Friday, May 7, 2021
I’ll admit it — I read just about any productivity book I can find. That’s because I am not what you might call a “naturally productive person,” so I need a few extra systems and strategies to get my important work done.
I’ve also (Braggy Braggerton alert) written something like 1.3 million words just for Copyblogger and Remarkable Communication.
So when I tell you I’ve found a couple of things that help you get work done … that’s coming from a real place.
Real talk: most productivity advice is awful
We live in an environment with toxic levels of stress, mountains of responsibilities, weakened social support, and an abundance of addictive distractions to keep us away from what matters.
Productivity feels hard because it is hard.
And clueless advice makes it worse, not better.
My main problem with most productivity advice is that it’s written from a point of view I call Privilege Narcissism.
That’s where you get advice like,
“I get a lot done because my wife takes care of our 7 kids and does all the cooking and the shopping and the cleaning plus she has a full-time job so I can re-invest all of my revenue into the biz.”
So I enjoyed this post I found this week: I used to love productivity advice. Then I had kids.
You don’t have to have kids to know that you have too many responsibilities and not enough time, energy, or willpower to get to all of them.
One of the handful of genuinely useful books I’ve found on this is Stephen Guise’s Elastic Habits.
I enjoyed his earlier book, Mini Habits, as the easiest-to-implement take on the advice to “do something very tiny every day.” (Which works, btw.)
Elastic Habits adds a couple of simple tweaks that make it vastly more usable, because it makes room for varying levels of time and energy. It’s a quick read, and I’ve been recommending it to all of my students and clients.
– Sonia
