What's next for personal productivity

I don't think that going "holistic" is the future of productivity. Something something dilution of focus.

My personal view: the next big improvement should come from tackling emotional self-management.

This is derived mostly from my own experience of ~15 years of struggling with personal productivity (and going through every trick in every popular book), as well as observing others close to me. In recent years I came to the conclusion that it's all about emotional state.

The planner, the TODO list, the Pomodoro timer, the Inbox & Someday/Maybe folders, the bullet journal - those are all complexity management tools. They address the problem of having too many things taking your attention, making you unable to focus. They don't address the problem of not being able to focus at all, not being able to open your TODO list, not being able to work on a task for more than 30 seconds before either feeling distressed, or beginning to question your life priorities. Conversely, when you're feeling really good and pumped about the thing you're doing, you don't need a complicated system to keep you focused - a notebook and some pens, or an open text file, is enough to keep the complexity manageable, and you'll figure out an effective enough system on the fly.

I've only begun exploring the space of emotional self-management, and so far, I haven't found any neat hacks or effective methods. A big problem is that the brain adapts to attempts at cheating it - like e.g. there was a time where I could control my emotional states through the choice of music, but it stopped working after I started exploiting it to make myself work on things. Similarly, all attempts at self-gamifying fail because I know I'm just manipulating myself.

But if anyone can crack that problem - effective emotional self-management - I'll happily shower them with all the money I can spare.

I think this article misunderstands what productivity is and is trying to achieve.

Productivity is about achieving your goals with as little waste as possible, and getting things done. It's not about deciding what those goals are. That's not a slight on productivity, it's just what the word means.

This article isn't talking about productivity, it's talking about meaning & fulfilment. But the idea that deciding what you want out of your own life is some new thing (a "3.0" as opposed to something humans have been concerned about since the dawn of time) is a mistake.

So... I'm not sure if it really says anything.

The content seemed a bit empty to me. It can be said that "fulfilment" is the next step of anything.

"Fitness 3 - fulfilment. Traditionally fitness focused on building muscle and nothing else, then came cross-fit and calisthenics that sacrificed pure muscle mass in favor of extending bodily functioning. Fitness 3 will be fulfilment where everyone can be as fit as they want or need to be without the pressures of ..."

"Reading 3 - fulfilment. Reading community has gone through two different stages in the past: first people were reading as many books as they could, summarising them and storing them in their bookshelves; then came the niche-reading which divided people into groups - we had sci-fi readers, popular psychology groups, detective story enthusiasts and so on. But the tide is shifting towards the next step for reading - fulfilment. Readers are now seeking meaning in their life and they try to balance reading with other activities for a more holistic life experience ..."

I didn't manage to gain something useful from reading the article, maybe that's why my take here is a bit cynical.

Not reading meandering meta articles about productivity makes me more productive.

This lost me when it said that the internet enabled people to push things onto your plate, and then went on to: " No longer did you have the list of items assigned by your boss to handle; you had the world's task list for you to manage, too."

Well, OK... true, if you never set any boundaries in your life, maybe it does make sense to spend years learning new ways to handle it all. And really, the article almost goes there when it starts to talk about fulfillment and there being more to life than your to do lists. Sadly, it whooshes right on by that point and says "productivity 3.0" will help businesses find ways to empower their employees, and then just fades away into some vague idea of knowledge management.

It seems like the author came so close to realizing that they need to guide their own ship, but they have spent so much time dealing with how much they want to get done, they simply fail to ask whether or not they should have been OK with taking so much on in the first place.

Set some boundaries, people. Your job is an important part of your life, but there are limits.

I should probably say this in response to the critiques but there are many of them and multiplying.

The critiques I see now are of the form: productivity is a means to an end and not the end so this article confuses them.

But I think that is sort of the point.

Traditionally we think of improving the means to achieve the ends we want but the author seems to suggest we should — or are or will — examine the ends to make sure we are not achieving the wrong ones.

It’s almost another way of describing the productivity hack of the no list or choosing what not to achieve to focus on what we do want to achieve.

My worry about these types of articles is that can make conclusions that sound like they should be universal but are not.

Company size and nature of work; turnover of staff; existing teams vs new teams all have an effect on whether you can give people the freedom to work asynchronously, work offline, have creative freedom.

I know plenty of devs who simply would not be productive if left to themselves, they need direction, they lack the skills to creatively solve problems and that's fine. Build them a backlog and let them tick things off. If they need help, let them message somebody and disturb them to get them unstuck.

A lot of the cult of independent and async working sounds like people who are introvert and just want to do what they want to do. This often doesn't work in business where we want people to be proactively working together to achieve a goal and some of this does require our time being "wasted" actually discussing things.

GTD has various "heights" of reviews for your week, your goals, your "someday maybe" projects, etc. Failing to perform these higher level reviews keeps you in the weeds.

For me it's a nap. A nap is next.

I did a complete 180 on my approach to personal productivity, and that change is similar to the transition from Productivity 2.0 to 3.0, as described in the article.

Before that U-turn I kept everything in my to-do list and had lots of recurring tasks. However, after several years I realized that I've become a slave to chores -- a very conscientious, diligent slave who has no time or mindspace for projects that really matter to me.

Nowadays, I use an opposite approach -- I don't keep a "general" to-do list at all, and I do chores only when they become really obnoxious. I do, however, keep a Zettelkasten with a dozen projects in it, and several stream-of-consciousness journals for ongoing projects.

The vast majority of productivity articles have two traits:

1. They are anecdotal, and reference other anecdotal articles for evidence

2. They focus exclusively on how an individual should be productive.

Keeping the first in mind, their accuracy is dubious at best. Real experiments and studies on "productivity" are harder to find and worth more.

And as for the second... there's only so much an individual can accomplish alone. The most efficient gear in the world can only do so much for the machine as a whole. There is more to be gained by improving the productivity of groups rather than individuals.

I liked this article. Productivity, is the next biggest thing to solve. All these “productivity” (tools for thought) are the toys of the future. We have too much information, and crappy ways to manage it. At the end of the day, that’s all a computer is, an information processing machine. So we’re merely modeling how humans of the future will interact with personal computers. Ultimately it’s about changing that underlying relation with humans and information.

Doing the work that everyone is telling us that they're doing, but they're actually not? They're just writing, "hacking", sharing about it...

I do not know what the author means by productivity. On the surface there is a structure in the thought achieved by versioning the term, but beyond that there is just the chaos of ideas. And I am not sold on redefining the words, please invent new ones if you really have to.

Yes before the internet nobody could communicate ideas. What a genius.

My take on this article's tl;dr;:

COVID shone some light on how pointless productivity is without fulfillment. Let's achieve fulfillment with better productivity tools!

Now the critique:

Being after productivity at the expense of fulfillment is unbelievable and unbelievably stupid. I don't mean to generalize and I really hope it's not a sign of our times, but I can't ignore this hypothesis for now.

Anyway, sol ing fulfillment issues with productivity tools certainly sounds like techno-solutionism to me and avoids a much simpler solution that is regularly overlooked: removing some productivity objectives instead of working to solve your issues with more productivity.

Working less.

I continue to believe that we don't talk enough about the root causes of several productivity issues, instead focus too much on the symptoms.

We somehow accept that the average office worker is constantly dealing with information overload and distractions, and never wonder why or make a serious attempt to fix it. We find systems to cope with it, but don't address the root cause.

Likewise, we stretch people to the point where they are often near a burn-out and then offer meditation as a solution. How about not stretching people out in the first place?

I'd like to offer an interesting contrast by means of my background. I'm born into the lower working class. My family, the town I live in, it's almost all blue collar workers.

Strangely, these people never have meetings. Or at most one per week. They may have a few spontaneous 5 minute phone calls per day to calibrate, and that's it. They seem to mostly just work, as they know what to do, how to do it, and when to do it.

The immediate excuse we might come up with is that the nature of the work is different. More repetitive, less complex, less dependencies. Sometimes, but not always true. But it's still not an excuse in any case.

We quite simply don't have things in order. If for the coming week you don't know what the 1-3 things are you should be working on, that's a planning/priority problem. Which is to be addressed centrally.

If you are under siege by 20 other things not part of those 1-3 things, you shouldn't "deal with it", you should aim to eradicate them. Because clearly there's a planning/responsibility misalignment going on.

If your planning/priority situation changes by the day or even hour, your team has shit planning. Fix it.

If you spend half of each day not working, instead figuring out what to do, stop accepting this reality. Something is fishy upstream.

If you are bombarded with status meetings and messages, you have a systems problem.

Is there a single silver bullet? No. All I'm saying is that a huge part of these problems are solvable, and shouldn't be accepted as a fact of life for you to cope with. Demand clear tasks and planning. Demand uninterrupted time to do the tasks. It's not anti-business, it's pro-business. The worker AND the business benefits.

Fulfillment has nothing to do with it. Of course work-life balance matters, as well as chasing the luxury of doing work you like. But the lack of fulfillment in office work likely does not come from the tasks itself being dreadful.

Example 1. A manager draws a line on a patch of sand and tells me to dig into the ground 2 inches deep along this line. It needs to be ready before tomorrow.

Whilst not a fun task, it is clear. It is fulfilling in the sense that you would get paid for it, plus at the end of the day you have a feeling of accomplishment. You may feel tired, but not burned out.

Example 2. The dysfunctional office version of the above would be something like this...

Yeah so we need you to dig that line, but please check with our design department as they may have some changes in the line's design. The Kentucky office said that the line might need to be dug into another location entirely. Please also look plan a meeting with legal as our shovels may not be compliant. By the way, today you also urgently need to paint the fence, renovate the shed and design a new pond but we're not really sure when what needs to happen or how much time you have so figure it out. By the way, did you take the mandatory HR and IT security training that is due this week. Sorry, whilst I was typing it turns out the digging needs to be 1 inch deep, not 2 inch, so please put the sand back. But do it after the painting. I think. As per latest policy, please declare your commute expenses en route to the digging site, I've attached a PDF with instructions, required reading. By the way, are you reading your email? 7 people asked about the status of the digging, yet you haven't replied? Please reply urgently as to prevent further escalations. Which reminds me, please skip lunch at the site as one of our investors may drop by. Further, as you know, we're working on new recruit diggers, can you do an interview with them around 7PM? We need to move quickly as there's many digging opportunities.

I'm sure I could go on. The point is that example 2 creates burn-out, a lack of fulfillment, meditation as a requirement, and so on. It has absolutely nothing to do with the actual task of digging. It's garbage planning and incompetence. This is why you'll never find a blue collar worker in a meditation center, only stressed out white collar workers.

This is so out of touch.