When Less is More: The Downsides of Pseudo-Productivity

Many of us are bogged down by a seemingly endless conveyor belt of incoming tasks adding to our to-do lists. It’s rare to encounter someone who feels that they are in control of their schedule and their work and personal commitments. In this article, I will explain how we got here, and what we can do to move toward a more sustainable pace of work that results in better, more meaningful outcomes. 

Productivity and achievement are highly valued in North American culture. Case in point: Amazon.ca’s current bestsellers list for time management includes titles such as The Power of Discipline: How to Use Self Control and Mental Toughness to Achieve Your Goals by Daniel Walter and Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time by Brian Tracy. These titles suggest that pushing yourself to be as efficient as possible in tackling your to-do list is a worthy endeavour. Such ideals are consistent with North America’s “hustle culture:” the mentality that one must work as much as humanly possible in pursuit of career success.

Unsurprisingly, this perspective on work-life balance frequently results in burnout. In his indictment of conventional productivity advice, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman defines busyness, or “hustle,” as relentless work not as a burden to be endured, but as an exhilarating lifestyle choice, worth boasting about on social media.” He goes on to state, however, that “it’s the same old problem, pushed to an extreme: the pressure to fit ever-increasing quantities of activity into a stubbornly non-increasing quantity of daily time.” 

What drives this obsession with doing more? Enter the concept of pseudo-productivity, which author and computer science professor Cal Newport defines as “the use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual productive effort” in his latest book, Slow Productivity. For knowledge workers, looking busy is often more important than producing meaningful outcomes.

An example of this is meetings being scheduled without having a clear purpose or agenda, which can result in the need for meetings to discuss the excessive number of meetings that are occurring! Hence, employees end up talking about work instead of approaching their tasks in a focused way that allows them to use their skills productively. As one interviewee in Slow Productivity states, workers “just try to work on a lot and hope they make progress that way.” 

How can we make the shift from frantic busywork to work that actually produces something of value? In her book Curating Your Life, Gail Golden, author and business consultant, advises that attempting to achieve work-life balance is not the most effective approach to managing your time and energy. Instead, curating your commitments is the path to ending the struggle to getting it all done.

This includes: 

• prioritizing activities that are consistent with our personal values, 

• assessing whether incoming tasks are actually important and saying “no” to them if they are not, and 

• embracing mediocrity: doing the bare minimum on tasks that need to get done, but do not need to be perfect. As the saying goes, “done is better than perfect, because perfect never gets done.” 

A task management tool that is well-known in the business wold, the Eisenhower Matrix, can help with determining which tasks are worth doing and which ones are not. 

In addition to prompting us to think about what needs to be done now versus what can be scheduled for later, this matrix prompts us to think about what is actually important, and whether we can get someone else to take care of certain tasks for us or remove tasks entirely from our to-do lists. This may require some reflection – we may need to consider factors such as: 

• whether a task is in line with work that centres our values 

• whether a task is enjoyable for us (life enjoyment is important, too!) 

• how important a task is to the person who asked us to do it. 

You might be surprised at how much gets taken off your plate when you ask others for help or ask them if a task is truly important in the context of your other responsibilities. Being aware of how much work you have to do can also be helpful in negotiating with supervisors, coworkers, or even spouses and family members when they ask you if you can take on a new task. You don’t have to say yes to everything!   

Put simply, the takeaway from this article is “do less.” It is easier said than done, but the strategies described above should give you a jumping-off point to cutting down on your workload while maintaining focus on the things that truly matter. 

What is the one task that you will remove from your to-do list, going forward? How would your current Eisenhower Matrix look like?