Productivity
By: Sachin Gupta
Tags: Leadership, Productivity, Time Management, Personal Growth, Mindfulness

Personal productivity is a topic I have obsessed all my life. Figuring out how to do more with less has always piqued my interest. Beyond just my Marwari genes, each of us have to make do with finite resources. The most precious being time, energy, and willpower. Time especially is non-replenishable; and ever since our birth, the clock is set against permanently. No wonder, for professionals, personal productivity is a competitive advantage.

Does productivity relate to more to do or less to be done?

The value of time is entirely evident when SuperHuman charges $30/ mo and yet maintains a long waitlist. SuperHuman’s email client is a trail blazer. All keystrokes are optimised, every user move pre-empted and each of user wishes cradled for. Using SuperHuman is akin to peeping into the future. With complete respect to Rahul Vohra (the founder), and my imminent colleagues who swear by the product, I feel it solves for only the symptom. It does not eradicate the disease. The symptom is an unhealthy obsession with inbox = 0. Thus, I fear, using SuperHuman and a wide variety of SuperHuman for X tools solve only for surficial productivity. Productivity is far deeper than using any tool. On contrary, whatever little history I have read suggests real productivity requires freedom from all external tools.

Understanding Productivity

Let me start with a discomforting truth, 99% of our efforts eventually go in vain. In our existential pride, we choose to ignore this power law. Or worse fight this notion. I myself am guilty of doing this. Before you stop reading further, let me ask you to do a quick mental retrospective of your life till date to arrive at this conclusion yourself :) It must be made extremely clear, solving for productivity does not also mean we cease our efforts and await the 1% to magically appear. However, it does begin with questioning our busyness. Listen to Bill Gates’ talk about it — this was the starting point of this blog a couple of years ago. Now that you are still here, let us define productivity for the future course of this discussion.

Productivity = Output/ Input Output is sum total of impact we generate or help generate. Input is time, energy and will power invested.

Theoretically, all humans are endowed with equal access to mother nature in terms of time, energy and will-power. Then how is it that leaders like Buffet, Jobs, Obama, Gandhi, Modi are able to generate phenomenal outcomes with the same finite resources. It comes from understanding the law of physics that governs individual growth.

Short detour: Have you ever wondered how Narendra Modi (plug in your favourite leader) goes about his usual day? Imagine a day in his life over last 9 months — waking up to Galwan incursion, fortifying Covid preparedness in the face of acute personnel and material shortage, assuaging labour migration concern, revamping farm laws while leading a brutal state electoral campaign. One can argue that he possesses vast machinery that does actual work. But then, anyone who has managed even a fraction of this complexity and uncertainty realises how draining the journey is. To do it every day for 20 years requires a level of tooling far evolved than any available off the shelf.

The secret these great individuals possess is an unlock to a higher orbit of functioning. It is called being in "flow". Each of us has experienced flow, we keep interspersing in and out of flow all the time. Worst, whatever flow we achieve evaporates, as soon, as we realise we are in flow. Albeit, unlike us, the evolved beings are able to maintain it as a permanent state.

Productivity comes from being in flow

For the penultimate part of this discussion, I shall use Gandhiji’s teachings to further elucidate on flow.

We all know about Mahatma and his contributions. I also understand the spectrum of opinions that debate his real contribution to the independence movement. How no Indian true to his heart can deny the imprint he has left on the world. Gandhi continues to live within us through his teachings and also through the countless world leaders that he helped inspire viz Mandela, Obama, Modi, and so on. It is but fair to use Gandhi as an example to understand how in a matter of just a couple of decades, he aroused 300mn to overthrow a tyrant rule without lifting a finger.

Most of the literature I read on Gandhi, suggests most of his time post his return to India was spent in jail, or in his ashram — feeding cattle, meditating, spinning, writing, thinking, listening, and framing rules for Satyagraha. Very little to suggest he was organising, scheduling, meeting, rallying. A lot of people are surprised when I tell them Mahatma returned to India only in his 40s. He led a perfectly material life similar to yours and mine for no less than 2 decades across UK and South Africa. For all practical purposes, Gandhi achieved his true flow only post mid-life. Thus, achieving flow is not a function of age but a matter of choice. In fact, it happens with us all the time, we just need to find a way to harness it in permanently.

Being in flow is a lifelong pursuit

I shall extend one of the most widely used Mahatma quotes to establish our premise on flow — “Happiness is when what you think, what you say and what you do is in harmony. Being happy is being in flow”. There are three stages to being in flow

Thinking clearly is the single biggest source of productivity. For clear thinking happens in absence of fear, or anxiety. It eludes us when we are consumed with pride, jealousy, or gluttony. And it is definitely extinct near anger. Clear thinking does however flourish in the presence of love and compassion. I am not sermonizing biblical advice, but sheer physics of how the mind works. Observing the mind requires focus. Only when we are able to remove the duality induced by ego is when answers come clearly. Just like in order for our devices to work clearly, we need to regularly clear our cache; thinking clearly requires us to continually clear our mind of all the junk and garbage that accumulates. Leaders have used meditation, long walks, journaling, exercising to cleanse the mind of junk. Saying the truth is the most underrated long term productivity hack. Understand this part correctly. Communicating exactly how you are thinking is an art. A lot of our clear thinking gets instantly muddled when the opportunity to present it to the external world arises. “How will others perceive it”, is the single biggest reason for the truth to vitiate. We fail to translate our real feelings by either overpromising or under committing. Each such deviance from what we think and what we say (aka untruth), burns an imprint on the mind. It does make life easy in short term, but each untruth then proceeds with its own growth. One that has to be continually fed and nurtured in order to maintain continuity. One the other hand, truth does not need watering, for it is always present. I am yet to find a person who innately likes saying untruth. It is a sorry side-product of the times we live in. Taking action is the final step in translating our thoughts and words into results. Generally, taking actions is easy when you have the winds behind your sail. However, it requires tremendous belief when the chips are down. To this, I say, "Fear is a disease, and hustle the only antidote" — Travis Kalanick or if you prefer Einstein — "Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you need to keep moving." Each time you are beset with uncertainty, I urge you to take action. With a clear mind, and true heart — there is no bigger sin than to not act. Always remember, productivity is zero, not infinity in absence of inputs.

We must realize that the most commonly advocated productivity practices such as 1) skilful manipulation of the calendar to manage time, and energy, 2) management tools to build leverage and measure effectiveness, 3) mastering email and communication are not first-order truths. They are important, but only second-order optimizations. Real productivity comes from choosing the right war to fight. And that requires us to work inward daily to attune ourselves to a fundamental plane. Finally, the rules of being in flow viz thinking, saying and acting also extend to teams. Most small teams that have conquered the world were glued as one extended multi-organism. How teams achieve flow, is a topic for another blog.

Note from author:

Once you understand flow, folks with young kids at home would quickly ascertain that we are born with flow. Somewhere down the journey, most of us have lost touch. It is time to rekindle: 2021 is around the corner, so is the time for resolutions. What is the one thing you always wanted to do but have not yet been able to? Now that you understand productivity, I am sure you will be able to carve time, energy and willpower. If not, I am always a ping away.

*Recommend this book "Flow — the psychology of optimal experience"