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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 books in the first place. We are seeking something that we can’t find, and we’re thirsty enough to subject ourselves to the minor indignity of surrendering ourselves to an expert who makes the promise we want to hear.
Oliver’s work is a breath of fresh air, because it’s about revisiting the promise in the first place. He reveals the truth of it: it’s never going to work. The title of his latest, Four Thousand Weeks, is literally a summation of the length of the average human life (barring tragedy).
This is new for productivity geeks, like me. I don’t come to productivity books looking for this reminder, that I have a finite lifespan, that I won’t be able to do everything I want to do because I want to do a seemingly infinite number of things.
Instead, through his work, Oliver challenges us and enforces the fact: You are a human being. You can’t do everything. That’s not optimism or pessimism. That’s just a fact…
