Productivity is far beyond merely ticking off tasks on your to-do list.
The concept of productivity is more than just accomplishing everyday tasks. We routinely complete items on our daily schedules, yet often find ourselves feeling stagnant, unable to make substantial strides toward life objectives, effect meaningful change or simply enhance our happiness.
As it seems, the philosophy of “busy is better,” endorsed by numerous efficiency gurus, may not necessarily bring us any closer to our ambitions.
So, you’ve marked an item as completed, but what’s the real achievement?
Our workday is often overrun by immediate demands appearing in emails or on Teams/Slack platforms. Instant meeting invites fill our schedules.
But how many of these tasks, messages, and meetings are actually steering us towards our objectives? What value are we creating? How are we quantifying our efforts?
Cal Newport, in his latest book entitled Slow Productivity (2024), argues that we’ve fallen prey to a state of restless busyness and find it challenging to disengage.
The struggle with efficiency and time management has been ongoing ever since computers found a place on our work desks.
In the late 2000s, as email became the commander of knowledge workers, many began assessing their productivity based on the quantity of emails dispatched and read daily.
Had no time to tackle an email inquiry or project request? Simply highlight it in Outlook, forwarding it to an uncertain future of more tasks, and yet gain the satisfaction of having achieved something.
The pandemic era, coupled with the advent of Zoom and instant messaging, escalated our engagement in busyness. Add to that Zoom fatigue, the anxiety of political unrest and global incidents, maintaining personal and family health, and managing daily chores correctly, including the unforgettable one-way supermarket aisles, and we ended up witnessing pseudo-productivity at its peak.
Cal Newport describes “pseudo-productivity” as “the indication of busy activity being primarily used as a measure of actual productive effort.”
Examples of such activities we might come across in the workplace include:
- Maintaining an active status on instant messaging and sporadically sending messages to convey the impression of being busy and available.
- Reacting to emails as soon as they arrive, even while attending a meeting — the epitome of multitasking.
- Participating in a meeting but not contributing as the agenda does not touch upon your work.
- Adding an already accomplished task to a to-do list and ticking it off to increase the visibility of tasks completed.
However, pseudo-productivity isn’t necessarily negative.
Certainly, administrative tasks, emails, meetings, and chats are essential for conducting business and fostering connections.
But pseudo-productivity-oriented practices may not promote our best work or contribute to our happiness and healthiness. Moreover, if we only indulge in these tasks, are we genuinely working towards our objectives?
The notion of productivity stems from the agricultural era of crop production and the Industrial Revolution’s assembly lines.
Productivity was equated with efficiency, with higher vegetable yields being favorable and an increase in car production catering to a population seeking enhanced mobility.
When managers became overly task-centered, pushing employees to their brink, labor unions and the Fair Labor Standards Act intervened to structure the workday and protect workers’ wellbeing.
However, as computers and knowledge work gained prominence in the 1970s, assessing a worker’s efficiency became a more complex task. Knowledge work transcends the paradigm of units produced per hour, a measure that worked perfectly during Henry Ford’s assembly line era. But how do you define productivity for HR professionals, marketing managers, IT security analysts, and other knowledge workers?
Tasks such as researching an employee relations case, planning a branding campaign, or fixing a network bug require hours or even days. It’s not about hourly output; it requires dedicated and uninterrupted time for in-depth work.
Healthcare provides an intriguing perspective on productivity. It is assessed by the number of direct patient care hours a nurse provides per shift. Clinical leaders’ efficiency is measured by their team’s productivity figures. However, participation in training and upskilling activities doesn’t count as “productivity.” Hence, in certain facilities, nurses often attend leadership training classes during off-hours because their department cannot afford to allocate significant “non-productive” hours in the schedule.
Renowned business management authority, Peter Drucker, acknowledged in 1995 that the challenge of identifying productivity in the context of the knowledge worker was something of a new frontier; a definitive interpretation eluded even him.
As matters stand, there exists no generally accepted — and high-quality — delineation of what constitutes productivity for a knowledge worker.
Consequently, this ambiguity allows for individual interpretation by every organization or leader. Should your role grant you a fair degree of independence, it is incumbent upon you to arrive at your own definition.
Visualize wrapping up your workday by acknowledging to yourself, “My day was indeed productive.”
- But what exactly does that entail? What have you achieved?
- Were your achievements in sync with your objectives or those of your team?
- Did you make progress on an ongoing project?
- Did your principles steer your efforts for the day?
- Did you make a positive impact on a colleague or their work?
Pondering these questions at the end of your workday could guide you towards a definition of productivity that adds value to your professional life and beyond, instead of reducing it to a mere tally of tasks accomplished.
Our professional landscapes have drastically accelerated over recent years, with no indication of this pace abating. It’s crucial for us to reassess our understanding of productivity at work and whether it accurately reflects our contributions.
Those in leadership roles are tasked with defining what productivity signifies for them and ensuring they model healthful productivity practices.
While technology proves to be a boon on many fronts, in this instance, it might be contributing more towards our “pseudo-productivity” quotient. This breed of “pseudo-productivity” is inducing considerable fatigue and eventual burnout amongst our working population.
