What You Need To Understand About Productivity Advice

“Time management is about life management.”

— Idowu Koyenikan, Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability

Many people misunderstand the purpose of productivity advice.

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. Fred works 30 hours a week and publishes 12 articles in that week. Steve works 10 hours a week and publishes 9 articles.

Fred certainly works harder, but it’s Steve who is more productive. Steve gets nearly one article done an hour, and Fred gets less than half an article done per hour. If Steve worked as many hours as Fred, he would more than double Fred’s volume.

Productivity advice (at least, good productivity advice) is about being Steve, not Fred.

People who read productivity advice are people who want to be like Steve. We want to get more done in less time to focus on our health, family, hobbies, travel, or anything else we’d like.

Productivity advice can help us do those things by freeing up our time.

Productivity advice teaches us how to get the most out of the time we use for work — whether that’s work we get paid for, housework, errand work, or side hustle work. When it comes to the time you use to get things done, productivity advice can help you learn to use it effectively.

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.

My passion for productivity hacks is inspired by my love of unstructured free time. The more I get done with my working hours, the more time is left over in my day for unstructured fun.

Productivity skills enable me to live my life the way I want, instead of spending long hours working.

2 Things People Mistake For Productivity

Now that you know what it truly means to be productive, let’s discuss two things people often mistake for productivity: busyness and workaholism.

1) Busyness

Busyness is not productive. I know that when you’re busy, it feels like you’re really productive, but you’re probably not.

Busyness is the opposite of productivity. A productive person is quick and effective about getting things done, so they have all the free time they want. On the other hand, a busy person never has any free time because they take too long to get things done.

If you know someone who is never available to hang out because they are always busy, you know someone who is not productive.

Everyone has seasons of busyness in their life, so if you go a month or two feeling busy, that’s normal. But if you’ve felt overworked for years, you can benefit a lot from the rest of this book.

2) Workaholism

Workaholism is not productive, either.

There’s an idealized stereotype of an always-on employee in American culture, someone who works ten hours a day and is still available on nights and weekends. This imaginary career exemplar always updates their JIRA board, gets recommended for advancements regularly, and frequently wins monthly company awards for performance.

Of course, they’re available as a loving father and husband at home, but only between “short” emails and “quick” phone calls.

To my mind, workaholism is busyness made cancerous.

People feel good about themselves when they work hard. Workaholics take this to the extreme, loading their schedule all day every day, so they have many possibilities to feel good about themselves for being a hard worker.

As they load down their schedules more and feel better about themselves, they become less concerned with productivity. Productivity is about working fewer hours, and workaholics are not interested in working fewer hours. They feel good when they work more hours, not less.

Workaholism, then, is not about actual productivity. It’s about feeling good. Workaholics use work to feel good the same way shopaholics go to the mall to feel good.

In case it’s not apparent, workaholism isn’t healthy for you. It leaves your life dramatically unbalanced, it eats up all your free time, and if your work is low-quality, it can even hold your career back.

What Productivity Advice Is Useful For

“My goal is no longer to get more done, but rather to have less to do.”

— Francine Jay, Miss Minimalist: Inspiration to Downsize, Declutter, and Simplify

If people misunderstand what it means to be productive, they definitely misunderstand when you can be productive.

Most people use productivity skills at work to get through tasks quickly. What motivates them to read listicles full of productivity hacks is the desire to get through work quickly to do more work.

Doing more work is an excellent use of productivity skills, but it’s not the only use. Productivity skills are useful for a wide range of things.

• Stay-at-home parents can use productivity skills to get housework and parental duties done more quickly.
• Students can use productivity skills to organize their coursework and learn more effectively.
• People planning long-term travel can use productivity skills to organize travel research and create a schedule.
• People doing home improvement projects can use productivity skills to reduce the amount of time and money a remodel will take.

Very few of my readers want productivity advice because they want to do better at work. They want productivity advice because they want to start a side hustle, pursue a hobby, or get fit.

My interest in productivity advice not only comes from a love of freedom but from a love of eudaimonia as well. (Eudaimonia is what the Greeks called “the good life,” analogous to a well-lived life or a meaningful life). Productivity skills have helped me as a writer, but they have also helped me get fit, save money, and make the most of my time with friends and loved ones.

No doubt, there are some things you would like to accomplish. Perhaps you’re a student trying to complete college online, or you’re a stay-at-home parent whose responsibilities have dangerously multiplied. Or maybe you’d like to start painting finally. It doesn’t matter. If you’d like to get more done in less time, whatever it is, productivity skills can help you.

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