You Don’t Need More Productivity Advice

“If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.”
 — Bruce Lee

A lot of people seem to approach productivity as something they lack. “I need to become productive,” they say. “Maybe I need a todo list.” Or a calendar, or a time-tracking system, or the Pomodoro technique. They think that their life is lacking some essential productivity tool — and once they find that tool, they will find their magical ‘productivity,’ and everything will fall into place.

As a teenager and young adult, productivity tools were my favorite thing in the world. Every productivity trick invented by the year 2012, I had tried at one point or another. Every single task tracking notebook, bullet journal, app, and calendar system had been mine. But you know what? Not a single one of them made me more productive. Regardless of if my todo list was immaculately organized or several weeks out of date, I got the same amount of work done. Productivity systems were great for making me feel productive, but they were not great for actually making me productive.

Fast forward to late 2018. I was going through a tremendously painful breakup with someone who was downright dangerous for me. Through my haze of pain, I wondered how I’d ended up with someone so bad for me. The answer dawned on me; it was because I kept saying “yes” to things that were wrong for me. In the wake of that breakup, I started cutting anything that was bad for me out of my life. Toxic people, toxic platforms (goodbye social media), toxic hobbies (goodbye video games), and toxic beliefs. If it wasn’t good for my emotional health, I decided, it had to go.

I didn’t embark on this journey because I was trying to increase my productivity. My personal productivity was the last thing on my mind. But as the weeks passed, I found that not only did my mood improve, my productivity did as well. I’ve spent the majority of my life as a disorganized and undermotivated person, but suddenly, I was spending the majority of my days reading, writing, and exercising. I started waking up at 5 AM and it wasn’t even difficult. Who was I? Where had the old Megan gone?

I spent the better part of a decade believing my lack of motivation was due to something that was missing. My breakup revealed it was quite the opposite; I was unmotivated and disorganized not because of something missing from me, but from something stopping me.

What made me a productive person wasn’t an outside intervention that fixed me. What made me a productive person was the act of identifying behaviors that were making me unproductive and eliminating them, one by one.

Today, I think of productivity like a river. When the river isn’t blocked, what needs to be done flows naturally. But when the river is blocked, by a disorganized todo list or clutter or a social media habit, the water stops and becomes stagnant. If you want the river to flow, you don’t need to make more water; you just need to unblock the river.

If you’re trying to increase your own productivity, don’t ask yourself what you could do to make yourself more productive. Instead, ask yourself what you’re doing that’s making you unproductive.

• Do you have a Tinder habit that leads to more time spent swiping than time spent on actual dates?
• Do you, like me, have a clutter problem that means you spend more time looking for stuff and getting ready for stuff than you do actually doing stuff?
• Do you have a problem that is totally unique and your own that a productivity writer has never touched on before?

Whatever it is, do what needs to be done to get rid of it. And the next, and the next.

If you’re not as productive as you would like to be, you’re not missing something. You are whole as you are. All you need to do is figure out what’s holding you back and stop letting it.

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