Want To Be A Better Employee? Start Caring Less About Productivity

by Brad Wayland
Updated On: 11-Feb-2023

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Want To Be A Better Employee? Start Caring Less About Productivity

We as a society are obsessed with doing more. Ironically, that obsession is actually counterproductive. If you actually want to be better at your job, the first step may well be to toss out everything you know about productivity.

We are obsessed with productivity, and it's ruining us.

Just a cursory look at Medium - or really, any publication - reveals a library's worth of advice on how to get more done in the workplace. On how to be a better, more focused, more productive employee. Taken as a whole, the bulk of that advice is either counterproductive or outright contradictory.

To be more productive, wake up at 6 a.m. Wait, no, don't do that - sleep in. Wait, scratch that, get up a bit early and exercise. By the way, have you tried yoga?

Some of that advice is valuable, of course. Prioritize important tasks. Learn to manage your time better. Figure out your peak hours and try to schedule your most important tasks around them.

But most of it leads to what I like to refer to as the productivity spiral. We start obsessing over what we need to do in order to get more done. We plan out new apps we can use, new techniques we can try, and a new approach to our workplace.

And ultimately, we spend more time thinking about working harder than we do actually working.

Of course, even those of us who aren't obsessed with cheating more productivity out of our day tend to fall into unhealthy patterns where work is concerned. We become consumed with getting things done, measuring our value and worth by our output.

Ironically, that kills productivity just as the search for new hacks.

"We have a bias toward hard work in our society, and it's causing a lot of damage, not the least of which is its negative effect on productivity," writes Leila Hock of job site Career Contessa. "Generally, when people say they're "working hard," they mean they're putting a lot of time in. What they (generally) don't mean is that they've put a lot of thought into that work, or that they know what they're working on is contributing to something important."

In other words, working hard and putting in tons of hours doesn’t mean you're getting things done. And even if you are getting stuff done, it doesn't mean you’re doing it well. In both cases, what's needed is to refocus.

To not just put in the hours, but think about the work you're doing. To find a style and workflow that suits you, and roll with it. And perhaps most importantly, to stop stressing about whether or not your output is "good enough" and simply focus on what you can get done while still maintaining a healthy work-life balance.

People are not machines, and there are no guaranteed productivity hacks to be found on the web. Understand these two truths, and you should do just fine.