Quick Summary
- This post is intended as a supplement to the database of productivity recommendations we recently published.
- I argue that effective approaches to increasing your productivity include a far broader spectrum of interventions than may be traditionally associated with productivity
- I am particularly excited about the concept of sustainable productivity, which I define as a focus on maximising productive output over your lifetime.
- This results in an emphasis on working effectively and efficiently, rather than working harder and/or longer.
- In the context of frequent reports of burnout and perfectionism, I think a focus on sustainable productivity may be particularly important and beneficial.
- Though we haven’t yet conducted rigorous research in this area, interventions that appear promising in this regard include using a task management system, increasing financial/ digital security, and installing a variety of simple web extensions to streamline your work.
The importance of sustainable productivity
Productivity advice is often associated with a push to work harder and longer. Surely you could work more than 40 hours a week if you truly want to maximise your impact? Couldn’t you be eating your lunch while continuing to work, rather than wasting time taking a break?
I want to argue that this logic is not only dangerous, it’s actively wrong. Approaches like those above to being productive will produce a lower level of impact in the long term than a focus on sustainable productivity.
Sustainable productivity: aiming to maximise productive work output over one’s full lifetime
A focus on sustainable productivity takes issues of burnout, value drift, and demandingness very seriously. As a quick worked example:
- Let’s assume that working 60 hours a week on a project increases your impact through this work by 50% over working a normal 40 hour week.
- You keep up this working pattern for a year before developing symptoms of burnout.
- This burnout spirals into significant mental and physical health issues that require substantial work and treatment to rectify
- As a consequence, your productive output for the subsequent 5 years is reduced by an average of 20%
- Over the course of these 6 years, your average productivity ends up at 75% of someone who had simply worked a regular 40 hours throughout. Your good intentions of working harder and longer have resulted in you effectively working 10 hours less a week.
This is obviously a very rough example but we think that the underlying point is robust. We intend to model this issue in greater depth in future research.
While intensive periods of work can sometimes be necessary to deliver on key goals, caution should always be exercised around making this choice given the potential longer-term consequences.
The value of your time is highly variable
Lost to an extent in discussions of time-money trade-offs is the important recognition that your time is not of equal value.
Most people’s energy levels, motivation, and focus fluctuate through a given day. In light of this, align work of high importance and/or high cognitive load with the periods of your day in which you’re most alert and engaged. If you tend to warm up slowly into the workday, it’s probably not wise to follow the commonly-given advice of tackling the most important things first.
The same logic applies on a more pronounced level to time-constrained activities. As highlighted in this great post, your time during a conference, an in-person work retreat, or while visiting family may be of far higher value than your average hour/ day. Consider aggressively trading for additional time in these circumstances, such as by paying for many of the recommendations for streamlining daily tasks below.
Productivity is broader than you think
The database published last week includes recommendations across a dozen different categories. I think productivity is often narrowly conceived as a collection of tools and strategies for prioritising work and streamlining time spent on daily tasks.
In compiling our suggestions, we found a much broader range of paths towards working more effectively and efficiently.
To highlight a few less common approaches to increasing your productivity:
- Investing in things that make you happy and help you relax.
This could take the form of buying better cooking equipment, paying for a sports club membership, or ringfencing time for a Sabbath-like period of rest and relaxation.
- Preventing financial and security shocks that compromise your ability to work
Investing time in improving your digital security, such as by setting up a password manager, a 2FA key, or a VPN could significantly reduce the likelihood of suffering a phishing attack or identity fraud.
Working extra hours with the express aim of building a larger financial runway could reduce stress associated with financial worries in the long-term. Significant savings also make it easier to take low-likelihood, high payoff bets with your work.
- Making your digital environments more distraction-proof
I think a lot of people could be more aggressive in controlling the flow of information they receive.
Limit interruptions to periods of flow/ deeper work by installing simple blocking extensions (e.g. for Facebook and Youtube), installing a website blocker that prevents workarounds, batching emails, and turning off instant notifications.
Final thoughts
These notes form part of Effective Self-Help’s preliminary research into the most effective ways individuals can improve their productivity. We intend to greatly extend both the depth and breadth of our productivity research over the coming months.
In the meantime, we encourage you to pair our intervention database with our behaviour change form, helping you follow through on making changes that can bring significant benefit to your life and work.