that matter to you. 

Bad plans, on the other hand, make simple things complex and require more time and energy than is justified for the end result.

But this entire productivity enterprise might be ill-conceived. Anne Helen Petersen article on the diminishing returns of productivity culture puts the entire field’s mindset in a very harsh light:

There’s something great about this dude with so much confidence in his approach to life that he doesn’t have to dress up what he gives him self-worth (“completing and doing things”) and his addiction to it. Productivity is what gets him off. Everyone else just doesn’t understand the thrill of completing things on a regular basis.

There is a danger in becoming too productive. You become a worker bee. You cease to become mindful of the value of what you’re doing and risk cutting yourself off from the entirety of the human experience you need to have throughout life:

This is the dystopian reality of productivity culture. Its mandate is never “You figured out how to do my tasks more efficiently, so you get to spend less time working.” It is always: “You figured out how to do your tasks more efficiency, so you must now do more tasks.” Sometimes, if you’re a Wall Street investment banker, you can complete infinitely more tasks until you have so much money that you don’t even need it anymore — you’re productive for the thrill of it, but also because you don’t know how else to gauge your own self-worth. 

But the people who help that banker in his quest, whether his explicit support staff (assistants) or his implicit one (office cleaners, house cleaners, food delivery people) often have a very different relationship to productivity. It’s not pleasurable or addictive. It’s just denying the most human parts of yourself in order to survive the economic moment. 

At this point, we’ve embraced so many new technologies, with so many accompanying mandates to increase our work load — but with so little attention to why, and to what end. To contribute to a stock price that benefits a select few? To check the boxes on our to do list? To spend so much time at our computers that our bodies physically ache?

I think I’ve discovered this the hard way and have moved on to a more sustainable approach. I take naps on a regular basis. I prioritize the work that I genuinely want to do, but leave empty time for exercise, reading, or just plain fallow time. Saying no is my default response to much that arrives at my desk; I declined five board positions that came my way this year. I take every Sunday off in order to rest and recuperate - this is from the guy who worked over 100 days in a row at the start of the pandemic.

(Image courtesy of Amanda Dalbjörn on Unsplash)