A weirdly large share of productivity advice is about increasing how many hours in your day you spend doing work.
My current job is not a good example here because it doesn’t come in discrete little units, but my last job did. My last job was to write profiles of software engineers. They took about 15minutes to write when I was in the swing of things, but it was often hard to get myself into the mode where I could work on them. Sometimes I’d spend the whole day slowly slogging through them. Sometimes I’d procrastinate all day and then do all of them with two hours left in the day.
The maximally productive day, for that job, would have been to finish all of my work by 10am and then spend the rest of the day relaxing.
Nearly all productivity tools and apps would consider the ‘most productive’ day to be the one where I spent ten hours working on profiles.
I get why they do this. You have more volitional control over how much time you spend working than over how much work you get done when you do, and it can be discouraging to strive for something that’s not really in your control. For many people and many tasks, how much time you work and how much you get done are pretty strongly correlated. And it’s easier to track time spent than progress accomplished.
But nonetheless, it seems pretty damaging for this to be the focus of nearly all productivity advice. The rare things which are instead results-oriented seem to do well. Duolingo rewards lessons completed, not time spent doing them. 4thewords rewards words written. The people I know seem to like them and stick with them a lot more than with time-trackers or strategies to squeeze more workday out of their lives.
I think most people trying to be more productive should try both a ‘track how much time you spend working! spend more!’ approach and a ‘here’s how much you have to achieve today! try for the earliest possible completion time!’ approach, so you can give yourself a chance at hitting on whatever works best.
I find that what works best for me is neither “spend as much time as possible” nor “do a set amount” (mind you, I don’t think I’ve tried the particular variant “do a set amount *as quickly as possible*”; that might work a little better), but rather “you have this much time available, do as much as possible within that period”.
Both more-time and result-based methods tend to make me work more slowly because it feels like there’s little reason not to, whereas if I only have a certain amount of time I want to make it count. My job pays by the hour, and I actually do really well under that system: it motivates me to make myself useful, because I want my employer to get his money’s worth.
Meanwhile, with university, it’s unfortunate that my schedule is not as conducive to “spend Exactly Four Hours working on school assignments” as it used to be, and I *am* pretty sure that I go through schoolwork more slowly now that I’m not doing that. I’ve been considering ways I might tweak my approach to allow for rigid school times while still being able to fulfil my duties as my workplace’s emergency fill-in person (that is to say, while having a somewhat unpredictable work schedule).
Tags:
#yes I do best with strict scheduling but signed up for a job with an explicit condition of ”must be able to show up on short notice” #look local minimum wage is super high compared to my cost of living #so by my standards even this fast-food job pays *very* well #most weeks I work 16 hours and make very nearly enough to support myself #reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #adventures in University Land #in which Brin has a job #adventures in human capitalism
Brinens and Things 