Re: productivity crap

10 Jan, 2025

New Bear blogger hisonu shared their first post, stop wasting time on productivity crap. just shut up and work 😤, and it’s crushing the trending charts.

First, from one newcomer to another, welcome! And congrats on making a splash!

Second, I’m super curious what set you off on that rant. Something at work? A blog post? Reddit thread? All of it? In a flash of narcissism, I thought maybe it was my post on moving from Obsidian to Bear.app. 😉

I agree with your general point. Many of us are prone to burning time on what I’ll call “meta work” — working on how to deal with our real responsibilities instead of actually dealing with them. That’s often not productive.

Side note: I feel the more insidious problem is burning time on low-value work that feels like a core responsibility, but that isn’t actually getting you any closer to a larger goal. I tend to think of Tim Ferriss’s post on this topic, Are You Hunting Antelope or Field Mice. I don’t know much about Ferriss. That line just stuck with me. (It’s actually a Newt Gingrich quote. 🙃)

Back to meta work: While I agree that it’s a common problem, I don’t think it’s a black-and-white one. And in fact I think we should make time for optimization and experimentation.

Cue quotes from wiser people.

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe. – Abraham Lincoln

From the book Designing Your Life:

A well-designed life is a life that is generative—it is constantly creative, productive, changing, evolving, and there is always the possibility of surprise. You get out of it more than you put in. There is a lot more than “lather, rinse, repeat” in a well-designed life.

From Leo Babauta’s Anti-Fragility as We Train Ourselves to Improve:

Take small risks often. Small experiments designed to help us learn from failure. Example: every day, I try to get better at doing hard work, with each day being a mini-experiment. I fail often, which means I learn often.

The book Make Time also encourages continual experimentation with tactics to spend time on what's most important in your day.

And so on.

So, I believe there’s nothing wrong with trying out a color-coded calendar, or trying out bullet journaling, or seeing if a bespoke automation can save you time on a routine task. In fact, some of those experiments can pay off in big ways. As long as you’re thoughtful and honest about why you’re trying the experiment, you learn something from it, and you time-box it so it doesn’t clobber your more important duties, I say go for it.

I’ve wasted countless hours on meta work in my life. Guilty as charged. And, I’ve made some big strides by pursuing a bunch of thoughtful experiments and sharpening proverbial axes.

Cheers.

#productivity