The Illusion of Productivity

In a recent post, we talked about simplicity. We discovered that overcomplicating things in ones life is a form of avoidance. It is a free pass to do a little bit more research, to tackle the easy, non-essential tasks first and to keep busy, holding up the illusion of progress.

It stuck with me.

So over the past weeks, I started to ask myself questions like:

• What am I holding on to that I need to let go of?
• Where am I overcomplicating things?
• If each day only had 12 hours. What would I cut out?
• If someone could only see my actions and not hear my words, what would they say are my priorities?
• What am I avoiding just because the desired outcome would take longer than I'd like?
• What would this project/task look like if it were easy?

If you seriously ponder these questions, avoidance patterns naturally start to bubble up to the surface. And I'm a master at this. I have to admit, I get a sense of excitement from being busy. It feels good. Because in the short term it does create the illusion of progress. It does feel like things are moving.

Being Busy Does Not Equal Being Productive

But then when we look back at weeks or months of busyness, what meaningful things that make a difference in our life, career and relationships have we actually accomplished? On top of that, being “crazy busy” both justifies and reinforces living on autopilot. Instead of stopping for a few minutes to ask ourselves why we’re doing something, we keep on mindlessly churning work that may or may not lead to a goal we actually care about. Simply because it's right there on our task list.

The issue is: Being busy does not equal being productive. Because something is only productive if it actually achieves the outcomes we are looking to get. Over the years I have been getting much better at saying "no" and committing to less, which I think is the very first step to breaking the "addiction to busyness". And still, my task list grows by the day and I keep excitedly crossing them off.

The Road Forward

So last week, I decided on a little experiment and just deleted the whole task list to see what happens. Since then I've spent every morning first thing looking at my project list and simply decide what the immediate next step is to move a particular venture forward.

Marc Andreessen (one of the most accomplished VCs of our time) uses a very similar system for years and has outlined his super simple approach in this article (hat tip to Melanie). In addition to the very simplified version of a todo-list, he further cuts away at busyness perpetrators like email, meetings etc., which I'll try as well as part of this life-simplification experiment.

I don't want to draw conclusions on the second week of an experiment. Let me say however, that so far I have not only made considerably more progress towards the things in my life that mean something to me, but also felt less and less burdened by things that "need" to get done. Which in turn led me to enjoy my off-time way more (and guilt-free at that).

I can only recommend to start asking yourself questions like the ones outlined above. They lead you to interesting answers and away from the busyness hamster-wheel onto a more meaningful path of accomplishment that feels real.