2024-01-21 · 5 min read

Productivity Is Unproductive

The faster you clear your to-do list, the faster it fills up.

I learned this the hard way over the holiday. I went OCD on inbox zero across every bucket I own: email, calendar, reminders, Instapaper, podcasts, all of it. I expected the clean slate to feel like space opening up for real creative work, like writing this. Instead I caught myself missing the little dopamine hit of crossing things off, and kept circling back to the inboxes to refill them so I could clear them again.

I'd thought clearing the lists would make room for deep work. It crowded it out.

That's the trap, and it's worth saying plainly before anything else.

Key takeaways

Clearing your to-do list faster just makes it fill up faster. The list is structurally infinite.

Productivity systems quietly manufacture shallow work that crowds out the deep work they were meant to protect.

Time isn't a container you fill. It's one present moment after another.

The highest-leverage move is rarely a better system. It's delaying your inputs and filtering them honestly.

Time Isn't A Container

Around the same time I was working through Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks, and it gave me language for what I'd been circling.

The systems, no matter how simple, manufacture shallow work. That shallow work then subsumes the deep work you built the system to protect. They run on a quiet lie: that time is a container you fill with tasks.

If you could just get organized, the story goes, you'd slot all the little tasks into the container and have plenty of room left for the big important things. With a bit more effort you'd finally reach the end of the list, once and for all.

But that's not how lists work, and it's not how time works. The list is infinite. Time isn't a container. It's just one present moment after another.

So the dream of enlightened productivity, where you get on top of everything and stay there, has the mechanism backwards. Life can't be managed as a finite set of checkboxes. Try to force it into that mold and the forcing eats all your hours, leaving none for what mattered.

These tools were sold to make time feel abundant. On net, for most weeks, they manufacture anxiety and impatience instead.

There will always be things left undone, including things that actually matter. That can be a relief: the goal is structurally impossible, so it's reasonable to unhook your self-worth from a clean list. We tell ourselves that once we finish this or that, the real life begins, that the dress rehearsal finally ends. But this isn't a rehearsal. This is it. Paying attention to it right now is most of what we've got.

Fix One: Delay Your Inputs

The 24/7 news and entertainment cycle makes this worse. It sells a moral obligation to stay current, a sense that you're failing the team if you don't know what just happened.

You can test the obligation cheaply. I save articles to Instapaper to read later. When I come back a few days on and start working through them, half are already irrelevant, sometimes inside a week.

So the first fix is the simplest: delay your inputs. For most things, you don't need to keep up with the daily news or the algorithm. Catching up every week or so is fine, and you lose almost nothing.

Fix Two: Ask What You're Getting Out Of It

The second fix is harder to hold but worth more: before you consume something, name what you're actually trying to get out of it.

Decision filter: before you open it, ask:

Entertainment? Fine. Just call it that.

Signaling? Collecting factoids for the dinner party. Less compelling on its own. Be honest.

Input to a decision, or something I'll make? Great. That's the one worth your attention.

Run most daily news through that filter and it falls out the bottom. Reading what went on in Washington every day won't, for most people in most weeks, change your daily life, or even your monthly one. On net it's entertainment or signaling. So decide whether it's worth this hour, or whether something else has a better claim on it.

The steelman: sometimes staying current is the decision. If you're a trader, a journalist on the beat, a clinician in a fast-moving field, or someone weighing a vote in a week where the facts are actually shifting, currency is input, not noise. The filter doesn't say ignore the world. It says know which bucket you're in, and don't default everything into the third bucket out of vague duty.

The Ego Underneath

There's a big ego underneath all of this too: the idea that my time is so important, that I'm one cleared list away from living up to my potential and changing the world.

You're probably not, and neither am I. That's not an argument against doing good work, or against the real problems worth solving. But there have only been a few hundred generations since the start of modern civilization, and each one produces just a handful of Einsteins. The odds you're one of them are not good. So give yourself a break. It's okay to leave things undone, to not optimize.

You already have some idea of what you actually want to be doing with this moment. So make it a moment worth paying attention to.

This week: delay one input source by seven days and see what survives. Most of it won't. What does is the only thing that was ever asking for your attention.