Busy Doesn't Mean Productive

Coming from an operations world, you are always on the go.

While you might work 8 or 10 hours a day, the other parts of your business and/or your responsibility are usually going 24 hours a day.

This is one of the most challenging things for people to manage as they get into an operations world.

At first you simply believe that you will do more hours, get ahead of the curve and then you will be able to slow down and relax. Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. The more you get accomplished, the more 'opportunities' you seem to have.

Added to this, you start to deal with the matrix above more often then you realize. The biggest trap that people fall into with their work and responsibilities is not taking the time to understand where each task / problem / responsibility fits. The other major challenge is that we often take on what 'seems' to be urgent and important ... for other people and not necessarily ourselves.

With so many people working from home right now, I think we have all see the articles talking about the strain it is starting to take on everyone, how the workday has actually gotten LONGER despite the absence of a commute.

It struck a parallel for me for the book "Sapiens" that I am currently reading and how the author talks about the agricultural revolution. A great quote from this section:

"We did not domesticate wheat, wheat in fact domesticated us"

The switch and focus from foraging to farming was supposed to make things easier. More control of our food supply brings benefits of a more consistent calories, the ability to store grains allowed people to better manage changes in climate while also being 'safer' as you are not risking your life hunting big game.

The problem is that this revolution also brought unforeseen consequences as well.

More food, meant more babies which actually meant more sharing had to happen (which in turn created more hard labour to farm more land). The success of grain silos drew the attention of neighbouring communities who now might try to take what you had (vs doing all of the hard work themselves); and a more limited / restricted diet left us more susceptible to unexpected climate events, as well as diseases ravaging the crops.

The point here was this ... humans rarely can conceptualize all of the consequences of our actions at scale and the worse our predictions are the further we go into the future. 

I think this is very apt and relatable to our current situation.

Our technology has given us more access and more 'freedom' than ever, yet we are finding ourselves spread even more thin. With each task we complete, each specialization we develop, someone wants us to now take on a little bit more.

Added to this, is the complication that most people (and honestly a traditional work environment) doesn't account for differences in people's natural rhythms of productivity.

Here's how Daniel Pink highlights these in his book "When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing"

Lesson 1: There’s an emotional pattern each of us follows on any given day

1. Morning peak. Whether it’s right after waking up or 1-2 hours later, most people feel pretty good early in the day.
2. Afternoon trough. You know how it’s tough to stay awake after lunch? This is it.
3. Evening rebound. Once you knock off work, even the toughest days take a turn, don’t they?

Lesson 2: Figure out your chronotype to produce your best work

1. The lark. People like me, who love to get up early, and have all their emotional highs and lows a few hours earlier than most people.
2. The owl. If you don’t like getting up early and can really get to work around 9 PM, that’s you.
3. The third bird. The majority of people, who are neither late, nor early, and just follow the standard pattern.

Lesson 3: Regular breaks and nappuccinos help you save time, not lose it

The best thing that we can do for ourselves, our teams and our organizations is to understand what is the work that we are doing, why are we doing it, and how urgent & important is it and then couple this with how we best work as individuals.

As we continue to spread out, continue to use technology to connect from all parts of the globe, we need to shift the focus from routine and 'clocking hours' and shift to a productivity mindset if we truly want to improve our organizations and drive more creativity and balance.