Pseudo-Productivity is a Disease, but Slow Productivity is The Cure

Stop bragging about how busy you are.

How do you measure productivity as a knowledge worker? 

Do you measure it by quantity — by simply ticking as many tasks off as you can? 

Or by quality — by focusing on the more concrete and creative tasks that require deep focus? 

Most people focus on quantity because it makes them feel good.

But feeling productive doesn’t equal being productive. You can feel productive yet spend your time in the most unproductive way — aka, you can be pseudo-productive. 

Pseudo-productivity has become an increasingly popular coping mechanism. I’m worried, and you should be too.

What’s the issue with pseudo-productivity?

The biggest consequence of pseudo-productivity is that we don’t really know what really matters anymore. We over-obsess about small tasks and neglect the big tasks that really move the needle.

Pseudo-productivity deprives us of our ability to focus. And it even gets us to play lame social games of importance.

Pseudo-productivity brings us comfort, but it doesn’t bring any results. The stats don’t lie: on average, we spend 28% of the workday reading and answering emails, according to a 2012 McKinsey study.

Meetings, too, have become an obstacle to deep work instead of a tool for collaboration and inspiration. A study by Bain & Company found that 15% of an organization’s collective time is spent in meetings, and 50% of those meetings are deemed unnecessary. Don’t even get me started about focus: 39% of employees admitted to dozing off during a meeting, and 91% admitted to daydreaming (I fall under this category).

But you know what? You can’t really blame people for dozing off, because too many meetings last way too long. The optimal meeting length is actually 15 to 20 minutes, yet 73% of meetings still last longer than 30 minutes.

More often than not, meetings that are supposed to foster ‘’connection’’ come at the cost of increased distraction. 

At what point are you pseudo-productive? It’s hard to pinpoint an exact number. However, knowledge workers only spend 39% of their working day doing their actual job. The remaining 61% of the day is robbed by ‘’pseudo-productive’’ activities like meetings, emails, and updates. 

Unless you’re the CEO, that number is way too high. 

‘’Busyness’’, a collective coping mechanism (and an overrated status symbol)

How did we end up spending 61% of our time talking about work, and 39% doing the actual work? 

There are two main reasons. The first is related to mental capacity. Being ‘’so caught up in e-mail’’ or ‘’scheduled in meetings the whole morning’’ creates a valid reason to not get started on the harder cognitive tasks that require more mental power. Generally speaking, e-mails are easy on the brain. It’s a simple way to relatively get many things done within a short time. Unless your colleagues have poor communication skills and you end up with a headache trying to decipher what the heck they mean. 

In the short term, that dopamine hit when you cross off a task on your to-do list just feels good. In the long term, you might look back and wonder why you haven’t made much progress despite your hard efforts. You might realize you could’ve made much more real progress on just a few things that really move the needle. 

The second reason is of a social kind: busyness is a (misplaced) status symbol. Feeling busy makes us feel important. In a Columbia Business School study, researchers analyzed the way people perceived status based on signals of busyness, finding that Americans increasingly view those who are overworked and constantly busy as possessing higher social status.

In other words: when we say things like, ‘’Oh, I am so crazy busy!’’, we’re actually trying to send another message across: 

‘‘Look, I am so important! I am so popular! I am so in demand!’’

Oh, you skipped lunch so you could attend all your meetings? Let me admire you for neglecting basic human needs— rest and food —in exchange for a ‘’participation badge’’.

Spoiler: this badge isn’t real. Believe me, nobody really cares that you managed to send 25 e-mails today or that you said yes to all your meeting invitations this week.

20 years from now, the only people who will remember that you worked late are your kids.

Goodbye pseudo-productivity, hello slow productivity

It’s time to become more critical about how we spend our time at work. It’s time we leave pseudo-productivity behind us. It’s time for us to embrace a more sustainable and fulfilling path to productivity, which Cal Newport likes to refer to as ‘slow productivity’.

Cal Newport proposes 3 things to make slow productivity work: 
1. Do fewer things 
2. Work at a natural pace 
3. Obsess over quality

But that’s easier said than done. Slow productivity makes people feel nervous. What if people get the wrong idea of them? They’d rather just stay visually present and not risk the possibility that people think they don’t have their priorities right.

But that’s exactly what needs to happen. We need people to show others that it’s okay to say no. That it actually pays off to do less. There need to be pioneers who are planting seeds to counteract the deep-rooted idea that the only way to be (and feel) productive is by always being virtually present.

Slow productivity isn’t low productivity. Slow productivity urges you to be relentlessly critical about what you do. It urges you to focus on quality (doing the things that build a legacy) rather than quantity (checking of as many to do’s as you can).

We need to stop bragging about how many emails we send and how many meetings we attend. We need to say no more often to things that don’t move the needle. We need to stop measuring productivity by ‘’visual busyness’’.

We need to embrace quality over quality. We need to understand that less is more. 

If you have more than three priorities, you have none.— Jim Collins

It might be time to start handing out non-participation badges…