We all know one person who can get an hour-long job in just 20 minutes. They seem to be some sort of a genius, cranking away tasks quickly at maximum efficiency. It’s tempting to look at these immensely productive people as wizards, but if you look at how they work and face challenges that we, ourselves, also experience, you will realize that it’s possible to bring our productivity levels to that extent as well.
If you dart for the top-selling books about productivity and time management nowadays, you will always come across the combination of Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, The 4-Hour Workweek, and Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. These books were written several years apart during different economic standing, but all of them tell us one thing— we got productivity wrong.
In this article, we will talk about the fastest way you can be highly productive. Let’s dive deep into the topic!
1. Overworking
Tim Ferris, The 4-Hour Workweek writer, gave a presentation at South by Southwest back in 2007 talking about how long working hours and working hard harm a person’s productivity. By this time around, Facebook (now “Meta”) is just beginning to gain traction worldwide, and Steve Jobs has just released the iPhone.
During this time, people working in Silicon Valley’s sentiment was to take overworking as their badge of honor. They work from seven o’clock in the morning until nine o’clock in the evening. That’s what everyone else around there was doing.
Because Silicon Valley is the sanctuary of wealthy tech entrepreneurs and great minds, this kind of working pace is amplified in every field and thus gave birth to the myth of hyper-productivity.
2. Hyper-productivity Culture
The hyper-productivity culture that was brought in by overworking is also known as the hustle culture. This culture engraves in people’s minds that they can consistently achieve more: they can climb higher walls, get promoted, and always grab a bigger title.
Brought by this culture was the desire to be perceived as a “hustler” who managed to build an empire by going head-on against odds. Many workers and entrepreneurs began dreaming of getting their faces in Forbes magazine.
However, the wrong side to this culture is the mind conditioning that the only possible way to achieve that big dream is to outwork everybody. This may be the reason why many entrepreneurs take pride in sleeping under their desks at the office.
Hyper-productivity is merely a made-up word. Yet, people are generally doing things in a quicker time than humanly possible just to keep up with this, leading to an entirely new industry.
3. The Productivity Business
It’s ironic how the technology that’s supposed to make our work a lot easier and quicker drives us to work longer. To make your employers happy with your job, you should be just one message or email notification away, taking away the supposedly time for yourself.
Tech entrepreneurs devised the productivity business to create products that sell (e.g., Slack and Dropbox). It’s to convince people that they badly need the offered products in their life. Fortunately, it worked out really well, and we are now seeing a world where work between people is seamless.
However, although tech products helped greatly with smooth dealings and communication methods, they also made work infinite. Hundreds of tasks get you drowning in a sheer volume of tasks in your company feed. Hence, although you are already productive, you can never feel productive enough because of the flood of never-ending tasks— this is where the problem of hyper-productivity shows its fangs.
4. Hard Work Unsustainability
Believe it or not, hard work isn’t sustainable. This doesn’t mean you should stop working hard, though. It’s just necessary to put some caveats to your work. Ask yourself this question that Tim Ferris asked at South by Southwest, “How do your decisions and priorities change if retirement will never be an option?”
People who enjoy their work and craft never want to retire because they can stand doing nothing. An average person spends about 500 months working in their chosen field. That’s 42 years, nearly half of your life out here on earth! Do you think you can work at your maximum capacity, without fail, all throughout this time?
The truth is, there’s no single application that can be found online that can be productive. No software can ever make you achieve more things. Hence, no productivity app will actually help increase your productivity. It all boils down to grasping the difference between efficiency and effectiveness.
5. Efficient vs. Effective
In the real sense, this means that if you can do your job outstandingly, you do get the chance to do other’s jobs as well. If you are just launching your startup, then efficiency should be your top priority.
Being efficient means doing a particular work in lesser time with the help of only a few resources. Oftentimes, this rewards workers with more work to fill in the free schedule brought by fast task accomplishment. The problem with this is that most of the work given is merely filler content that has no substantial value aside from making you feel that you’re using your precious time productively.
Calculate the hours you spend working and analyze what value those hours bring. Did they bring you any positive outcomes?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics stated that an average employee works 2 hours and 53 minutes every day. Hence, you just waste more than half of your eight working hours doing something that doesn’t add substantial value.
Going by the book, being effective basically means reaching a certain desired outcome. For instance, your desired outcome is to cut down a tree.
Being efficient, you would calculate the perfect angle, the optimal amount of hits, and the right amount of force to cut the tree as quickly as possible. But being effective, all you can think of is to sharpen the ax. These mindsets are what lead to how you can be extremely productive.
6. The Fastest Way to Be Productive
Everything boils down to being effective at the right things. These “right things” are those actions that can give high leverage if undertaken. It isn’t about having 18 different management apps on your desktop, it isn’t about doing multiple things all at once, and it is about how fast you can do a particular task. It is essentially about focusing on actions that deliver tremendous impacts.
Don’t expect productivity to bloom in you overnight. You need to make adjustments by relearning some things and equipping yourself with discipline. You would need to cultivate entirely new habits that come both subconsciously and consciously.
