Your Obsession With Productivity Is Killing Your Productivity

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The person who started the local tire shop and the person who started Google probably worked about the same amount of hours. I used to say this to CEOs all the time when I was a venture capitalist. Your job isn't to work hard. Your job is to have great ideas. If you have one great idea, it could save this company 2 years, 3 years, 4 years.

All right, everybody. Welcome back to The Art of Accomplishment. Today, Joe and I are going to talk about how your obsession with productivity is killing your productivity. Early on as an entrepreneur, I found that there were always far more things to do than I possibly could do. And like many people, my very first strategy was, how do I find out how to get more of the things done that could get done? Whether that is by making better lists or creating better structures or working harder or more. Or finding ways to work smart, not hard. And it took a long time for me to recognize that, you know, that phase of the journey eventually expired. I started to realize it wasn't actually about getting more done. And in fact, sometimes if I got more things done, that actually created a bigger to-do list, more technical debt, more undone loose ends. That ultimately could distract me from what I really want and what really needed to be done.

Mm-hmm.

I'd really like to talk a little bit about productivity today and how, how easy it is for productivity itself to become sort of a hedonic treadmill or, you know, a chasing the dragon kind of obsession for productivity's own sake. And how easy it is to lose the forest for the trees and what it is that really aligns with what we want and how to really go after that and get that in a way that is efficient, effective, joyful.

Awesome.

Regardless of what we consider to be productive.

Yeah. To some degree, there's a very small epidemic of productivity-minded folks who are all learning how to be more and more productive. And then there's the larger epidemic of people confusing getting stuff done with creating the life you want.

What has your journey been around productivity? You've been a VC, you founded AOA, so you've been on a couple of different sides of the scenario. You've been a coach.

When I was starting my journey, there really wasn't too much of a productivity movement. So there wasn't a, you know, we didn't have this digital lifestyle that we have now, which is just a shit ton of information. Which makes us forget a lot, which means we have to organize things and be more productive. And there's a little bit— there was like Getting Things Done, that book had a positive effect on me. What I noticed in the very beginning was that I would procrastinate. I told myself to do X, Y, and Z, and then I would procrastinate and not do those things, or do them at the last minute, or And then when I found that I was doing something that was really deeply aligned with what I wanted, there was no procrastination. There was just doing. And there was an addiction to that doing. And if I look back on that time in my life, almost all of it was unnecessary. Like I could have literally done one-tenth of what I did when I was a venture capitalist to get the exact same result. Hmm. And that recognition was huge for me. Oh, whoa. And it's what makes us now in our meetings, when we're, when we're doing team meetings, one of the things that we do is check in on what's the pace and what's the spin. Because I noticed that it's very hard to know if our if productivity is useful or if it's just a dopamine fix, but it's very easy to know if you feel like you're spinning, which means you're putting a lot of effort into something and you don't see the thing you want moving forward.

Yeah. Can we unpack that a little bit? Pace, pace and spin. What are pace and spin here?

Yeah, for me, pace is important because if you're running a marathon, which a business is, You want to make sure your pace is right. Are you doing it at a sustainable pace that's enjoyable so that you want to come back to work so that you can feel fulfilled, so that you want to come back the next year, not going to burn out? If you really care about what you're doing, that's important. If you're just doing it for the money, then you might convince yourself to go really quick and then sell the thing and then go to an island in Hawaii where you typically end up feeling irrelevant and then beating yourself up for not creating your second business. I think we both know dozens of people who fall into that. Yeah, that's pace. And then spin is when you can look back on a week and say, how much of it do I think was productive, was actually getting us to the right place that we wanted to go in an efficient way, in a way that didn't create a lot of rowing against the current. And there's a viewpoint of what spin is for the week. There's also a viewpoint of what spin is for the month. There's also a viewpoint of what spin is for the year. And those different ways of thinking about spin are really important because it tells us, hey, how much of what we're doing is actually productive. And that's never completely easy to see, but it's a really important thing to reflect on. And so in my journey that came up, then there, there's also in that same timeframe where I would look at my to-do list and it would go from how do I get this done to what are the 3 things that I can do on this list that'll make everything else easier, redundant? And that started becoming a practice where my job wasn't to get things done. My job was to not do things and get them done.

Yeah.

Or make them irrelevant. And then that became a deep practice. Then there was a recognition that one of the most productive things I could do is do the most uncomfortable thing.

Mm.

That there was a moment of seeing that the thing I was most likely not going to do was the thing I didn't know how to do, and it was usually the most important thing to do if I was creating a business. And so that was also a pretty big recognition. And then there was a recognition of, oh, I'm answering emails, but I'm not doing anything. And that was this moment, I think, to some degree made so much more visible by the way social media, Slack, emails, text messages work, where it became really apparent that the job was to be able to press enter. The job wasn't to move the ball forward. Yeah, I've answered the 20 emails, but did I do anything? Did anything actually happen because I answered those 20 emails? And that was a huge one to see that my mind was being tricked by a dopamine response. But that feels good. That feels good. That feels good. But I was playing a video game and by the end of the video game, maybe I got to the next level, but my business wasn't forward. Nothing had changed significantly. And if nothing had changed after an hour of emails, I could have done something for an hour that would have changed. The whole thing.

You have all these different apps and structures that you use for, for your business or for running your life, and each of them is incentivized to engage you, right? So individually, they're not holistically incentivized for you to have the best life. They're incentivized for you to use them more.

Correct.

So you have that already working against you, but then you also have the, the cultural, the societal layer. Yeah, where Often we're reinforced for conspicuous productivity, conspicuous busyness, or even demonstrated or, or near burnout just to show that we're doing enough.

The place where you can see this most visibly is in a, in large corporations where people are responding to text messages while they're in a meeting, getting stuff done apparently. But 2 years later, the company hasn't grown, productivity hasn't increased, or it's taking 10 times as many people to do something that a startup would do. And they feel guilty if they don't do it because I'm not responding. I'm not, I'm not answering the emails. I'm not there for blah, blah, blah. Instead of, oh, if I'm not fully present for the thing that I'm here to do, I'm wasting everybody's time.

Yeah. I'm getting the thing done, but I'm also degrading our meeting culture.

I'm getting a thing done that probably doesn't mean shit.

Yeah.

You know, I was recently with a vice president of an organization and she was missing the 3-day offsite where the CEO and all the vice presidents sit down. I said, whoa, how do you feel about that? Her response was, I could ask Claude what the meeting summary is and it would be 80% accurate. And everybody who went will only also get 80% of what they were meant to get out of it. She's like, I could literally tell you what's going to happen, how it's going to happen. It's all a known quantity.

Oh, wow.

So I'm just thinking about that. Let's call each vice president making $2 million a year. Like, how much does that 3 days cost? Mm-hmm. Like, what did that move forward?

Yeah. And what were they distracted from?

And what were they distracted from doing? And how could you have made that super productive where she was looking forward to going and she knew that it was critical to her business? That's the underlying question. And it's in each meeting, it's in each decision. Is this how we're supposed to be spending time? Is this a great use of my time? And that's the stuff that gets hidden from productivity. You said earlier something to the effect of, are we seeing the forest through the trees? I would say if productivity is the trees, what's the forest? Hmm. I think most people don't know what their forest is.

Yeah. So how do we assess that? How does, how does somebody who's listening to this look at what they're doing in their life right now, look at where they're feeling productive, where they're feeling unproductive. What are some really good questions for them to ask and ways to explore this?

Yeah. So the first question I would ask is, if you could have everything you wanted and it didn't require you being productive, how would that be? Would you push that button to allow that to happen? The other way to ask that question is, what's all the productivity for, actually? Is the idea that the productivity will make you rich, or is the idea that the productivity will make you happy, or is the idea that the productivity will make you rich so that you can be happy? Is the productivity meant so that people think you do a good job so Dad will love you? Like, what's all the productivity meant for? Because if you can't see that, you can't actually get to the real thing that the productivity is meant for. And it's why you can see people who are ultra productive as far as getting tasks done, starting companies, even being successful, being rich. But there's no fulfillment. There's no sense of purpose.

Yeah.

They say things like, I can't wait till I can retire rather than, you know, I want to die doing this.

So let's say somebody is listening and they're like, okay, well, they just ask themselves this question. It's like, well, obviously, so I can feed my family. This is the job that I have. This is the only opportunity that I am aware of that is you know, the best opportunity for me. So I just need to do the things that my boss wants to get done and serve the company, and then I can feed my family, and that's it. What is a way to get deeper under a story like that, to question those assumptions and get, get to what it is that somebody really might not be aware that they're doing the productivity for?

Well, in that particular one, my question would be something like, how big of a What role does safety play in this, if at all? Because it sounds like what I'm hearing is that you want to be safe. And so then the question becomes, how safe is your productivity making you? So I'll give you another example of this. I was in another company and a whole bunch of middle managers, we were training 100 middle managers. And it was clear that AI was going to come in and take half of their jobs. And that means for all of them, there was an opportunity to be the person to implement AI in this role. And then they would have a job for the next 10 years implementing AI, either within this company or within other companies. That would make you safe. But what most people were doing was making sure that they were doing the tasks that their boss boss would be happy with. Not making them safe, making them redundant. Hmm. So if you really can get in touch with what's below the thing, if, if in this case it's safety, then you can really ask the question, how is my productivity aimed at actual safety?

Right. And in that case, it might have been aimed at safety. It also might have been aimed at making the boss happy. Who does the boss represent for you? Like, how does that get linked to the idea of safety?

Right. Yeah. So you make the boss happy. So what if your boss is happy? Well, then I keep my job. Or then I don't have to hear them yell. So both safety.

Yeah. Imagine getting cut loose in a company reorg and you go to get your new job and you're like, well, I was really good at making my last boss happy. That's what my, that's what my skills are.

Exactly. So it's really being able to go as deep as you can to the underlying thing that the productivity the promise of that productivity is a promise that it's going to keep you safe, is the promise that it's going to make you rich, is the promise that it's going to make you likable. And then you can start seeing, well, is it— is that actually happening? And if so, how do I make that productivity better? And what I notice is most people, they just get hooked on the dopamine. I got stuff done today, and that feels good. It is literally paramount to playing a video game for 8 hours a day. There's a feeling you get at the end of it, which is you're not all the way there. You feel like, oh my God, this is, this was not a great use of my day. There's an emotional hangover that comes with it, which is where I think a lot of people end a day of productivity.

Yeah.

Whereas if your productivity was really serving your purpose in life, what you are meant to do, and your productivity is geared towards enjoyment of your life and making your life meaningful, and it's a very different feeling being productive at the end of the day. Yeah.

So I'm noticing there's a couple different time horizons that we're talking about here and We've kind of gone into the what's the endpoint? What is your, what is your productivity really pointing towards? Yeah. And then you just alluded to the way that you feel while you're being productive. And I'd love to double-click on that a little bit. So when you're, when you're responding to emails or you're checking off the to-do list, what are some ways that somebody could explore their experience in the moment of running whatever their typical productivity pattern is like how much enjoyment they're feeling, how much dopamine they're getting from whatever it is that they're doing, and whether that's linked in the direction that would take them to the endpoints that we were just talking about.

Yeah. So definitely enjoyment is a great pointer, as you just said. The other one is energy. How much energy do you have to get shit done that day? And at the end of the day, do you feel more energized or less energized? Even if you're fatigued, you can still feel energized. Oh, I can't wait for tomorrow. I'm tired. It feels good. I get to rest and I can't wait for tomorrow. Even just looking at how did that day energize me? How did that meeting energize me? Incredibly useful for productivity and being productive. For example, I know 3 things. That will take my energy from me. One is back-to-back meetings. If I don't have a way to close a cycle, if I don't have a little bit of rest, recalibrate what just happened, get back into myself after a meeting, and I go meeting to meeting to meeting to meeting, I feel like I have a whole bunch of open loops that aren't closed in my life, and it totally sucks the energy out of me. I know context switching takes a lot of energy from me. So if I can do one whole day of coaching and then one day of podcasts and then one day of teaching, I have far more energy than if I am having a business meeting followed by a coaching meeting. And so I'm just checking out where my energy level is. Checking in on the sense of spin is another one. How much do I feel like I'm spinning? How How much of the effort that I'm putting into pedaling is actually moving the bike forward? So in that particular instance, a great example is I used to say this to CEOs all the time when I was a venture capitalist. Your job isn't to work hard. Your job is to have great ideas. If you have one great idea, it could save this company 2 years, 3 years, 4 years. The person who started the local tire shop and the person who started Google probably worked about the same amount of hours. There are plenty of people who worked their butts off and got laid off and don't have a job. How are you thinking about what you're doing and how do you choose the things that you're putting your time towards is a huge component. And, and that can mostly be felt in spin. Yeah. And then the other thing you can do is take a moment to reflect every once in a while. Okay. I just worked for an hour. What did I actually do? And you don't get to say responded to people, responded to people isn't a thing you do. What project did I actually move forward? And so there's something really sweet about retrospectively looking at how did I spend my week? Is that how I want to spend my week? That's also really useful. It's not quite in the moment, but it's, it's in the very near term.

Yeah. Yeah, there's, there's a lot to go into there. One, one of the things in the first one that you mentioned about closing the loop is interesting to me. I found that sometimes I can get into a cycle where I'm feeling productive and I'm going through, say, like a checklist and I'm getting things done. And there's a way that when I complete a task, I immediately skip over the appreciation, the enjoyment, the, the celebration, even just for a moment, of taking that task and then go on to the next one. So there can actually be— this is where Chasing the Dragon comes in, the hedonic treadmill, where we might be chasing a sense of completion, but we never actually let ourselves savor any completion that we get along the way. And so we're looking for a loop to close that we never allow to close.

Yeah. And to me, it's— completion is a word for it. Release and relax is what I notice is, you know, if I'm going to do a high-intensity workout, 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off, 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off, whatever it is. If I'm going to do yoga I'm going to have shavasana at the end of it. Not even appreciation. Appreciation is great. Sense of satisfaction that it's done. Those are great. That's, I think, more of the release side of it. There's also the relaxation side of it. I had a friend who was a programmer, and he literally every week would try different forms of programming. 45 minutes on, 15 minutes off. 3 hours in the morning, everything else off, just try different things and then looked how much code he got done. Because if you're a programmer, especially back in the day, it was literally how much good code got written and you could happily measure that. And he found that it was 6 hours a day, 45 minutes on, 15 minutes off, 5 days a week was his peak performance. He could not do any better as far as lines of productive code. Yeah, you can't run 24/7 and be a great marathon runner.

Something that's interesting about that too is just by running through a number of different iterations of the experiment, he was also necessarily breaking up some other patterns that he might not have been aware of. For example, the pattern of getting into the zone and then mistaking the zone for productivity, the zone for moving in the right direction just because you're focused.

Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, he would be totally excited and engaged in something and in the zone, and the alarm would go off and he would stop.

Yeah.

And the 15 minutes off for him, he found, was all about being in the body. So it was, I am running in place, I am doing jumping jacks, I am stretching, I am something laying down on my back and being silent. Whatever it was, he was always in his body for those 15 minutes.

Yeah, and that's curious too, because from one perspective, being in your body during those breaks— for example, you were describing how there's the rest and release part of the closing of a loop. And I, I also imagine that if you get back into your body, if you check in with your body, your body will also have a signal of whether you're— you've been going in the right direction or not. There will be some way where you're like, wait a minute, something just doesn't feel right.

So there's a huge difference if you're coding completely from your head or if you're present in your body while you're coding. Even coding. Yeah, guaranteed there's more flow if you have some awareness of your body while you're coding.

Or if another person is doing the same thing sitting next to you, or if you have a Zoom window open and someone else is coworking with you and you're just getting things done, but you're in each other's presence. That's another a fascinating hack that people have been using.

Yeah, that's right.

A lot of what we perceive as like inattention, ADD kind of behaviors around productivity can be traced back to attachment and connection. So yeah, in, in those cases, creating a context where you feel connection while you're doing what you're doing, the hack, it's not necessarily about how you timed it, but about the environment you place yourself in.

Correct. Yeah. So I know a lot of people who want to start their own businesses, entrepreneurial in spirit, but they just can't do it. And then they pick someone to do it with and they can totally do it. You know, it's just like people who, let's say your productivity is about your physical health. Yeah. There's going to be people who will not do physical health stuff unless they're doing it with somebody. So there's, yes, there's the context of how you do it, who you do it with. So much stuff there. And primarily it's, what am I doing this for? And it's that— that's not a question you ask every month. It's a question you ask every day. That little thing. And for me, when I'm in our business and I watch a meeting, it's really clear if people are being productive in that meeting. In that email, or if they're not— meaning real productivity, meaning they're really moving the ball forward. Are they just thinking out loud? Are they delegating their decision-making? Are they trying to build consensus instead of make a decision? Are they like a whole bunch of stuff that is not about getting the job done? And you can tell it. It's very easy to watch and see what's happening And when that's happening, the question is, how do you address it and change it?

Yeah. And I think that points to kind of a key differentiator between what one might call like Productivity 1.0 or like Productivity 2.0, or—

Yeah.

You can go through your life stacking new productivity tools, hacks, tricks on top of one another until you have a palimpsest, one of my favorite words, like a bunch of spaghetti code of the ways that you structure your productivity and end up in a mess or lost in it, or having those structures slow you down.

Yeah.

Until you get to a point where you start to just remove structure.

I obviously do things like minimize context switching, those things. I have a to-do list that is just generally a reminder that I will visit every couple days, but I don't even work off of a list in a day. If I work off of anything, I work off my calendar, and I have a very, very clear and deliberate way in which my calendar gets made. Part of what was really important to me was that I didn't have weight in my productivity. I wasn't spending 2 hours a day organizing all my productivity tools so that I could be productive that day. I could not do Slack. It was just so not productive for me. What I've noticed is that if I really spend a lot of time on the design of my interactions, then most of the productivity is taken care of naturally.

That's another piece here where for somebody who recognizes that they've gotten to say productivity bloat and they start taking things away, one of the things that I noticed that you start taking away is, you you stop engaging in certain kinds of patterns. Like what you described is you can join a meeting and you can see what is being productive and what isn't. And that sounds less like you're following a structure and more like you have developed the awareness of those patterns, particularly the kinds of patterns that you might be prone to getting swept up in.

Yeah.

Then sort of the, the training wheels of structure to keep that from happening. Become less necessary until eventually they fall away.

Yeah, agreed. And, and I think one of the things to really become aware of quickly is what does a dopamine high look like?

Or feel like?

What does it look like? What does it feel like? How do you know when you're in it? How do you stop it? That's a really important one. That's one of the most important ones. And then what does it look like, feel like to reflect? To take a moment and reflect. And it doesn't need to be a long moment. What I notice is that it needs to be relatively often. Oh, what, what did today feel like? How, what, what actually occurred today? What did I actually get done? How much of that was really useful? Like that's just those questions really quickly are really important.

And then that's, I imagine some nuance there. You can make yourself a whole nother to-do list while you're in your reflection. Which is a very different experience than stepping back, reflecting, just noticing, not necessarily creating new thought loops while you're resting.

Yeah, the reflection is the release, and then there's resting, which is literally nothing. And that's an important piece too. The other thing that I notice a lot, a lot of productivity is very fear-based. There's a, uh, anxiety, shortness of breath. In, in the productivity. Like I noticed that when I'm going through like, oh, it's, it's 4 o'clock in the afternoon and I'm going through my emails. Am I still breathing deeply? Am I present in my email response? Am I taking a moment to really, oh, what's the real thing I'm doing here and what's the real answer I want to give? Or am I bam, bam, bam?

Yeah.

And when I'm being my most productive, I'm in a very present state in my body. And when I'm being less productive, I'm in a more fear, anxious, gotta get it done state. And so usually what happens is most people who are deeply interested in being productive are in a fear state often when they are, when they are doing productivity, there's a time poverty to it.

Yeah, it reminds me of a time when, you know, Alexa and I had been traveling and I left something at the airport and I was all on my phone like, oh shit, I gotta reach out to the customer service, maybe they'll find my thing. And I was like in this, gotta get this thing done. And Alexa was just like, what if you just pause for a moment and feel that anxiety for a second? I was like, oh, and just all of a sudden just like collapsed onto her shoulder for like 5 seconds, and then it was just done. I just very gently sent a message to the customer service app and then put it down, and then later got a response. It was, yeah, a bunch of struggling just got saved by stopping to feel the anxiety.

Yeah, exactly. That's such an incredibly useful productivity hack is feel the fear behind the production that's happening, which is also something that's really ties back into where we started the conversation, which is what is the forest through the trees of productivity?

Mm-hmm.

What I notice is that typically people who want the productivity to create some sort of safety are doing it in a very anxious way. And if they're doing it to be liked, they're doing it in a very needy way that there is a, if they're doing it to manage the world, to try to make the world into something, they're doing it usually in a very forceful way. There's a clue in the way that you are productive that hints to what the implicit forest is and then making it explicit. Can see through the implicit forest.

Yeah, you can find out what, on some level, what you're actually, you could say, addicted to. What's the emotional cycle? If I'm coming at productivity to feel safe and I'm not allowing myself to feel the anxiety in it, then I'm going to be productive in a way that is leaking anxiety everywhere, and everyone around me is going to pick up that anxiety, and I'll create a world where everything is anxious.

Yeah.

And it's the golden algorithm that we talk about. I'll just be recreating that exact loop just to end up in that feeling. So you could even then say that the, the meta value, the goal that I'm actually following is to feel anxious rather than to get anything done.

The amazing thing is there's somebody listening right now who's like, none of this shit works. You just got to get shit done. Just fucking put your head down. So for them, I would just like to say, last week you and I both worked from 7:30 in the morning till 10, 10:30 at night, average, sometimes longer, sometimes a little shorter, for 7 days straight. And this week I'll be doing 4 podcasts, 1 live performance, running the business, seeing 8 clients. And still making time for my family and still making sure that my girls are attended to and that my marriage is healthy. And that happens. I can be that productive. And occasionally I get a little burnt out because I've bitten off more than I can chew. And I have a calendar that is— there's some obligation. I feel like I've committed to something. I want to be honest to my word. So occasionally I'll go a little bit too hard and fast, but generally I can, for years, do a tremendous amount of work. And the reason I can do it is because there isn't as much inner fight. It isn't that I'm doing it from anxiety. It's that I'm, I'm in my body when I'm sending the emails. It's because I'm not trying to force anything. There's— it's because I've learned how to rest in between my things. If you get your pace right, there's just this constant flow of creativity. And if you start noticing your pace goes wrong, then there's this opportunity to learn something about yourself. Oh, I'm anxious here. What's making me anxious here? What makes it that I don't feel like I can be present with this conversation? And so productivity turns into these great moments of self-reflection and self-growth. And that gets a lot of friction out of the system, increases the enjoyment, keeps you far more energized through the day.

Yeah, beautiful. Well, thank you, Joe. This has been a very productive podcast. I'm going to take a little time now for reflection and release. Thanks everyone for listening. I appreciate you listening to our podcast during your very productive day, or, or maybe your relaxing day, or your commute, whatever it is. It's a pleasure to be in your ears today.

Yeah, it is.

You can find us at artofaccomplishment.com. Check out our community and our courses. We often do free online Zoom 1.5-hour sessions that you can experience some of our experiential practices with a partner. It's a very different kind of work than just listening to the podcast passively. Highly recommend that. You can also find us on social media. We're on X at Art of Accomplishment. Joe is @fu_joehudson. That's fuck you, Joe Hudson. And I am Eric Kistler. If you're listening to this, you can also watch it on YouTube at Art of Accomplishment. This podcast is produced by myself, Brett Kistler, and Joe Hudson. The production coordinator is Munyi Kelly, and Reasonable Volume edited this episode.

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