When you look at the last couple of decades, it seems that we came to the conclusion that there is something inherently wrong with life, and it needs to be fixed. So an army of life hackers flooded social media with ideas on how to make life more efficient and how to live smarter. Productivity gurus are teaching us how to become more productive and cram as many things into our crazy busy lives as possible. And to be fair, many of these things do deliver on the promise. We indeed get more things done and live more optimized lives. But for what? To be busier than ever. Instead of five suboptimal meetings, we manage to squeeze ten of them into our busy day. Instead of having one after-school activity for our kids a week, we get them to attend five or six. Instead of earning a comfortable living, we double our income to buy more stuff we don’t need. All this striving for productivity and efficiency makes us busier and more anxious than ever.

Wouldn’t it be better to accept that we can never do everything we would love to and slow down and enjoy a quieter and more sane life? Trying to be more productive and more efficient inadvertently leads to filling up your days with more and more things to do.

“The chase for productivity leaves us in a perpetual frantic state where we lose the ability to live in the moment and enjoy all the wonders life has to offer.”

Trying to be ultra-productive often leaves us in a perpetual frantic state where we lose the ability to live in the moment and enjoy all the world’s wonders. Getting things done is important. But it is not all that is important. Look at it from the grand scheme of things. What would happen if you didn’t create the report for your boss? Nothing. The hour you spend on it has exactly zero impact on the history of the world. Yet, spending that hour with your kid will have a huge impact on her childhood.

Good old days before productivity became a thing

When did this need for productivity, efficiency, and managing time start? Do you think it has been there since the dawn of humanity? Think again.

In the good old days, people had tons of problems. They would worry about their safety, about whether they will have enough to eat. They would worry about wild animals, about the weather. But they wouldn’t worry about time. In pre-industrial society, the concept of time had a very different meaning. You worked on your fields at a sustainable pace, and what you managed to do was it. You took breaks and ate your basic food. You accepted your life as a mere peasant because that was the life you knew. No need to save time or not waste time. You didn’t even have a good way how to track time.

“The industrial revolution made us obsessed with time as a rare resource. And if it is a rare resource, it must be managed with care and great efficiency.”

It all changed with the industrial revolution when a bigger number of people had to synchronize their daily activities when we got obsessed with time. We had no choice. When you want to accomplish something bigger and coordinate more people, you need to make time the cornerstone of your organizational effort. And so the endless obsession with clocks and time becomes a way of life. It is no longer something abstract that is just there. It is a rare resource that can’t be wasted. And if it is a rare resource, it must be managed with care and great efficiency. You want the workers in the factory to spend their limited time at work as productively as possible so you can mine the time resource and translate it into as much money as possible.

Productivity chase makes us miserable

When you think about it, our obsession with productivity and efficiency is actually pretty sad. Instead of enjoying the activities we do, we try to be efficient and get them over with, so we can squeeze more of them into our limited time. We are obsessed with crossing the tasks off our list. Is that really the meaning of life? When can you say you are done? There are always more things to do. No wonder we are under constant stress. No wonder we feel empty after we have worked hard all our lives. Our job will never be done. There is always the next thing on our list of things to do. Depressing.

“Instead of enjoying the activities we do, we try to be efficient and get them over with quickly.”

All this also means that we are more and more reluctant to commit to things that are not totally under our control. Like relationships. You can’t make relationships work if all you do is pursue efficiency and productivity. Being in a long-term relationship requires a serious willingness to compromise and accept that your sense of efficiency may be different from your spouse’s. And good communication, by its nature, can’t be efficient to be effective.

You work more than you need to

Unless you are struggling daily to survive, chances are you work more than you need to sustain your life. You probably make more money than you need for basic shelter and basic sustenance. You work harder for more money not to survive but to get more stuff so you can afford to do more things, to “enjoy” life, and by this pursuit of “more,” you are actually less likely to enjoy what you’ve got. The more you work, the less time you have to think about your efforts’ futility. Being busy is a good antidote to the anxiety brought by stopping and thinking.

“Being busy is our favorite antidote to the anxiety brought by stopping and thinking about our lives.”

Wouldn’t it be more practical to accept that you can never manage everything under the sun and live your life with the understanding that your time is limited and there is little point in squeezing an infinite number of activities into your finite number of hours? You may get more at peace with yourself, stop stressing out that you can’t manage everything you want to do, and enjoy your limited time more.

It may require making some hard decisions, committing to a few things, and consciously saying “no” to the majority of other things that don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things:

• Stop living on autopilot
• Stop managing your time
• Lower the number of things you actually focus on
• Stop keeping your options open
• Fight the fear of missing out
• Commit to a lower number of long-term activities

It is the hard choices, closing some options, and committing to a path that makes life meaningful.

Busyness and efficiency

Where does busyness come from? It comes from the faulty notion that being busy means that you live a meaningful life. It leads to the state where we believe we have to do more things than we actually can do. So we are busy, stressed, and unhappy.

The reality is that you can never be “done.” There are always more important things on the horizon simply because what is important is highly subjective. Once you get closer to getting all the important things done, the goal post shifts. More important things will pop up. There is a saying in project management. Work will always expand to fill all the time available. Getting more time for a project doesn’t mean you will get more done, but the current amount of work will simply take longer.

“The more efficient you get, the more time you save, and that time gets filled by other things, so the net outcome is you are still busy as before, only more stressed and more tired.”

You may think that buying a vacuum cleaner so you don’t need to sweep your floor will save time, but it won’t. Yes, your labor gets easier and faster, but you also increase the standard of how clean the floor should be, so you start cleaning it more often. The actual time saved is zero.

The more efficient you get, the more time you save, and that time gets filled by other things, so the net outcome is you are still busy as before, only more stressed, more tired, and still not satisfied as there are always more things to do. You can’t have it all. You can’t do everything you would like to do. There is so much to do, to see, to experience. Get comfortable with the fact that there is only so much you can do, and make your peace with missing out on most of the things out there.

“Get comfortable with the fact that there is only so much you can do, and make your peace with missing out on most of the things out there.”

It is not easy. If you believe in progress, if you believe that humanity is heading towards a better future, you may get depressed about how short your lifespan is and that you are going to miss out on that great future. So you want to get the most out of the life you have. And that means cramming it full of experiences and things to do. Even if it means you get stressed.

Settling for good enough

In fact, you are going to settle for good enough in whatever you do. If you choose to stay in the job you don’t like while searching for your “dream job,” something that may take you years, you have essentially decided to settle for your current job for the time being. If you decide to jump ship now, even though the new job may not be the best you could do, again, you have settled.

You settle for suboptimal solutions all the time. Admit it. It will make it easier for you to make decisions, be comfortable with, and even enjoy “good enough.” When you commit to the new job and make an effort to become good at it, build relationships, help others, and be grateful for what you’ve got, you will eventually make it your dream job. The same goes for dating. You may wait forever for your dream partner, or you can settle for one who is good enough and then commit and work hard on making the relationship the best it can be therefore seeing the partner you picked as your dream partner.

Productivity tip

And if you still want a productivity tip after all you just read, here it comes. Accept that most things on your to-do list won’t get done. Try having two to-do lists. One that lists all the tasks and activities you believe you should do. Keep adding new things as they come to this list. Feel free to even prioritize it. However, don’t work on any of these things. Have a second, working-on list with a fixed number of slots, five or ten, depending on how granular you want to get. You are not allowed to work on anything that is not on this list. If you want to add a new thing, you have to either finish or remove an entry from your working-on list. It will keep you focused, and it will also protect your time. Especially when bundled with a fixed time you dedicate to this work every day. Even with the list of five to ten activities, you should still do your best to work only on one at a time, if possible. Serialize, don’t multitask. You will get more things done faster and have a better feeling about it.

This approach will allow you to strategically plan which things you will fail at. There will be things that will be on your to-do list and never get to your working-on list. Accept it. You may even decide to move them off the to-do list without working on them at all, without getting them done, but with a good feeling that you are actually okay that they don’t get done.

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