Don't be enslaved by a productivity cult

The last stretch of years, aided by online mediums like blogs, have greatly boosted the popularity of personal productivity. Themes like "get things done" and "look at work in a new way" have popped to the top. As devoted as I am to being effective, I have a confession to make: this phenomenon is no different than self-help spiritualism and diet fads. While personal productivity texts tend to overlap more with the Business than the Health aisle in your local bookstore, a lot of it is the same, weary echoed quackery. Futility which tries to impose a rigid form where life opposes that: as Bruce Lee illustrated with water, it flows.

Growing big doesn't always mean you lose your way.

But it often requires being reminded of your roots, and the pure essence you grew from. This is a purity which is open to fusion with valuable elements, but absolutely closed (at least in theory) to scams and other such rubbish.

If you look around, personal productivity has become like a religion. And not just that, but it's splintered into numerous schisms. As I remarked earlier on leading productivity site Lifehacker:

…all of this has led to a saturated field with many copycats. Like religions, there are too many splintered strains, altho oddly enough, not enough freesouls and original thinker-doers. This inevitably leads to collapse in some areas when people are disappointed that they're spending too much time obsessing about a system and organizing things rather than doing things.

Spiritual terms are even borrowed to market more effectively, like Leo Babauta's Zen Habits. He's a godfather in this field, and just like he took parts of David Allen's GTD principles and created his own teachings out of them, so are others doing to him. "Alternative productarians" are rare: I consider myself one in the most forgiving sense possible, and also point to one of the finest "insider" satires by Clay Collins. He nailed it, dissecting the formula to writing an archetypal productivity post with razor-sharp wit and precision.

It's not just a productivity problem

The above observations also apply to the broader "social media" craze, which is well-known for selling books, DVDs, and evangelical seminars on how to talk and behave as a human. Big companies pay big bucks for this buzzword-binged stuff, and I find much of it is silly. Beneath all the gilded lilies and "having thoughtful conversations with your customers" slop is the actual, earnest flow of doing it. Not just talking about talking, but doing talk, then awesome followup.

I urge you to digest knowledge with great alacrity. But at the same time, if you read a book or blog post detailing a productivity system, always ask yourself from the middle to the end: "Am I applying what I've learned?" If you're not, then it is, in the truest sense of the word, useless. (Exactly like reading about a diet then not eating healthy.)

It's about you

Unlike a tangible tool like a computer or wrench, the entirety of a productivity system can't be transferred from one person to another. You can describe mechanics, but your life experiences will color and shape continual efforts. Much as a teacher can improve their disciples but not duplicate the skills of a grandmaster, ongoing practice is essential to being better. Not a copycat.

Hence, it's valuable to be skeptical. Don't take 4-hour workweeks and ROWEing your boat at face value, but rather, perform your own sequence of experiences and see if a system, or parts of it, works for you.

Being effective isn't new. It didn't start with Peter Drucker either. But it must include the self-awareness that mantras aren't the act — they may inform, or prompt its happening. And without those happenings, empirical evidence to show you're actually benefiting from a system or its adaptation, there's no substantiated proof that you're gaining anything at all.

And by the way, some of the most important things, like being happy, can't be measured in numbers. But you can't lie to yourself, and therein lies the truth.

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