Productivity Advice Isn’t Only for Rich White Men

As most regular readers of the productivity and self-improvement genres have realized by now, most productivity writers are white men. Most people who are interested in productivity advice writ large are white men, too. It’s one of the most wealthy, white, male writing spaces on the internet. (Cisgender, too, come to think of it).

This understandably turns many people off of productivity writing. When the only cultural references and examples used by productivity writers are ones geared toward rich white men, it’s easy for anyone poor, minority, or non-male to feel pretty marginalized by the genre.

And I admit, this is something the productivity space needs to work on.

But there’s a lot of good in productivity and self-help writing, too. A lot. It pains me to see this good being left behind by so many people because it comes in unappealing, culturally insensitive packaging.

So I’d like to take this time to talk about what productivity and self-improvement advice is really about beneath all the white male entrepreneur posturing.

At its core, productivity advice isn’t about how to work longer hours. It’s about how to get more out of the hours that you do work.

For example, consider two writers. Writer A works 30 hours a week and publishes 12 articles in that week. Writer B works 10 hours a week and publishes 9 articles.

Writer A certainly works harder, but at the end of the day, its writer B who is more productive. Writer B gets nearly one article done an hour, whereas writer A gets less than half an article done per hour.

Ostensibly, most of us would like to be like writer B. We would like to get all our responsibilities done in a much shorter time period, so we can use the remainder of our time to pursue other goals like physical health, family bonding, social wellness, hobbies, travel, and all the other things that make life worth living.

That’s where productivity advice steps in.

Productivity advice teaches you how to get the most out of your working hours, so you can spend less time working.

How you choose to spend the rest of your time — whether it’s on taking on more work, picking up an exercise habit, or learning to play the guitar — is totally up to you.

I’m a perfect example of this. I’m a serious productivity nerd, but what do I use all my productivity research for? Figuring out how I can write as many high-quality Medium stories as possible, in the minimum amount of time possible, so I can spend the majority of my time doing things that aren’t working.

According to my time tracker, I only worked 10 hours last week. The rest was spent doing whatever I wanted (which, last week, was folding origami, drinking cheap wine, going on long walks, and reading various books).

To take it a step further, productivity advice doesn’t even have to be applied to career work itself. Many people reading productivity advice hope for more productivity at work, but that isn’t the only application of productivity advice. For instance:

• Stay-at-home parents may read productivity advice so they can formulate a plan about how to get all the housework and chores done in less time.
• People planning a trans-continental travel itinerary may use productivity advice to organize their research and create a very user-friendly travel plan.
• Students may use productivity advice to organize their coursework in a way that allows them to complete it both in less time and at a higher quality, increasing their chances of getting good grades.
• People doing home-improvement projects may use productivity advice to decrease the amount of time and money their home-improvement project will take.

My personal example of this involves getting fit.

For a while last year, I was pretty into weightlifting. I came to a point where I wanted to start bulking and weight cutting cycles. I used everything I knew about personal productivity to help myself organize and track my dietary plan during that time, and to help me schedule out when the best days and times to hit the gym would be.

Instead of making me super-productive at work, productivity advice made me super-productive at the gym.

Many of my readers tell me stories like these. They want to be more productive not because they want to perform better at work, but because they just got laid off from work, and they need to get a side hustle going or they risk losing their homes. Or, they tell me they’re interested in productivity advice because they’ve decided it’s finally time for them to start reading more/pursue a hobby of painting/start that DJ’ing company on the side and they need to create more time in which to do so.

In fact, very few of my readers actually fit the white-male workaholic productivity nerd stereotype.

Presumably, you’re trying to do something in your life right now. Perhaps you’re a student trying to get through school remotely, or you’re a stay-at-home parent for whom the responsibilities of being a homemaker have multiplied tenfold. Or maybe you’re just an artist who would like to paint more. It doesn’t matter.

No matter who you are, if you’d like to get more done in less time, productivity advice can help you.

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