Everything You Know About Productivity is a Lie
By: Jason Mcbride
Tags: Life Lessons, Business, Productivity, Freelancing, Writing

We live in a world of empty slogans and meaningless mantras. But, of all the empty phrases in our culture, none are as damaging as productivity.

Productivity sounds nice. It sounds technical, efficient, and powerful. Most of us have bought into the idea that to be successful you have to be productive. You probably end most of your days looking at your to-do list and scolding yourself for being so unproductive.

Productivity used to be a term of art in the discipline of economics. Now, it is a multi-billion-dollar cash cow for the self-help industry. What does productivity mean?

The most common answer is the equally vapid phrase, “getting shit done.” But what shit are you getting done?

In the knowledge economy, productivity is meaningless. It is a leftover from the first industrial revolution. It might have mattered how many widgets you could crank out on the assembly line in 1950. But measuring the amount of thought you put into an article, design, or line of code is impossible. Productivity is an unmoored metric in the knowledge economy. It doesn’t measure anything worth tracking.

Productivity in Economics

In economics, productivity is the ratio between the output volume and the input volumes. It is a measure of efficiency. Economists look at productivity to see how efficiently countries and corporations are using capital and labor. In economic terms, the more productive you are, the more value you can create for the economy.

Productivity only makes sense as a ratio. The problem is that it has become increasingly difficult in the knowledge economy to measure the inputs that go into creating an output. Traditionally, economists look at hours worked. Payroll records are the most common way to assess the amount of labor used to create a given product or service.

This works well for most physical products. But it fails miserably with the kind of work lawyers, writers, designers, consultants, coders, and engineers do. If thinking is a major part of your job, traditional measures of productivity do not accurately capture your inputs. They also likely fail to measure the value of your output accurately.

It might take me one hour to type out an article. If that is all I produce that day, have I been productive? If I sell the article for $400, does that mean I was more productive than if I only sell it for $100? What if I have been thinking about the article and writing it in my head for months? What if I wrote the entire thing from concept to final edits in an hour? How does productivity measure my efficiency?

There are too many variables in the creation of knowledge work for economic productivity to accurately calculate its economic efficiency.

Productivity is even more nebulous when you leave economics and venture into the world of self-help.

Productivity in Our Self-Help Culture

Not surprisingly, the definition of productivity in the realm of self-help is not as precise as the one used by economists. Most self-help gurus think of productivity only in terms of output. Input is rarely even an afterthought. It is all about how much did you get done that can be shipped out today?

There are thousands of self-help productivity books, and ten times that many productivity gurus. Our hustle culture loves to promote the idea of getting shit done.

But, as a knowledge worker, what does it even mean to get shit done? If you are a painter, are you more productive if you finish twenty miniature portraits in a week than if you take three months to paint a mural in a public park?

If you write one line of code that solves the one bug that has kept the product from shipping, are you less productive or more productive than all the coders who spent weeks writing the rest of the code?

If you are a writer, is writing 10,000 words more productive than writing 1,000 words? Does it make you ten times more productive?

I know many freelance writers that make less writing 10,000 words than I make writing 500 words because I work with businesses, and I charge high rates for my labor. Self-help productivity might leave me feeling like a loser and the 10,000-word writer making pennies per word deeply confused. They might wonder, if they got so much shit done, why are they still broke?

Again, the notion of productivity also fails to capture all the time I spend thinking about my work. I write in the shower every day. I outline articles and write complete introductions. I end up publishing or selling many of those articles. Many of them never go anywhere because, upon deeper reflection, I realize they are garbage.

How does productivity measure that?

Today while playing cards with my kids, I had an interesting idea pop into my head. I jotted it down and will return to it later. Does that mean playing cards was productive? Or, am I only as good as the number of projects I finish in a day?

Like other knowledge workers, I draw upon my life experience and the media influences I am exposed to every day in creating my work. There is no way to measure the inputs I require to produce something. Additionally, not everything I produce has an absolute economic value. I have sold articles to magazines, written content and sales copy for clients, and independently published articles and books.

Some of the pieces I have published as an indie have earned far more over several years than they would have made if I had sold them to a traditional publisher like a magazine or if I had written them for a client. But, for most things I write, I earn the most money writing for private clients. Sometimes I have published articles independently and only made a couple of bucks.

However, occasionally an article I have published myself or placed with a magazine or website under my own name goes on to bring new clients to me. It is impossible to see a finished article and book and know what its economic value will be.

If you are a knowledge worker, you should stop focusing on productivity and focus on something else instead.

Process Over Productivity

How you work is a better measure of your progress than your pile of completed tasks. If you want to maximize your work time, you need to create a process for doing your work. If you focus on process over tasks or goals, you will be happier and more successful.

As a knowledge worker, you usually cannot control how well your idea or finished product is received. You can control your process.

I do not write every day. Every day I spend time doing some combination of these activities:

Writing Reading Thinking Outlining Editing Observing the world around me Throwing away bad ideas

I do plan ahead to make sure I can meet client deadlines. I have a writing process. I don’t worry about how many words I write a day or how many projects I finish in a day. Instead, I focus on my process. Over the past eight years, I have learned that I will make the money I want if I do certain things consistently.

When I fail to follow my process, my business flails. I don’t have to-do lists. My only goal is to be better today than I was yesterday. I don’t panic about efficiency or stress about how much shit I got done.

I can measure my process. It takes into account everything I need to create my best work. It also takes into account my crazy life. Some days that means I only read and think. Some days I produce 500 words, and other days I produce 5,000 words. Some days I don’t write any words. It doesn’t matter as long as I am following my process.

I do care about how many projects I finish and ship. But, writing and other creative endeavors are about much more than the end result. The process determines the quality and quantity of work I create. A daily tally of checkmarks doesn’t make me a more prolific writer.

Knowledge workers of the world, it’s time to unite and kill our senseless obsession with productivity.