Fable: Productivity Rain Dances - Watch Out - DBR 073

Do Busy Right - The Task and Attention Management Podcast

I started out talking about the lies of productivity, but I’m going to change to fables because it's just things we collectively believe without much evidence. Plus, I don't think anybody's intentionally trying to mislead us. We just move without much actual data. A couple of those fables collided with a post by Cal Newport with the evocative title of “productivity rain dances”, which is a pretty humorous mental picture. Apparently, rain dances are those habits of work that we believe make us productive but actually don’t. We don’t develop evidence, so we are engaging in superstition. So, fables and rain dances probably have some overlap. Let’s explore Cal’s post and investigate some of our own practices to make sure we’re not wasting our time and energy doing things that don’t improve our productivity. What is the discussion?

• Cal’s post about Chris Williamson’s podcast
• It’s not that nothing is useful in productivity, it’s just that the field is not scientifically organized.
• Experiment means think, gather data, analyze situations. It does not mean “I feel like…”.
• Technique is a real thing and it exists – there is a better way to manage your tasks and attention.
• Is a new tool really that helpful? Or is AI another ‘rain dance’
• Cal’s post: https://calnewport.com/productivity-rain-dances/

Examples of rain dances (or Fables)

• Williamson gave a few examples:
• Why do I sit at my desk when I'm not working?
• Why do I thrash around about emails?
• Why do I take phone calls that have no goal?
• My fables are more habits of thought around specific tasks
• “I'd better do it before I forget about it”
• Usually means “… forget about it again”
• Sometimes we do it just because its late
• I feel guilty because I'm not any better at my stuff
• In order to resolve that guilt, we pop up and go do it now
• Overlap with “not finished” syndrome
• Avoiding the knee jerk reaction
• Our systems don't dictate our priority; they reflect our priority.
• If we often say, "I better do it before I forget about it", then your system is broken.
• Instead, say to yourself, I'd better capture it before I forget about it.
• We create tasks that implicitly have the Title of "Make progress on X"
• “Thrashing is a rain dance.”
• Rapid task switching, multitasking is a rain dance
• When we measure time, we switch from measuring outputs to measuring inputs
• Faster, in and of itself, is not more efficient.
• Efficiency is a property of a system and only makes sense when the goal is clear.
• Don't maximize inputs to try to maximize outputs.
• Only time saved at the bottleneck step of your process improves your productivity.
• every process has a bottleneck, and the bottleneck governs the overall throughput of the system,
• Some commentary on the comments
• Inbox zero: rain dance, or not?
• Inbox Zero is not efficient behavior in and of itself
• “Tweaking” your system is a rain dance
• We spend a lot of time and a lot of stress buying tools to speed up parts of the process that are not the bottleneck, and then we don't get better productivity because of it.
• You don't need a system to help you handle email faster. You need a system to reduce the amount of email you have to deal with. It's an input.
• Increasing the inputs for the same number of outputs is the opposite of productivity - the opposite of efficiency,

Where have we gotten today?

• Define your outputs; identify them very cleanly, and then focus on those and work backwards
• Identifying a bottleneck is not a trivial challenge
• Faster is not more productive. Faster is simply faster.
• Many of these things are signs that your system is broken or incomplete
• We do our rain dance and it doesn't rain so the process is broken
• Understanding which part of a process is broken is not trivial or simple.
• Don't deal with a system in a piecemeal fashion (See the previous episode about optimizing sub processes is not a reliable way to optimize the overall process.)

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