The Cult of Productivity
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Published 2023-10-20
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#productivity #business #career
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You know you are a lazy person, and there are thousands of people who want to tell you exactly how to fix that. But the truth is, you are probably just fine, and falling too far into the productivity rabbit hole will just make you lazier, more stressed, and poorer than when you started.
Modern life is full of an endless list of things to do, you spend a lot of time getting to a job, putting in your eight hours a day (if you are lucky), getting home again, and only then can you go shopping, clean your house, wash your clothes, pay your bills, cook, and help out your family with anything they need. Thanks to the rising cost of living and stagnating wages you might also want to including a side hustle or a business project in addition to everything else oh and at some point have some time to relax with friends and family or just get a good night sleep.
It’s a lot, and us humans were not meant to be this switched on all the time, so to keep you on your grind and help you feel a little bit less overwhelmed by everything you need to do, there is a new movement of pseudo self help gurus. These people promise to teach you simple tricks that conveniently fit in seminars, books or 15-minute YouTube videos that will help you to better organise your life, stay motivated and achieve your goals, even if your goal is not having to work 2 jobs.
It sounds helpful, or at the very least harmless, but following this advice could put you further behind for four reasons. The first reason is that it just doesn't work. Productivity brands and influencers have the opposite problem to “finfluencers” another group that promises to fix your finances instead of everything else in your life.
Good personal finance should be boring and simple, save diligently, avoid high interest debt, maximise your income and invest responsibly for long term goals. It’s so simple that everything you need to know about personal finance can fit on a post-it note and people have done it. That’s a problem for personal finance influencers because they make a lot of money by posting weekly content and can’t keep saying the same thing every week so they end up making uninformed predications or telling financial success stories that were more a product of luck than diligent financial planning. But we have already talked enough about those guys before. Productivity influencers have the opposite problem, there is just TOO much to talk about and without knowing each and every one of their viewers situations they can’t come up with good suggestions, and uninformed advice is the same thing as bad advice. A report by psychology today founded so called “toxic productivity” as one of the leading causes of diagnosed anxiety and depression.
A strong focus on productivity also produces worse outcomes for everyone.
A report by the Harvard Business School studied employees who were fired for bad workplace behaviour. The study found that a large share of those terminated employees were high performers in their roles, but brough down everybody that worked with them. A strong belief in their own abilities, a strict adherence to their own routines, and a high expectation for everybody around them made them worse at delivering good results for the business. The researches found that a worker that had an intense focus on their own productivity might return $5,303 in cost savings to a company through increased output, avoiding a toxic hire will net an estimated $12,489 because they collaborate more easily with co-workers and clients and are less resistant to changes in the organisation.
An extreme focus on productivity in your personal life can also simply make you less productive as you spend all your time and effort hyper optimizing every task in your life instead of just getting them done in a way that works for you. Despite the crazy amount of harm this can do, there are three terrible reasons why the cult of productivity isn’t going anywhere.
So it’s time to learn How Money Works to find out why trying to become more productive is only going to make things worse
All Comments (21)
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I know if I was already rich and wanted to hold back potential future competitors, I’d tell them to wake up at 5AM, ignore sleep, and spend all their time “grinding” the lowest barrier-to-entry, highest competition business.
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Used to be trapped in the rat race... then 2 of my colleagues died. One in his 40 and one in her 50s. The 50 year old dropped dead during work, and all she got was a "large condolensces card." Then their jobs were posted immediately. This made me realize that we are nothing to the company. You give your life to your job, then when you literally die from work, they replace you in the blink of a eye.
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Something I've figured out as an adult. You'll never work hard enough in the eyes of someone that makes more money the harder you work.
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I love how in the creative industries, a lot of successful people actually tell you to stop working at times and go take a walk or do 'nothing' to give your brain some rest. So a lot of this 24/7 hustle mentality is not always applicable to everyone :)
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There was a time when one 9 to 5 Monday to Friday job could support a family of 5, pay for a nice house, afford a yearly vacation, and put you kids through college.
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This 100%. My last job I was fired because of my attitude. I worked so hard, took extra shifts, even covered multiple positions when others didn’t show up. It got to the point where I was feeling under appreciated and over worked, and I got angry about it, so I got fired. They said they’d rather have a terrible worker who never shows up, who has a good attitude, than a good worker who isn’t happy. So they place blame on me for not being happy rather than themselves and their shit hole business. They seemed nicer to the ones who flaked out than the ones who showed up. This was a locally owned pet store. The owners were lazy and greedy. Glad I got fired.
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Prioritisation is a 100x more useful skill than productivity
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The entire self help industry can be deprecated by one sentence: Take Action
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In my early 20s, I thought productivity videos were a compilation of good people teaching us young ones the things they wish they would’ve been taught… Now at 30 years old, I know these guys are full of it, and are simply exploiting people’s desire to improve, and as we can see, they make plenty of profit off of this… Shaking my head.
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There was a studie that showed your productivity takes nosedive after working 8 hours. And if you do labor job this becomes dangerous. In my teens year I worked for my fathers old ass friend carpenter. There was strict 8hours work rule. You know one of the two main reasons people lose fingers? Overworking. You can't stay focused for 12hours everyday.
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It is not just chores that get neglected: family, friends, and gaining a community reputation that you can enjoy later in life are sacrificed for the pursuit productivity.
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i went the rabbit hole. Waking up way too early, going to the gym before work, working in a high demanding job in a consulting company, studying in my evenings to get more certs, and grinding the weekends to try to push a new startup or amazon brand or whatever, with my schedule perfectly fitted on when to eat, what exactly to do on weekends, when can i met friends, etc. Ended up depressed. Now i am just taking it easy in my day job, still going to the gym before work, and still testing business ideas, but way more relaxed, if i het fired it will take me less than a month to find a similar job, but if i lose my friends or family it will be much more to bring them back. And i dont need to be a millionaire by 30 because i am already 30+ and not mill
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I learned how to grind from Graham Stephan... be born with rich parents and tell people they're lazy for not buying 4 properties while in their early 20's.
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"Been busy is not the same as been productive" That paired with "20% of work, delivers 80% of the results" is why I ask myself "This will matter in a year?" This will help you to prioritize. And remember, planning and learning is not a replacement to actually doing the stuff.
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It's also important to mention that what work you do matters more than how productive you are at doing it. If you're a really productive dishwasher, you are still going to make $12.50/hr. If you're the lazy manager, you'll keep making your $28/hr or more.
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I needed to hear this today. I’m in a job I hate but it pays the bills and allows me to be with my 5 kids most nights and every weekend without interruption. I’ve gotten wrapped up in real estate investing and entrepreneur content that’s made me more anxious than I probably need to be.
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Yup I was on the hustle game 2012-2021. Flipping stuff on amazon and ebay. Money wasn't bad then i realized I could work for UPS and make more with less stress. The amount of money i had tied up in inventory could have been in index funds making me some money with no work. Once you scale a side business you start to load up on expenses. Warehouse office, self employment tax and insurance etc
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When I was depressed, I would wake up at 5 AM naturally and just do busy work the whole day because I thought that if nothing could bring me joy anyway, I should do the thing that everyone on YouTube says I should do. Now I'm medicated, happy, and wake up at 8 AM, can enjoy my hobbies, have a personality and connect with people better. The trouble with focusing on productivity so much is that it makes it harder to connect with people as you usually are devoid of anything interesting to say. Now it is easier for me to find jobs and opportunities because people like me, despite being "less productive".
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Higher productivity is often due to better skills, and that's something you cannot generate with a handful of quick self-help tips. E.g. high-ranking software engineers are sometimes paid huge sums for "doing nothing", or so the complaint goes. In reality, such engineers have to oversee complex IT projects, e.g. Reviewing complex code that others wrote is obviously a skill. Often, there's no reason to interfere, if everyone does their job smoothly. That's not the same as doing nothing. If there's a snag, it has to be fixed quickly. A good engineer can do it in, say, 2 h, while a less capable person may need a whole day. Clearly, the former engineer is doing a better job and is more valuable for the company than the latter, even though he worked less in terms of pure hours.
