The Cult of Productivity

You know you are a lazy person, and there are thousands of people who want to tell you exactly how to fix that. But the truth is, you are probably just fine, and falling too far into the productivity rabbit hole will just make you lazier, more stressed, and poorer than when you started.

Modern life is full of an endless list of things to do, you spend a lot of time getting to a job, putting in your eight hours a day (if you are lucky), getting home again, and only then can you go shopping, clean your house, wash your clothes, pay your bills, cook, and help out your family with anything they need. Thanks to the rising cost of living and stagnating wages you might also want to including a side hustle or a business project in addition to everything else oh and at some point have some time to relax with friends and family or just get a good night sleep.

It’s a lot, and us humans were not meant to be this switched on all the time, so to keep you on your grind and help you feel a little bit less overwhelmed by everything you need to do, there is a new movement of pseudo self help gurus. These people promise to teach you simple tricks that conveniently fit in seminars, books or 15-minute YouTube videos that will help you to better organise your life, stay motivated and achieve your goals, even if your goal is not having to work 2 jobs.

It sounds helpful, or at the very least harmless, but following this advice could put you further behind for four reasons. The first reason is that it just doesn't work. Productivity brands and influencers have the opposite problem to “finfluencers” another group that promises to fix your finances instead of everything else in your life.

Good personal finance should be boring and simple, save diligently, avoid high interest debt, maximise your income and invest responsibly for long term goals. It’s so simple that everything you need to know about personal finance can fit on a post-it note and people have done it. That’s a problem for personal finance influencers because they make a lot of money by posting weekly content and can’t keep saying the same thing every week so they end up making uninformed predications or telling financial success stories that were more a product of luck than diligent financial planning. But we have already talked enough about those guys before. Productivity influencers have the opposite problem, there is just TOO much to talk about and without knowing each and every one of their viewers situations they can’t come up with good suggestions, and uninformed advice is the same thing as bad advice. A report by psychology today founded so called “toxic productivity” as one of the leading causes of diagnosed anxiety and depression.

A strong focus on productivity also produces worse outcomes for everyone.

A report by the Harvard Business School studied employees who were fired for bad workplace behaviour. The study found that a large share of those terminated employees were high performers in their roles, but brough down everybody that worked with them. A strong belief in their own abilities, a strict adherence to their own routines, and a high expectation for everybody around them made them worse at delivering good results for the business. The researches found that a worker that had an intense focus on their own productivity might return $5,303 in cost savings to a company through increased output, avoiding a toxic hire will net an estimated $12,489 because they collaborate more easily with co-workers and clients and are less resistant to changes in the organisation.

An extreme focus on productivity in your personal life can also simply make you less productive as you spend all your time and effort hyper optimizing every task in your life instead of just getting them done in a way that works for you. Despite the crazy amount of harm this can do, there are three terrible reasons why the cult of productivity isn’t going anywhere.

So it’s time to learn How Money Works to find out why trying to become more productive is only going to make things worse.