How To Be More Productive by Working Less
when it comes to productivity, things are not what they seem.
I believe productivity is a deeply personal thing.
For example, procrastination is deeply tied to anxiety — so it’s important to develop an understanding of your own neuroses and fears. Action has a momentum to it, and so developing personal rituals to get your own snowball rolling downhill is likely far more important than what yerba mate supplements to take, or what fucking yoga mat to sit and scratch your ass on in the morning.
Most of us, for most of our lives, conceptualize work as a linear function. What I mean by “linear” is that the amount of productive output you create is directly proportional to a number of hours you input.
The truth is that most thoughtful, brain-intensive work does not unfold like this. And this feels really unfair to us. So we spend a lot of time complaining to our parents and making excuses that our bosses don’t appreciate our “genius” or whatever.
As we’ll see, as well-intentioned and glamorous as the Religion of Hustle is, it often backfires on people. Because the truth is that most types of work (especially work that will make you some money in 2017) does not produce linear returns, it produces diminishing returns.
Exercise has diminishing returns for the simple reason that your muscles tire out. And as your muscles tire out, their ability to be stimulated for further growth diminishes until it’s more or less non-existent.
Most work is this way. Why? Because, like a muscle, your brain tires out. And if you’re exercising your brain by doing any sort of problem-solving, or important decision-making, then you’re limited in how much you can effectively accomplish in a day.
When it comes to creative work, not only is there a diminishing return, but at a certain point, writing more produced a negative return. Because bad writing isn’t just bad—bad writing creates more work for yourself, because it requires way more time to revise and edit.
Eventually, after months of frustration, I began to notice that most days, everything I wrote in the first 1-2 hours was great. It needed little revision and usually fit quite well with the message I was trying to go for in the book.
It wasn’t until I had been writing for over a year that I worked up the courage to try limiting my writing to two hours a day.
My guess is that most creative work operates on a negative returns curve.
Every business, job, or project has what I call a leverage point that instantly makes everything else you do more effective.
solving problems is like food for your mind. It makes your mind happy. It makes it feel important and worthy and capable—all things directly linked to happiness.
But what’s amazing is that this leisure time—this ability to distract one’s brain away from problem-solving and work, actually makes your brain far more effective upon returning to work.
Posted on August 7, 2019