What is Real Productivity?

Found this inspir­ing arti­cle from Life​hack​.Org. This is some­thing that tries to debunk our long-held the­o­ries on time man­age­ment and pro­duc­tiv­ity. Tell me what you think about it in the com­ments below.

There’s More to Pro­duc­tiv­ity than Time Man­age­ment
Dustin Wax
Link to the Orig­i­nal Arti­cle. Empha­sis mine.

What does it mean to be pro­duc­tive? A typ­i­cal def­i­n­i­tion might be some­thing like, “Get­ting the most done in the least pos­si­ble time.” In a work­place con­text, this means one and only one thing: more work. If the process for a task can be stream­lined so it can be done in half the time, then you can have your employ­ees do that task twice as many times.

In order to cram more into the same amount of time, we need care­ful time man­age­ment, but I want to sug­gest that pro­duc­tiv­ity is far more than just time man­age­ment. That in fact, the def­i­n­i­tion of pro­duc­tiv­ity above might be fine if you’re an employer and pay­ing your employ­ees by the hour or the work­day, but it’s absolutely dread­ful for just about every­one — and every­thing — else.

Another def­i­n­i­tion of pro­duc­tiv­ity

Here’s a dif­fer­ent take on what pro­duc­tiv­ity is: You’re being pro­duc­tive when your work is entirely sat­is­fy­ing and fulfilling.

Although the spe­cific things that are sat­is­fy­ing and ful­fill­ing to you are, of course, a mat­ter of indi­vid­ual tastes and pref­er­ences, here are a few qual­i­ties most peo­ple would con­sider important:

* You grow as a per­son.
* You enjoy the com­pany of oth­ers.
* You are proud of what you’ve com­pleted.
* You feel con­fi­dent about your abil­i­ties.
* You look for­ward to under­tak­ing the same or sim­i­lar projects in the future.
* You help oth­ers.
* You receive the acclaim of your peers.

Notice, the qual­i­ties that make work sat­is­fy­ing are all about you, not about the work. There is no job that is inher­ently so dirty or demean­ing that nobody could find it sat­is­fy­ing and ful­fill­ing. (Unfor­tu­nately, that isn’t at all how work gets assigned in our soci­ety, where race, class, gen­der, social stand­ing, ambi­tion, edu­ca­tional cer­ti­fi­ca­tions, and other irrel­e­van­cies deter­mine who will do what job, leav­ing only a small amount of “wig­gle room” for each of us to choose among a lim­ited num­ber of options.)

There are dirty jobs, and you have to do them

There are, of course, lots of tasks that are nei­ther sat­is­fy­ing nor ful­fill­ing that have to get done nev­er­the­less. Few peo­ple enjoy doing their taxes or get­ting a root canal, but they need doing. Since it’s unlikely that every rou­tine, bor­ing, dan­ger­ous, or repet­i­tive task that our soci­ety needs to keep run­ning will be auto­mated within our life­times, there is still a need to man­age our time.

But the goal of time man­age­ment should not only be to get the most done in the time allot­ted. At it’s best, time man­age­ment offers a set of strate­gies for main­tain­ing bal­ance between “work” and “life”. I’ve put those terms in quotes because a) our work is, of course, not a thing sep­a­rate from life, and b) by “work” I don’t mean our job but all the least sat­is­fy­ing and least ful­fill­ing tasks that we need to take care of in order to live. Frankly, if your job con­sists entirely of that sort of work, you’d best be con­sid­er­ing a switch!

Looked at this way, the hoary phrase “work-life bal­ance” that so many employ­ers are pay­ing lip ser­vice to these days takes on a new mean­ing (and one most employ­ers don’t have even remotely in mind): to bal­ance our lives more in favor of tasks that are sat­is­fy­ing and fulfilling.

Those tasks that are drain­ing and unstim­u­lat­ing should be done as quickly as pos­si­ble, not to max­i­mize share­holder value but so that peo­ple can get on with the stuff that makes them human. Some­times that means giv­ing employ­ees fam­ily days or set­ting them up to telecom­mute, but often that means giv­ing employ­ees room to do things that chal­lenge and stim­u­late them, and min­i­miz­ing or automat­ing the things that don’t.

This applies out­side of the work­place, as well. If your fam­ily life con­sists entirely of chores and drudgery, you’re not in bal­ance no mat­ter what per­cent­age of your time is spent at home. House­hold orga­ni­za­tion and chores should be, as much as pos­si­ble, sys­tem­atized and rou­tinized so it can be got­ten out of the way with the least pos­si­ble invest­ment of time and effort, so that you and your fam­ily can get on with the things that make you grow closer together.

Get­ting to doing

When you have the “work” under con­trol, you can afford to give time to the projects that turn you on. In fact, you can afford to take plea­sure not in get­ting things done but in doing them. While a com­pleted task or project can give you a great deal of sat­is­fac­tion, the act of doing should also be ful­fill­ing. Con­sider fish­ing: every­one loves land­ing a big fish, but at the end of the day what counts is not how many fish you’re bring­ing home or how big they are but the time you spent sit­ting in the boat watch­ing the line.

For a writer, hav­ing a fin­ished man­u­script to send off to a pub­lisher is great, but it’s the daily flow of words that makes writ­ing worth doing. Same thing for a painter, for whom the feel of paint on can­vas is as impor­tant — if not more so — as hav­ing a fin­ished work to hang or sell. There are sales peo­ple who love being in the thick of a nego­ti­a­tion, actors who love the thrill of the stage, ath­letes for whom the feel­ing of push­ing their bod­ies is far more impor­tant than a win. And when they’re fin­ished, they move on to the next one.

The most use­less thing you do

There’s a word in Yid­dish that I’ve always loved: “Luft­men­schen”. Lit­er­ally “air peo­ple”, Luft­men­schen are peo­ple who deal in “air” — in the non-tangible: ideas, thoughts, dreams. While it’s a bit of a put-down to be called a Luft­men­sch, I’ve always felt is seemed like an admirable occupation.

The Luft­men­sch knows some­thing the rest of us don’t: that the most use­less thing you do is the most impor­tant. That is, the things we do with no final pur­pose in mind, solely for the enjoy­ment of doing them, are the things that make us human — that make us Men­schen. (A Men­sch is a gen­uine, authen­tic person.)

If we’re lucky, these things are part of our job — we get paid to do things we’d do any­way just for the sheer enjoy­ment of doing them. But lucky or not, they are the key to real pro­duc­tiv­ity — not doing as much as pos­si­ble in as lit­tle time as pos­si­ble, but doing the least ful­fill­ing stuff as quickly as pos­si­ble so we have plenty of time to do the “use­less” stuff — think­ing, dream­ing, living.