Productivity Isn’t About Time Management

I’m not sure how it happened, but somehow the concepts of time management and productivity have become nearly synonymous with each other.

 

This seems on the surface to make sense, after all when it comes to getting things done your time is your most precious asset and how you manage (or mismanage) it can have a huge impact on your ability to accomplish important things.

 

But what if we’ve missed the real issue, what if poor time management is the symptom of the real problem and not the root cause?

 

Think about this for a second, how many hours are you actually productive in a day?

 

My guess is that every single person reading this probably has at least 4 hours every day where they aren’t being productive. None of us are ever truly getting things done during all of our waking hours, nor would we want to.

 

If productivity were just about time management, it would be easy to get ourselves back on track, we could just dip into that pool of four unproductive hours per day and allocate a few to whatever tasks that we need to complete.

 

Stop watching TV, start getting stuff done.

 

For some people that advice might actually work reasonably well, but most of us recognize it isn’t that simple, we muster up a bout of energy and set our minds to work but can only keep it up for a short period of time and we eventually revert to our old habits.

 

Emotional Labor and Energy Management

 

The problem is that the completing the tasks that need to get done requires what we might call emotional labor (a term that I unabashedly stole from the amazing Seth Godin, author of some of my favorite non-fiction books including The Icarus Deception which is the book that has most inspired me to do important work).

 

Accomplishing things takes a mental and emotional toll.

 

Think back to the first time you ever did your taxes and you’ll understand what I’m talking about. You probably experienced a fair amount of anxiety and apprehension beforehand knowing that it was important and that you didn’t want to mess up. You also probably had to concentrate especially hard to understand exactly what you needed to do and what documents you were going to need.

 

You probably felt exhausted afterwards.

 

Isn’t that interesting? You didn’t exert yourself physically at all, but the combination of doing something new that required some amount of mental energy drained you to the point where you probably wanted a nap after you finished.

 

The reality is that we only have so much energy in a day. We have a limited supply of willpower, a limited supply of focus and attention.

 

In order to get important things done we need to learn how to manage our energy, how to conserve it by avoiding draining activities and how to replenish it with rejuvenating activities.

 

Focus Mode vs Diffuse Mode Thinking

 

A little while ago I took a free course on Coursera called learning how to learn. One of the primary insights that this course offered is that or brain has two primary ways of operating:

 

• Focus Mode is when we are dialed in on a task. the neural pathways of our brain narrow down to ignore basically everything that’s not immediately relevant to what we are doing.
• Diffuse Mode is what is happening when our mind is free to wander. You can kind of think of this mode like a pinball machine, once a thought gets loosed it has a lot of room to bounce around

 

So, which one of these two modes do you thinking is better for learning, creativity, and productivity?

 

It’s actually a trick question, the answer is that strategically switching between these two modes of thinking is actually the best way to get important work done.

 

There are a couple of different reasons for this. First of all there is the concept of the “eureka” moment. When you apply yourself to a task and begin to focus, you by definition lose the ability to think outside of the box. Focus mode focuses on what is in the box. That’s the point. The problem is the answer or breakthrough that you need might not be so obviously connected to the work that you’ve accomplished up to that point. What happens is that if you walk away and let your mind wander, your subconscious will still be partly chewing on the problem that you are working on, but now with no constraints. Then, all of a sudden in the middle of a walk in the woods, “eureka!”

 

This isn’t to say that every time you step away from your work you’ll have a major breakthrough, but it is to say that the best way to have breakthroughs is to force yourself to stop what you are doing and switch to something where your mind can wander for a bit.

 

The other thing that switching into diffuse mode does is it allows time for rest and recovery so that you can get back to your focused work. You can only focus on a task for do long before your focus starts to wane and your performance starts to deteriorate, so you need to make sure you periodically recharge your batteries.

 

It’s incredibly important to state here that simply taking a break does not qualify as recharging your batteries. If you step away from your work for 22 minutes to watch a show on Netflix or to scroll through a social media feed, you’re not resting or recharging, you’re just killing time.

 

True work, a true state of flow, requires that your mind be devoted to a single task. True rest requires that your mind be free to wander. Television and social media neither let you focus nor relax your attention. They capture your attention and divide it.

 

Your brain wants to attend itself to the most interesting thing around, and if you give it something to respond to the most interesting thing it can do will be to respond to the never-ending stream of stimuli on your screen.

 

Your brain is going to work best when you free it from the need to be responsive. After all, a big part of productivity is accomplishing the things that you want to accomplish not responding to everyone else’s demands on your time, right?

 

In order to gain the benefits of diffuse mode, you don’t just have to sit there in total silent boredom, you can multi-task to a certain extent. The tasks that allow you to simultaneously be in diffuse mode, and thus the tasks that “recharge your batteries” and get you ready for another bout of focusing, all tend to be manual, repetitive, productive, and routine. Here are some examples:

 

• Washing the dishes.
• Going on a walk.
• Mowing the lawn/doing yard work.
• Folding laundry.
• Driving by yourself without the radio on (in some cases even with the radio on)

 

None of these things require your full undivided attention. To some extent your brain goes on autopilot when performing them and it is going to wander to find some interesting thought to occupy itself.

 

As was mentioned earlier, this is the environment that can lead to breakthroughs and even if it doesn’t, it can get your brain rested a ready for another deep dive into the land of focus and productivity.

 

One popular method that incorporates these concepts is the Pomodoro Technique where you alternate between cycles of work and shorter cycles of rest. The Pomodoro Technique is a “time management” technique, but you’ll notice that it’s really an energy management technique. It forces you to stop what you are doing when your focus begins to fade and makes you recharge before starting again.

 

Whatever technique you use, you need to make sure that your focus time is really focused and your rest time provides real rest. This means that you should turn off anything that has notifications for both your focus time and your breaks. If you do something during your break time, try to make it manual and repetitive. Don’t look for any external sensory stimulation. During your focus time, it’s possible to listen to a song on repeat to “prime” you for your task, but it shouldn’t be something that distracts you, like a new song that you are trying to learn the words to. An old familiar song that fades into the background will work much better.

 

Prioritization

 

The next big thing with productivity is to make sure that you are focusing on the most important things.

 

This fulfills the demand of both time and energy management. If you only have so much time, do the important things first to make sure you don’t run out of time. If you only have so much energy, do the important things first so that you don’t run out of energy.

 

Many people who are locked into the absurd “time management” theory of productivity scoff at the thought of setting aside ten minutes each morning to reflect on what the days most important tasks are. “Ten whole minutes? What a waste of time!”

 

This “waste” of time is really an investment of time.

 

Real time wasting doesn’t just occur when you are killing time, but also when you preoccupy yourself with irrelevant tasks.

 

Busy and productive are not the same thing.

 

Being productive means getting important things done. If you accomplished 45 things today but none of them got you any closer to your goals, you weren’t productive, Period.

 

The best way to make sure you are accomplishing the right tasks is to set aside time each morning (or better yet, the night before and then review your list in the morning) to think about what the most important things are that you can accomplish that day. This list should usually be 1-3 items long. You can accomplish more than three things in a day, but things that are worthwhile will take more emotional energy than your average tasks.

 

If you’ve never done this before, it will be incredibly awkward and the first several times you do it you will probably feel like the skeptics are right and that it is a waste of time.

 

It’s not. You just need practice.

 

At the beginning you’ll probably struggle to uncover what tasks should really be a priority. Here’s a couple of questions that could help you decide:

 

• What is going to move the needle? In other words, what is going to help you make the most progress toward your long-term goals (if you have no written goals, we’ve found your first problem. Start by reading this post and creating your 10-year plan for a remarkable life and then come back and revisit this one after you’ve finished).
• What are you afraid to do? As Seth Godin points out, it used to be the case that our comfort zone was a good proxy for our safety zone. If you ran into a growling wolf in the wild and became scared it was because you were in immediate physical danger. In modern society, many of us still treat the comfort zone as if it is the safety zone but it isn’t. Public speaking is the least dangerous thing imaginable but it’s most people’s biggest fear. There once was a time when fear kept you safe. Now it mostly hold you back. The thing you’ve been procrastinating on is probably something you are afraid of and is probably something that will move the needle.

 

A pro-tip for prioritization: keep a running list somewhere of low-importance tasks. That way on a day that is especially high-energy where you knock out your three priorities by 10am or an especially low-energy day (like when you are sick), you have a list of things that you can accomplish to at least make some progress.

The Myth of Multi-Tasking

 

Perhaps the most damaging application of the time management school of productivity is the myth of multi-tasking.

 

If you believe that the main key to effectiveness is managing your time, anything that allows you to pack more tasks into the same unit of time is obviously a winning strategy.

 

Except that it isn’t.

 

As MIT professor and psychologist Sherry Turkle points out in her excellent book Reclaiming Conversation, multi-tasking makes you less productive while feeling better about your own time management skills.

 

Moreover, she points out that multi-tasking trains your brain to expect even more multi-tasking. People who multi-task often don’t get any better at it, they just want more of it.

 

We have already covered the principles behind why multi-tasking is futile: even though it makes efficient use of time it doesn’t make efficient use of energy and attention.

 

The cognitive load of switching back and forth between one task and another is not significant enough for you to really feel it, but its cumulative effect will wreck you output.

 

True multi-tasking is pretty rare, and it necessarily involves the completion of two tasks that don’t compete for the same resources.

 

So for instance going on a walk for the sake of your health while listening to an audiobook for the sake of your mind is a good example of multi-tasking that works.

 

Really, any combination of audio + any manual, routine task works.

 

Listening to audio while doing the dishes, listening to audio while folding the laundry, etc.

 

One thing that should be mentioned however is that there is still a trade off with multi-tasking. All the things that I just mentioned as working with audio are the same sorts of things that can put your brain into diffuse mode to recharge. It’s possible to let your mind wander in the presence of audio stimulus, but you have to tune out whatever you are listening to. If you listen to audio while going on a walk and pay attention the whole time, you need to think about engaging in another activity that sets you into diffuse mode.

 

At any rate, the popular notion of multi-tasking with 30 tabs open at once where you are simultaneously both researching and writing something while responding to email and checking your social media feeds is a big fat lie.

 

Final Thoughts

 

I’m not against the overall concept of time management. At some point you have to take control of your time and allocate certain hours to certain things.

 

What I’m against is conflating time management with productivity so that you come up with erroneous applications like multi-tasking and staying busy.

 

Our culture today has a bizarre obsession with being busy. Somehow the thought is that if you are sufficiently busy it validates your existence and constitutes something to be proud of.

 

I don’t understand it a bit.

 

A productive person might be busy, but they might not be. On the other hand, you can be busy without being remotely productive.

 

The problem with being busy is that you can do it in a way that is totally reactive. When you are living in reactive mode you are working for other people’s agenda, not your own.

 

The productivity that I have in mind proactively gets things done and accomplishes your goals.