The Silent Productivity Killer – Why You Feel Like You’re Not Getting Anywhere

Hello again, this is the 3rd instalment of a post series on productivity. If you haven’t already, check out the other posts in the series. What I have written about is so simple yet It completely changed the way I saw work and productivity. Hope you enjoy 🙂

Busy Working or Busywork?

Imagine. You sit down ready to engage in a focused productivity session you’ve been training your mind with meditation and now you have the ability to sit and complete a deep work session of 90 minutes. You finish up what feels like a great session and you feel good about yourself. As this goes on and you begin to consistently work on this project, you begin to sense that you’re not making any real progress and you wonder why that is. You just spent your time and mental energy and feel like you are no closer to getting anything finished. What is going on?

Engaging in, what I like to call busywork, is something that we are all guilty of, myself included. This is a silent productivity killer. You are spending all your time, energy, and focus and getting nothing in return. The worst thing about it is that after you’re done you think that you were extremely productive, our minds have been tricked into feeling good like we did a lot of work but it just so happens that the work done was rather inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.

Pareto Principle – Prioritise!

The Pareto principle often known as the 80/20 rule is something that I came across in another Ali Abdaal video (his videos on productivity are a gold mine). The rule is so simple and can be applied to many areas

80 percent of the results comes from only 20 percent of the work

The numbers are not what’s important, in fact, almost anything in which most of the output comes from a small proportion of the input can be considered as operating under the Pareto Principle. This was first observed by a man called Wilfred Pareto and was used to describe the land ownership distribution of Italy, Pareto noted that roughly 80% of Italy’s land was owned by around 20% of the population. What this principle means for us is that there is a small percentage of sub-tasks that contribute the most to the larger goal. We need to find a method for weeding out those ‘vital few’ tasks and then prioritise them so that they get done first.

We can do this by taking a step back and thinking about what it is we are trying to accomplish. once we have our goal set in place we can then begin to specify rough focus areas that are of the most importance. For example: let’s say I wanted to write a blog post on productivity. I first think about what the overall goal & message of the post is and what is it that I am trying to accomplish. Then I will being to bullet point key areas of focus, so for a blog post the key areas would be something like the writing points e.g.

*** Blog Post About Pareto Principle & Productivity
Goal/Message: To help others realise the importance of the pareto principle & give actionable strategies to use it to increase overall productivty and task management.

- The Dangers of Busywork
- Pareto Principle - 80/20 Rule
- Only a few taks contribute to the whole
- Actionable Strategies to prioritse tasks

This is actually a rough idea of the writing points I wanted to make in this blog post. Then I would conduct some research and then write a first draft, making sure to cover all of those areas I had written down before.

Thats it.

That final 20% comes from the sentence structure, grammar, spelling, references, coming up with title names, making sure everything is formatted nicely, and everything else like that.

What I am trying to say is that you can get the bulk of the work done very easily if you take the time to step back and strategically prioritise those vital sub-tasks that make up the whole.

Optimisation – Just Do Nothing

While optimising our priorities is one thing for making sure we don’t waste time, completely getting rid of tasks is something that can save us great amounts of time. I was watching an online lecture by experienced game engine programmer Casey Muratori. On the topic of algorithm optimisation, he had this to say:

Not doing the work at all is better than doing it fast.

C. Muratori

This resonated with me as something that can be applied to productivity. If it’s possible to find a way to eliminate work from our projects then we can increase our efficiency by way of decreasing our total input. You can apply this easily to something like school for example. Imagine you have a project or a piece of coursework with a grading criteria, if you wanted to make the best use of your time you would only bother to focus on the things that you are being graded on, anything else is wasted effort because it doesn’t contribute to the final result.

I am not saying however that you should always give minimum effort, those two things are completely different, I am rather showing how to get the most out of your time/effort (which is essentially the definition of productivity).

Long story short if it doesn’t contribute to the end result. Cut it.

A note to the perfectionists out there.

Sometimes good enough is okay

I say this one often to my boss lol. I can’t remember where I heard this but it’s important to note how it says Sometimes good enough is okay not every time. It is not an aim at mediocrity because that is most definitely not what we want. However, I think it’s good to keep in mind especially if you are a perfectionist. If stretch out maths brains and apply Pareto’sPrinciple recursively to itself then we can see that not only does the remaining 20% of results require most of the work but the remaining 20% of that 20% requires even more work proportionally. This ties into the topic of the next post which talks about deadlines. Essentially there comes a point in which the work you are putting in has diminishing returns enough so that it is better to mark it as done and move on to something else.

Pareto Distribution – Stacking Your Success

Now this is something separate from Pareto’s Law but was named after Mr Pareto. There is lots of mathematical jargon that defines what’s called a Pareto distribution but in essence, it is essentially a distribution that follows the principle it was named after. The main and most common example of this is the distribution of wealth. The top 1% have the majority of all the wealth and even the top 1% among those few hold most of the wealth in that domain. This model doesn’t stop at just wealth either. I learned from a Jordan Peterson lecture on personality that the Pareto distribution & Price’s Law (the square root of the number of people in a domain do 50% of the work) actually model any domain in which there is a difference in creative production. This can apply to the workplace, artwork, music, movies, and even the amount of points scored in basketball games.

What this means for us though, is that if we begin to take very small steps to improve our productive output we will be moving further & further to the top of that scale exponentially.

It is also be aware that once we begin to move forward and get better at our craft. That it becomes easier for us to keep this forward momentum and get even better, in other words, success generates more success. This may be why the Pareto Distribution is observed across domains rooted in human productivity.

Dr Peterson uses Monopoly as an example but I think a game like League of Legends fits the bill pretty well. A player will get lots of gold early (they got a few kills), they spend their gold on items (they are now stronger), and with those items — they get even more gold, and they end up winning the game for their team because no one can stop them. That’s basically what’s happening here in real life.

It’s easy to imagine that we can start to get more done compared to others and that we have more time spare as a result. Perhaps this time can be invested into other useful areas, even if it’s just totally relaxing, that invested time can have an impact on our success in other domains as well and this extra success will compound with the rest and we will be pushed even further towards the top making us almost unstoppable. Don’t forget however that this very same thing applies when it comes to moving backwards, it’s like a snowball effect but we need to make sure we are moving in the correct direction.

Key Takeaway

In summary think about ways to prioritise your tasks so that you can get the highest contributing tasks done first, get more done with your time/effort, use that extra time/effort to improve across another domain and use this compounded success and skill to snowball yourself even further.