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Productivity advice is great—usually. But there’s a point of diminishing returns. If you spend four hours every day on some “productivity system” you’ve built, all that time will really eat into the time you would spend getting stuff done.
Recently, on the productivity subreddit, someone wrote a great post titled “**ck your productivity system. Seriously.” It struck a chord: posted not that long ago, it’s now the most upvoted post of all time on that forum. And for very good reason. A lot of productivity advice out there is not worth our time. After filtering through a lot of the productivity advice out there, including for my first book, I’d even wager that most of it is. (I found the Reddit post hilarious—you will, too, assuming you can handle a lot of f-bombs. When I mentioned the post to my wife, she immediately asked: “did you write this?”)
So, what should we focus on when it comes to productivity?
Here’s the golden rule for productivity advice: for every minute you spend on a tactic, how much time will you get back? The original poster, Motor_Ordinary336, who goes by Ibo, highlights a bunch of tactics out there that they feel are more of a waste of time than anything else, including “notion templates that took longer to set up than actually doing the work”, using “27 different colored highlighters for time blocking”, and inbox zero tactics. Maybe one of these tactics will let you make back time in a way that it doesn’t with Ibo. But make sure it does make you back time—that you’re not just shifting deck chairs around in your work.
Notice what works, and very quickly drop what doesn’t.
A problem is that it’s often hard to know what advice will work until you try it on for size. Experimentation is key—and so is investing in advice that’s rooted in research. But be sure to keep this rule in mind while experimenting. Productivity advice exists to serve you—not the other way around.
As Ibo puts it on the post (and on his site): “You know what made our parents productive? They just sat down and did the work. They didn’t need an app to tell them to drink water or take a break. [..] They had a pen, paper, and sh** to do.”
“You don’t need a better system. You need to sit your a** down and work.”