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Want To Be More Productive? Accept That You Can’t Do Everything.
A fascinating thread started at Hacker News about Oliver Burkeman’s latest post entitled, “It’s worse than you think.” There are words like, “pessimism,” “nihilism,” and “futility,” floating around in the comments. I commented in there a couple of times (1, 2), feeling confident after my own submitted blog post gained a bit of momentum.
I found my brain still drawn to the thread, so I wanted to make sense of it. Here I go:
If you’re familiar with productivity books, you’ll know that the majority of them are obsessed with control. For example, “If you organize yourself a little better…,” “If you adopt a new system…,” or even “If you adopt my recommended personal values…,” you’ll be able to do whatever you want to do.
These are all great promises, but they’re nothing more than that; and worse yet, they always fall short. No system ever fully delivers, even if you build the best infrastructure — team, company, technology — around yourself.
A person’s appetite for more is insatiable. It might not be about more money. It might be about more control, more freedom, or more experiences and emotions of another sort. We all want more. We may even want more of less; that’s still an experience of wanting more. But nonetheless, that’s what draws people to productivity…
