Productivity Expert: The Productivity Trap That Causes Burnout

Welcome to the Kwik Brain Podcast. I'm your host and your brain coach, Jim Kwik. And today I'm excited to share with you behind the scenes, a powerful keynote that we had at our recent Limitless Live. This is my annual live event where some of the world's top thinkers take the stage to help you to think clearer, to focus better, and live with more intention. We could all use that. Today's speaker is someone whose work has deeply influenced how I think about focus, productivity, and personal and work success. My friend Jay Papasan is a productivity strategist, and he's author of one of my all-time favorite books on productivity. It's called The One Thing. Many of you have read this book, saw him on stage, or maybe have heard his name. Jay breaks down why busyness is the opposite of living a limitless life, how clarity solves most of our problems, and how identifying your one thing can radically change and transform how you work, how you live, how you learn, and how you lead. This is one of those talks that stay with you long after it's over. So enjoy.

You know, like, my favorite part of that little video— I've only seen it a few times— is there's a shot in there of my sister hugging me, me right after she beat cancer. Oh, makes me happy every time I see it. All right, so with that emotional start, let's dive in. My goal today is, in 20, 25 minutes here, to teach you that this busyness state that we all find ourselves in most of the time is the exact opposite of a limitless life. If you want to limit your possibilities, If you want to short-circuit your health, your relationships, your work, keep living in this state of constant activity without any intention attached to it. So, whoop, there we go, I'm gonna go back one. The busyness trap. So, I will tell you, I have, in my natural state, I'm a tasker. If I'm left to my own devices, I do wanna be moving, I take action very quickly. I'm very decisive, I move out there and get it done. And on my worst days, I will be running from 8:00 AM in the morning when I hit the office, all the way until 5 or 6 o'clock at night. I will come home after going from meeting to meeting, trying to grab a protein shake so I have some nutrients, maybe like showing up late 5 minutes for a meeting so that I can go to the bathroom. Have y'all ever had a day like that?

Yes.

And you get home, and maybe your partner says, How was your day? And you're like, it was busy. And my wife knows to also ask me, well, did you get anything done that you're proud of? And I sometimes have to really think, if I'm honest. And I think we've all been there. I think especially since 2020, something shifted, and maybe it's how much the world has access to us through our mobile devices and through Zoom, We have so many opportunities and obligations, it is incredible that we balance it at all. And we add and we add and we add, we say yes and we say yes and we say yes, 'cause we're high achievers, we want more, and we think the answer to getting more is to say yes to more. And we forget that it's not just our work. Like, I've got aging parents, I've got kids, I'm about to be an empty nester. Like, life is gonna come at you sideways. Someone is gonna ding your car and you'll spend 6 months fighting the insurance companies. Life is going to happen on top of everything that you've planned for. So how do we break out of this? So in our company, it's not the marketing thing that cracked me up. Whoever's business that is, God bless you, that's not mine. Our company is called Productiv, and we teach people how to invest their time. But we see that there's 2 broad types of people. There are dreamers, who need more space to do, and there are doers who need more space to dream. And chances are, you can self-identify as one or the other. When dreamers show up who need more space to do, it's not that they're not doing anything, it's that they're planning. They're trying to shoot for perfection before they take meaningful action. And so they're doing a lot of stuff, but not the important stuff.

Mm-hmm.

And it's frankly the same for the doers and their need to constantly be in motion and be in action. They do more than just about anybody else. They often are socially rewarded for it. Dude, how do you get so much stuff done? People probably say that to you, and you wear it like a badge of honor. But are we doing the right things? Fundamentally, activity is not productivity. Activity is doing stuff. Productivity is acting on our priorities. So I'm gonna walk you through an exercise. I would love it if you would get something to write on, if you've got your notebook, all you need is about 5 lines. If you don't have a notebook, get out your phone and open up a note for me, 'cause this is an active session. I'm gonna work you through what we call the $10,000 question, and it's a very, very fast audit of how you are currently battling busyness. So the first step, just a brain dump. What are the top 5 activities that you do professionally on any given week? And be brutally honest. We go to meetings, we manage email, we manage our social media, we meet with clients, we research before we meet with clients, right? We, if you're in a business for yourself, a business owner, maybe you have to lead generate, you have to prospect, you have to market. What are your, the activities that make up an average week for you? Can you list the 5 things you do most? Retired people, how do you fill your weeks? How do you fill your week? Right? You've got goals, or you wouldn't be here. Maybe it's to be healthy. How are you filling your week? Good question. I'm just gonna give you about 30 seconds, 'cause we've got a couple more steps where if you're behind, you get to catch up. If you're done, will you give me, I'm ready? Say, I'm ready.

I'm ready. Great.

Okay, I knew this was a fast crowd. Now, you don't have to move them around, I just want you to number them from 1 to 5 in the order that you believe you spend the most time on them. And again, just be honest, this is just an assessment. No one gets to see your work but you. So number 1 is the activity that you invest the most time in. While y'all are doing it, I'll share mine. I do this every time I'm gonna prepare this particular exercise. I did it last week, and even though I teach this, the thing I spend more time on than anything else is I attend and lead meetings. If you audited my calendar, if you followed me around for a week, that's what you're gonna see. I run a couple of businesses, and there are some things that may not always be that important, but still have to be done, and that's one of them for me. I do teaching and coaching. I'm teaching right now. I do one-on-one, I do a group coaching program, I consider my podcast and my writing a form of teaching, but I'm literally in front of a camera or front of people coaching or teaching. I write. That is my, I believe, the thing that I'm meant to do. I've been a part of 3 million copy bestsellers. I feel like I've got, that is something that I try to fit in every single week, usually 4 days at a minimum. I cannot tell you how many times I've managed to hit it all 7 days, 'cause in reality, life gets in the way. I have email and social, right? I'm an author. That to me often is, it feels like it's important. But I have a little Post-it note on my desk, and it says, am I networking or not working?

Not working.

Okay? And we all know which side of the fence we're on most of the time. And then I do a lot of reading and interviewing. That's how I get my inputs. All right, this is the next step. You have to assign your top 5 a dollar value, what you get paid per hour in theory. You cannot use the same dollar value twice. I find it easiest to identify what's the thing that's worth a dollar, the thing that leads ultimately the least to your success, and then I usually see it, it's screaming at me on the page, the $10,000 activity I know is most important, But maybe I don't give enough time. So one activity's worth a dollar, one is worth $10 an hour, one $100, one $1,000, one $10,000. You get it? So when I did this, that's how I spend my time, and that's how I would value it. So I've got the most valuable thing I do, which is writing. Every opportunity, I'm on this stage because I sat down and made myself write a book. It was no fun, it took us 3 years. It was very rewarding, but without that, I wouldn't have the productive company, I wouldn't have so many things in my life. That by far is the number one, and guess what? It's third in line to eat on my calendar. My second most valuable opportunity is reading an interview. So I think of it as my inputs determine my outputs. If I'm reading great works and talking to amazing people, I will have better things to write about. And that is 5th to get to the table. It gets the scraps of my schedule. That's just the reality of where I am right now. When you look at your list, your $10,000 activity, does anybody actually have it ranked number 1? I would love to see it. A couple of people. God bless you. I need to get some coaching. I'll be free after the session. But the reality is, it can be extremely tough to have that in the pole position on a week-to-week basis. So does your calendar reflect your goals? I sometimes do calendar audits with my clients when I'm doing one-on-one, and we've reached a level of trust to do that. And we will go through their calendars, and I can tell you, how we invest our time will tell people what not only your priorities and goals are, but what your values are as well. I don't know if anybody's heard the old saw, how does a child spell love? T-I-M-E. Where we invest our time, right, shows what we value. And the problem is, for most of us, and it's not because you're a bad person, so if you've got the shame stick out and you're hitting yourself over the head right now, it's also the way we live as a society. is not lined up to help us do these things, but we look up and our calendar doesn't reflect who we are. So Dr. Robin Hanley Dufault is one of my favorite authors, she's also a friend, and she taught me on a recent podcast, you wanna know the number one thing that'll drive you into burnout the fastest? It's living in a way that does not match your values. When you're on the sidelines at your kid's soccer game, and you're working, and you know you should be present, That will drain the meter faster than anything, when we don't live our values. And so we look up and we know that we have this huge opportunity to be better, and I think that we can all do better, and I'm going to give you some frameworks. So let's first, let's define what we mean by busyness. This is how I define it.

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A reactive mode. That word reactive is very important because people who are trapped in the business cycle are reacting to the world. They're not responding to it, where your time is filled with activity, but depleted of intentionality. Intention, what do we intend to do versus what we actually did? And it's a commitment to overcommitment that creates the illusion of progress and productivity, I would say, while obscuring what actually matters. People look at you, and they say, wow, you get so much done. But are you getting the right stuff done? At work, and in our coaching and training, I sometimes refer to this as performative work. If you've ever been new to a job, you've done it. You're like, I don't know what to do, so I'm just going to walk around really fast and carry papers. And it gives this illusion that you've got something to do, because you don't really want to do work when you're the intern or whatever, but you also don't want to be called out for it. So we've been trained to believe that this busyness is something that's good. In fact, it's become a kind of status symbol. It used to be, if you wanted to signal that you were incredibly wealthy, you signaled how much leisure time you had. Today, we talk about how many hours we work and how many businesses we run. That is now the badge of honor That is the status symbol. I was reading in the Harvard Business Review, a really cool article. The guy was talking about an immigrant he was working with, and the immigrant thought the word busy meant good. And the guy goes, why, why, why do you think busy means good? He said, because every time I ask someone how they're doing, they always say, I'm busy. Now, after I read that, watch yourself. When someone asks you, how are you doing, what is the word that you want to say?

Amazing.

Amazing is great. That's what I'm trying to pivot to. Awesome, fantastic, how about you? But the default words that often come to my lips and I hear more than anything else is the word busy. So how do we remove it from this kind of badge of honor status that society's put us on? Because the truth is, a lot of us are living a life of incredible busyness, and we are mistaking that for productivity. What it really is is compulsion, and at its extreme, illness. A lot of us are living a well-orchestrated panic attack and calling it a life. Thank you for laughing and not crying. I've had both reactions. Okay, so if we look at the symptoms of what this does, like beyond the stress of rushing through our days, what shows up? So first and foremost, we see goal drift. Is anybody here an aviator? Anybody an aviator? I thought I saw a hand. There's this thing called the 1 in 60 rule. I don't know exactly how scientific it is, but it says if you are 1 degree off in your heading, for every 60 nautical miles you travel, you'll be a mile off of your destination. So small deviations in our direction add up to big differences in our destination. And when you look at people who are trapped in this busyness cycle, we're reactive, and we, we look for the low-hanging fruit. Oh, that would be a quick win. You come to a conference like this, you'll have to resist it. Oh, I should, I should, I should, and we should on ourselves. Thank you for getting the connotation. Don't ever shit on yourself. But we think of all the things that we, quote, should be doing that we're not, and we start adding more to the plate. And it's all coming from a good place, but what it does is we start veering off course. Now, the actual reason we have GPS today is there was a Korean Airlines plane in 1985 that started its journey from Anchorage to Seoul, and it was 5 degrees off. And over a few hundred miles, it flew into Soviet airspace and was shot down. After that, Ronald Reagan agreed to make what was then proprietary military technology, the GPS, available to all civilian flights, because they were still using dead reckoning to guide planes around the world, and now we have GPS. So what is our GPS? How do we stay on track? How do we stay connected to our goals so we don't drift and often go in circles. 2, unconscious quitting. And I meant to misspell that. Sorry, I'm an English major, I missed the S. The unconscious quitting. You look up and it's January, it's February, and those goals you started the year out with, suddenly you've forgotten about them. There's a company called Strava. Is anybody here a runner or mountain biker? They've been doing this for years. And they call it Quitter's Day. They track everyone's health resolutions in January, and the majority of people will have abandoned their goals by February. And the day on which they quit at the highest rate, which they call Quitter's Day, is either January 17th or the 19th. It depends on the year. It takes less than a month for most people to forget what they launched their year into. And when we're running around and it's not front and center, it becomes very easy to unconsciously quit on ourselves and our goals. I'm all for quitting. I think winners quit. We strategically quit the roles and responsibilities that don't serve us, and more importantly, we quit the relationships that are toxic and don't serve us. So quitting is good when it's conscious. Quitting is good when it's conscious. Groundhog year, both of those add up to those people, and it's sometimes us, who say, this is the year that I will finally fill in the blank. Quit this job, start my side hustle, write that book, get healthy, start lifting weights, you name it. But what happens is year after year, we come back to the beginning, and it feels like we're in the same place. Now, my first big book I worked on at HarperCollins was called Body for Life by Bill Phillips. And it was, like, iconic at the time, sold 6 million copies. And I studied the bestsellers around health, and every year, you watch it next month, the bestseller list will be full of health and diet books, because the publishing industry knows all about Groundhog Year.

Okay.

All they have to do is slap a second edition on it, put it out in January, and they've got a good chance that people are about to start over again, and maybe by February, they'll keep going or they'll have quit. So Tim Ferriss says it this way, busyness is a form of laziness, lazy thinking, and indiscriminate action. I look at it when I'm in my coaching, that I often see it as a place where people go to hide. They know what they should be doing, but they hide it up with all the activity. And I'll be frank, you know, when I've been through going through grief, and I've lost someone over the years, I didn't know it. I went to work to hide, until I lost a coworker, and I realized that I couldn't hide at work anymore. And so that was a gift, even if it was a painful one, but busyness can be a place that we go to hide. It's either a laziness of thinking or a lack thereof. Keith Cunningham's one of my favorite offers— authors. He wrote a book called The Road Less Stupid. He would tell you, You don't actually need to be smarter, even though that's why we're all here. What we really need to do is less stupid shit. The mistakes that we make because we're not stopping to think and plan, we're working in the business instead of taking just a minute to work on the business, cost us far more than all of the little gains we make. So just a little bit of space at irregular intervals can make us less likely to do that stupid stuff. So at the end of the day, this is where we end up. When you lack clarity about what you should be doing, if it's not front and center, we have poor boundaries. I like to say, if you don't know what you, you've said yes to, how can you say no to things? Right? So when we lack clarity, we lack boundaries. When we lack boundaries, we say yes to too much stuff. When we say yes to too much stuff, we look up and we are stressed out and we are time impoverished. We have that feeling that we never have enough time to do the things we want to do. Our to-do list is getting longer, not shorter. And that feeling of time poverty eventually rolls downhill to overwhelm, overwork, and burnout. And when we're in that state, even though we're saying that this busyness is a good thing and people are projecting it, our work suffers, our health suffers, and frankly, our relationships suffer. And that may be the highest cost we pay for this. So I love this quote, it's a punch in the goat, goat, in the gut. If busyness is your drug, rest will feel like stress. And I've seen people, right, that when you ask them, I need you to take an hour, and I just want you to step out of your business, and I want you to focus on what is it you're doing strategically, like step out, they get fidgety, they don't know what to do. Right, it is a real thing that a lot of us suffer from, because the world has rewarded us for a long time for our ability to take action, not to think about the action we should take. So here's what I'm gonna leave you with as a simple framework, and I'm gonna spend a little time, it's 3 steps. I did a podcast on Valentine's Day of this year, and I think it was like falling in love with your goals or something like that, it was something cutesy. But I kind of stumbled into, oh, this is really important. And if you think about the last time you fell in love, when you met that person, did you want to wait a year to see them again? No, you like, like, when can we go out again? And do you mind if I text you or email you 5 times or send you DMs 5 times a day between then? We don't want to go Like, how far is creepy in the beginning of a relationship? But I really like this person, and I wanna interact with them. So we haven't learned how to build a relationship with our goals. We start off in January, and we say we're married. I'm running a marathon this year, I'm writing the Great American Novel, I'm gonna launch my business. But we don't do any courting along the way, and so that's what leads to those other things. So how do we make those regular connections? So in our business, you heard me in the video, we talk about forming habits. The research suggests that on average, that doesn't mean it's every time, it takes about 66 repetitions. By far, in the last decade, the most impactful habit we've built as a community is something we called Goals Before Phones. Most people, the first thing they do when they wake up, is they pick up their phone. And what do they do when they get their phone? They drop into their email, they drop into their social, they drop into their text. Guess what lives there? Your goals do not. That's where other people's priorities live. And the simple act of, what did I actually say yes to? What is my priority, my one thing today, allowed people then to enter that chaos with clarity, and say no to all the junk, right? You've said I do, to go back to this romantic thing, to your goal, and therefore everything else is cheating. But you have to remind yourself, and you have to do it daily. I was sharing backstage, I've got my core values on my phone: impact, family, and abundance. And they say that you look at your phone 80 to 90 times a day. I need, I'm on, I'm in the remedial class, I need to be reminded constantly. What is it that I've said is most important, and am I actually living true to it? So 5 minutes a day can change your trajectory if you only do one thing after the speech. If you wanted to do 2 things, you knock that out, spend about 20 minutes a week looking at your goals. What did I say I was gonna do this year? Based on that, what do I have to do this month? Based on that, what do I have to do this week? And then you look at your calendar and say, does my calendar reflect my goals? And if it doesn't, you're sending cancellations. People do it to you all the time. I'm sorry, I'm, I can't do it this week, can we take a rain check? And that's what we have to do. But that 20 minutes a week is how we're course correcting. We drifted last week, but we can get back on course, 'cause we didn't go too far off, right? That 1 degree last week, we just have to go 2 degrees the other way. It's small adjustments over time, and you do the same thing for a little longer on the month. Where am I spending my time? Am I investing it, and will I get a return? I want you to fight busyness to start building a relationship with your goals. Take them for a date every day, every week, and every month. So, I got a little applause for that, thank you. Busy people don't fill their— busy people fill their time, successful people protect their time. You have to flip the switch. to looking for what you could do, to focusing on everything that you can say no to. Steve Jobs, we wrote about it in The ONE Thing, very famously said, every yes has to be defended by 1,000 nos. And I'm not sure he was underestimating things if you wanna do something extraordinary. Busyness is not a badge of honor, it's a symptom of poor boundaries and unclear priorities. We don't want to fall for that, we want to be better, And lastly, just join me, let's break out of the busyness trap. Busyness is not limitless, right? When you know what your one thing is every day, that is the path to an extraordinary, limitless life. Thank you, folks. Thank you very much.

There you have it. That was a powerful reminder that being busy isn't the same as being productive. And that clarity, focus, intention are what actually move your life and your learning forward. So tell me in the comments, what was your biggest takeaway from Jay's talk? What's the one thing you want to focus on right now? Make sure you save this episode so you can revisit it later. And don't forget to like and subscribe for more brain performance strategies. You could join our 2 million YouTube subscribers where we put the extended version of our podcast and also some of additional training that we put there and it's completely free. And if this keynote sparks something in you, if you like hearing directly in the room from speakers like Jay and learning from some of the world's top voices in peak mental performance, be sure to join us at our upcoming Limitless Live event in 2026. You get details at limitlesslive.com. That's limitlesslive.com. Go there because while it is about limitless, the spots, the seats are indeed limited. This is an experience where we go deep on productivity, AI, how to influence mindset, brain optimization, especially for work. And these strategies are the ones that you need To not only survive, but thrive in a fast-paced technology, AI-changing world. So get your ticket today. Seats are limited. I'd love to meet you and see you there. Until next time, as always, be limitless.

Limitless.