My personal view: the next big improvement should come from tackling emotional self-management.
This is derived mostly from my own experience of ~15 years of struggling with personal productivity (and going through every trick in every popular book), as well as observing others close to me. In recent years I came to the conclusion that it's all about emotional state.
The planner, the TODO list, the Pomodoro timer, the Inbox & Someday/Maybe folders, the bullet journal - those are all complexity management tools. They address the problem of having too many things taking your attention, making you unable to focus. They don't address the problem of not being able to focus at all, not being able to open your TODO list, not being able to work on a task for more than 30 seconds before either feeling distressed, or beginning to question your life priorities. Conversely, when you're feeling really good and pumped about the thing you're doing, you don't need a complicated system to keep you focused - a notebook and some pens, or an open text file, is enough to keep the complexity manageable, and you'll figure out an effective enough system on the fly.
I've only begun exploring the space of emotional self-management, and so far, I haven't found any neat hacks or effective methods. A big problem is that the brain adapts to attempts at cheating it - like e.g. there was a time where I could control my emotional states through the choice of music, but it stopped working after I started exploiting it to make myself work on things. Similarly, all attempts at self-gamifying fail because I know I'm just manipulating myself.
But if anyone can crack that problem - effective emotional self-management - I'll happily shower them with all the money I can spare.
This comes from trauma therapy, specifically Polyvagal Theory. Patients have their life story and often think of it as the reason for their current problems, when in reality a huge portion of that might be their body, ie the state of their nervous system, informing a story they tell themselves, making mental illness an infinite loop.
So for self management: Get into a happy state and you'll be productive.
Body:
-sleep
-food
-water
-sun
-posture
-exercise
Mind:
-well basically "Learned Optimism" by Martin Seligman
My main point being: How we learn what hard work is (the Hollywood version), and how work needs to feel (Stress! Panic! No sleep! Hustle! Endless To Do lists!) is very wrong and gives you anxiety => puts your body into a bad state.
And if you are in the bad state and unproductive, people usually resort to "I'm not doing this right, I need to put me into the bad state harder!". See the endless tools you listed. The problem lies elsewhere.
I also have mixed feelings about it. It feels nice at a surface level, but I'm not sure if the details follow. Are our brains really that bad at interpreting signals from the body? When I scrape my leg, I just feel that my leg hurts - but if I have lower but more persistent pain, my brain doesn't flag it as a leg issue, but instead starts telling me I hate my job?
More than that, I don't like how this view is typically used to peddle what I dubbed as "fuck off" advice. Take e.g. the "Body" list you've attached: essentially "sleep, diet, exercise". Aka. things that are often given as generic advice to solve one's mental problems. My personal experience (both of applying the advice on myself, as well as observing people) tells me that these do not work beyond fixing some extreme deficiencies - but they're the perfect thing to tell someone so they go away. They waste a year trying and failing to fix their problem, constantly blaming themselves for failing to stick to good sleep schedule / diet / exercise regime, but through that year they don't bother you anymore.
Even if these interventions did work like that - which I doubt they do - they're usually impractical. Getting into a perfect shape and sleep schedule is a years-long effort requiring sacrifices few people can make without throwing most of the nice things in their life away (it's not like they can cut out their job, so it's the personal time that gets sacrificed), and results are high-maintenance. So it isn't a good answer for the modern lifestyle, unless it brings order-of-magnitude improvements. Which we know it doesn't (otherwise everyone even moderately successful would be also fit and sleeping well).
1. The body stores emotions and simple movement and body awareness can shift feelings. Read "Body Keeps the Score" for more.
2. Animals often shake and shudder out emotions, we've unlearnt that. Try shake it out.
3. There's some clinically backed programs that help with emotional regulation. My favorite is the Mindfulness Based Self Compassion Course https://centerformsc.org/. A key enphasis of the course is accepting emotions, that suffering is part of life. Unnecessary suffering is often caused by the resistance of the emotion.
Hope that helps! Email me samdup at gmail com if you'd like to discuss more!
Also I think this is why sociopaths are so successful. I believe they are not subject to the strong ebb and flow of emotions like myself and the person I am responding to.
Also I'd like to state that some exceptions are entertainers/sportspeople as many of them are notoriously mercurial but overall they are still largely successful enough at "harnessing" their emotions to profit from it.
Productivity is about achieving your goals with as little waste as possible, and getting things done. It's not about deciding what those goals are. That's not a slight on productivity, it's just what the word means.
This article isn't talking about productivity, it's talking about meaning & fulfilment. But the idea that deciding what you want out of your own life is some new thing (a "3.0" as opposed to something humans have been concerned about since the dawn of time) is a mistake.
So... I'm not sure if it really says anything.
You could be doing meaningful stuff for yourself, like a starving artist. It is not productive, if other people do not pay you for your art work.
You could be doing very productive work, but not meaningful (for yourself).
The meaning and fulfillment is given by the metric by which you measure, nothing more. Productivity is basically just a tool, it has no greater meaning by itself.
"Fitness 3 - fulfilment. Traditionally fitness focused on building muscle and nothing else, then came cross-fit and calisthenics that sacrificed pure muscle mass in favor of extending bodily functioning. Fitness 3 will be fulfilment where everyone can be as fit as they want or need to be without the pressures of ..."
"Reading 3 - fulfilment. Reading community has gone through two different stages in the past: first people were reading as many books as they could, summarising them and storing them in their bookshelves; then came the niche-reading which divided people into groups - we had sci-fi readers, popular psychology groups, detective story enthusiasts and so on. But the tide is shifting towards the next step for reading - fulfilment. Readers are now seeking meaning in their life and they try to balance reading with other activities for a more holistic life experience ..."
I didn't manage to gain something useful from reading the article, maybe that's why my take here is a bit cynical.
Well, OK... true, if you never set any boundaries in your life, maybe it does make sense to spend years learning new ways to handle it all. And really, the article almost goes there when it starts to talk about fulfillment and there being more to life than your to do lists. Sadly, it whooshes right on by that point and says "productivity 3.0" will help businesses find ways to empower their employees, and then just fades away into some vague idea of knowledge management.
It seems like the author came so close to realizing that they need to guide their own ship, but they have spent so much time dealing with how much they want to get done, they simply fail to ask whether or not they should have been OK with taking so much on in the first place.
Set some boundaries, people. Your job is an important part of your life, but there are limits.
The critiques I see now are of the form: productivity is a means to an end and not the end so this article confuses them.
But I think that is sort of the point.
Traditionally we think of improving the means to achieve the ends we want but the author seems to suggest we should — or are or will — examine the ends to make sure we are not achieving the wrong ones.
It’s almost another way of describing the productivity hack of the no list or choosing what not to achieve to focus on what we do want to achieve.
Company size and nature of work; turnover of staff; existing teams vs new teams all have an effect on whether you can give people the freedom to work asynchronously, work offline, have creative freedom.
I know plenty of devs who simply would not be productive if left to themselves, they need direction, they lack the skills to creatively solve problems and that's fine. Build them a backlog and let them tick things off. If they need help, let them message somebody and disturb them to get them unstuck.
A lot of the cult of independent and async working sounds like people who are introvert and just want to do what they want to do. This often doesn't work in business where we want people to be proactively working together to achieve a goal and some of this does require our time being "wasted" actually discussing things.
Do you? Or do you just want that goal achieved with a great solution?
Sure, there are times that necessitates a team to solve it. That’s far from always, though.
Before that U-turn I kept everything in my to-do list and had lots of recurring tasks. However, after several years I realized that I've become a slave to chores -- a very conscientious, diligent slave who has no time or mindspace for projects that really matter to me.
Nowadays, I use an opposite approach -- I don't keep a "general" to-do list at all, and I do chores only when they become really obnoxious. I do, however, keep a Zettelkasten with a dozen projects in it, and several stream-of-consciousness journals for ongoing projects.
1. They are anecdotal, and reference other anecdotal articles for evidence
2. They focus exclusively on how an individual should be productive.
Keeping the first in mind, their accuracy is dubious at best. Real experiments and studies on "productivity" are harder to find and worth more.
And as for the second... there's only so much an individual can accomplish alone. The most efficient gear in the world can only do so much for the machine as a whole. There is more to be gained by improving the productivity of groups rather than individuals.
Most of this bubble seems to be about people finding ways on how they can organize themselves to reach their goals in the first place. Optimizing these ways for higher efficiency is usually the endgame that most people seem to barely reach, considering how swallow it all is at the end.
And optimizing the necessary and boring parts, to have more time for happiness makes totally sense. For example, the less time I waste on necessary household chores which are eating my free time, the more time I will have with actual free time which I then can use for things which will make me happy.
COVID shone some light on how pointless productivity is without fulfillment. Let's achieve fulfillment with better productivity tools!
Now the critique:
Being after productivity at the expense of fulfillment is unbelievable and unbelievably stupid. I don't mean to generalize and I really hope it's not a sign of our times, but I can't ignore this hypothesis for now.
Anyway, sol ing fulfillment issues with productivity tools certainly sounds like techno-solutionism to me and avoids a much simpler solution that is regularly overlooked: removing some productivity objectives instead of working to solve your issues with more productivity.
That's what I meant, yes.
We somehow accept that the average office worker is constantly dealing with information overload and distractions, and never wonder why or make a serious attempt to fix it. We find systems to cope with it, but don't address the root cause.
Likewise, we stretch people to the point where they are often near a burn-out and then offer meditation as a solution. How about not stretching people out in the first place?
I'd like to offer an interesting contrast by means of my background. I'm born into the lower working class. My family, the town I live in, it's almost all blue collar workers.
Strangely, these people never have meetings. Or at most one per week. They may have a few spontaneous 5 minute phone calls per day to calibrate, and that's it. They seem to mostly just work, as they know what to do, how to do it, and when to do it.
The immediate excuse we might come up with is that the nature of the work is different. More repetitive, less complex, less dependencies. Sometimes, but not always true. But it's still not an excuse in any case.
We quite simply don't have things in order. If for the coming week you don't know what the 1-3 things are you should be working on, that's a planning/priority problem. Which is to be addressed centrally.
If you are under siege by 20 other things not part of those 1-3 things, you shouldn't "deal with it", you should aim to eradicate them. Because clearly there's a planning/responsibility misalignment going on.
If your planning/priority situation changes by the day or even hour, your team has shit planning. Fix it.
If you spend half of each day not working, instead figuring out what to do, stop accepting this reality. Something is fishy upstream.
If you are bombarded with status meetings and messages, you have a systems problem.
Is there a single silver bullet? No. All I'm saying is that a huge part of these problems are solvable, and shouldn't be accepted as a fact of life for you to cope with. Demand clear tasks and planning. Demand uninterrupted time to do the tasks. It's not anti-business, it's pro-business. The worker AND the business benefits.
Fulfillment has nothing to do with it. Of course work-life balance matters, as well as chasing the luxury of doing work you like. But the lack of fulfillment in office work likely does not come from the tasks itself being dreadful.
Example 1. A manager draws a line on a patch of sand and tells me to dig into the ground 2 inches deep along this line. It needs to be ready before tomorrow.
Whilst not a fun task, it is clear. It is fulfilling in the sense that you would get paid for it, plus at the end of the day you have a feeling of accomplishment. You may feel tired, but not burned out.
Example 2. The dysfunctional office version of the above would be something like this...
Yeah so we need you to dig that line, but please check with our design department as they may have some changes in the line's design. The Kentucky office said that the line might need to be dug into another location entirely. Please also look plan a meeting with legal as our shovels may not be compliant. By the way, today you also urgently need to paint the fence, renovate the shed and design a new pond but we're not really sure when what needs to happen or how much time you have so figure it out. By the way, did you take the mandatory HR and IT security training that is due this week. Sorry, whilst I was typing it turns out the digging needs to be 1 inch deep, not 2 inch, so please put the sand back. But do it after the painting. I think. As per latest policy, please declare your commute expenses en route to the digging site, I've attached a PDF with instructions, required reading. By the way, are you reading your email? 7 people asked about the status of the digging, yet you haven't replied? Please reply urgently as to prevent further escalations. Which reminds me, please skip lunch at the site as one of our investors may drop by. Further, as you know, we're working on new recruit diggers, can you do an interview with them around 7PM? We need to move quickly as there's many digging opportunities.
I'm sure I could go on. The point is that example 2 creates burn-out, a lack of fulfillment, meditation as a requirement, and so on. It has absolutely nothing to do with the actual task of digging. It's garbage planning and incompetence. This is why you'll never find a blue collar worker in a meditation center, only stressed out white collar workers.
1) Get rid of tasks. A huge amount of "work" done today is nonsense. Common culprits are meetings, compliance, tickboxing, just following orders, etc.
2) Do one thing at a time and just get it done. Surprisingly few tasks actually requires a ton of people to get involved if you ignore whatever dogmatic process procedure policy culture imposed.
Planning and efficiency tools are net negative until they have improved your efficiency more than the time, distraction, and mental effort it costs to fiddle with them. That is something I rarely see when I test and measure how people work in reality. And there are more secondary costs, e.g: getting more rigid to follow an established plan even when reality changes, unrealistic synchronisation promises, etc.
You are noncompliant only when you have been sued and lost. Before that point you are improving your efficiency by just solving the problem and building value for your customers. Most people drastically overinterpret the regulations and overemphasise the risks. And you can almost always become compliant at a later stage, if the risk profile changes.
Sitting in meetings is very rarely effective work. Coordination by meeting is almost always highly inefficient compared to alternative structures. But for some reason there is a shared myth here that is very hard to kill. And it is insanely rare that anyone questions the dogma, or measures the effects. It is common that I see organisations with effective total management and coordination overhead above 60%. It is not difficult to stay below 10% without drastically increasing risk of errors, planning, etc.
Many "superimportant" tasks, features, etc turn out to be not needed in the end. By prioritising well and postponing/killing stuff you will drastically improve efficiency and save lots of work, money, and headache.
Hire competent people with common sense. Given them a clear goal on the horizon and leave them alone. The end.
