The Real Cost of Productivity

This is such a vast topic, and the word “productivity” itself will mean different things to different people. If you’re a 25-year-old working professional, effective productivity might mean figuring out how to get more done in less time. If you’re a 45-year-old entrepreneur, it might mean figuring out how to grow a business without simply adding more hours to your working day.

But I think there is a more interesting question underneath all of this, and one that gets significantly less attention in our obsession with becoming more productive: what is the cost of the output we’re trying to produce?

Like many things in life, various inputs can lead to similar results. The question is what the chosen method costs you along the way. Entrepreneurship, for example, can potentially offer greater freedom and financial upside than employment, but the cost and risk can also be considerably higher. Even within entrepreneurship, there is no single system for reaching the desired outcome, and certainly none that guarantees it.

This is what I think is missing from a lot of the conversation around productivity. We spend an enormous amount of time discussing how to increase output, and far less time asking whether that output is actually worth its inputs.

Individual Productivity and Its Cost

When we refer to the cost of an individual’s economic productivity, it is often only discovered in hindsight, sometimes years into the process. The cost I’m referring to is what happened to the rest of the person's life while they were being so wonderfully productive.

We celebrate the man who built the $50 million company. We rarely ask what it cost him to build it. What happened to his health? His marriage? His relationship with his children? His friendships? His spiritual life? Does he actually like the person he became in the process?

None of this is an argument against ambition or financial success. I’m deeply ambitious myself, and I have no problem with wanting to build extraordinary things or make an enormous amount of money. But I’ve become increasingly skeptical of any definition of success that measures only the thing being produced while ignoring everything that was sacrificed to produce it.

After all, one thing we cannot produce more of is time. If we dedicate too much of it solely to economic gain, there is a very real possibility that we neglect some of the things that actually make life worth living: loving relationships, health, meaningful experiences, doing good, and spiritual growth.

So perhaps our productivity needs to be assessed a little more like an investor would assess an investment, with long-term thinking. What am I willing to pay for the outcome I’m pursuing, and more importantly, is the price actually worth it?

This does not mean you cannot be highly productive, financially successful and happy while maintaining fulfilling relationships. Of course you can. But it ain’t easy, and it requires careful management of your time, energy, attention and priorities.

For ambitious men in particular, I think this is worth taking seriously. We’re still largely measured by what we produce, earn, build and achieve. There is nothing inherently wrong with those things, but they represent only one dimension of a man’s life. If succeeding in one area requires destroying four others, I’m not sure we can call the final result success.

This is part of what I now think of as becoming an integrated man. Your work, relationships, physical health, emotional wellbeing and spiritual life aren't five completely separate lives. They are different dimensions of the same one.

With that established, let’s look at individual productivity with a first-principles approach.

The How

There are thousands of books and strategies for increasing productivity, and I don’t think the world needs another article explaining how to organize your calendar, break down tasks, or use a priority framework.

Most of that stuff is helpful, but it is ultimately surface level. It’s useful to break down tasks. It’s useful to organize your day according to priorities. It’s useful to set aside focused time for important work and understand how you personally work best.

But these things are simply frameworks for production. They're the systems through which the human factory operates.

I will share, however, what I still believe may be the greatest productivity/procrastination hack ever discovered: just sit down and start working.

Annoyingly simple, I know.

Which brings me to the more important piece.

The What

What you insert into your framework of production is considerably more important than simply keeping yourself busy within that framework.

Two hours of high-impact work will outperform eight hours of low-impact work any day of the week. You can be extremely busy across eight different things and make very little meaningful progress, or focus your attention on one important thing and move significantly further.

This is where productivity becomes less about discipline and more about discernment.

Being able to make yourself work is one skill. Knowing what deserves your work is another.

I've made this mistake many times myself, especially as someone who naturally generates more ideas than I could realistically execute. Being productive on the wrong thing is still being productive on the wrong thing. No productivity system can compensate for continually directing your attention toward things that don't really matter.

So before asking how you can get more done, it might be worth asking whether more actually needs to be done at all.

What are the few things that genuinely move your work or life forward? What deserves your best energy? What are you doing because it matters, and what are you doing because completing small tasks gives you the satisfying feeling of being productive?

Choosing what not to work on may be one of the most important productivity skills of all.

And this brings me to the most important piece.

The Why

Think back to a time when you worked for hours and barely noticed the time passing. You got an enormous amount done, yet somehow you still had energy afterwards.

People often refer to this experience as a flow state, and there are obviously many reasons we enter flow. I no longer think experiencing flow necessarily means you've discovered your life purpose, but I do think our capacity for effort changes considerably when the thing we're doing has genuine meaning to us.

There are things we can force ourselves to do through discipline, and discipline is incredibly important. But there are also things we seem naturally willing to suffer for because we understand why we're doing them.

The deeper the why, the more tolerable the difficulty often becomes.

This is particularly important when you're building something ambitious because almost every meaningful pursuit eventually becomes difficult, boring, frustrating, or uncertain. Passion alone won't carry you through that. Neither will another productivity hack.

At some point, you need a reason to continue when the work itself stops being particularly enjoyable.

That reason doesn't necessarily have to be some grand life purpose either. You might be building a company because you want financial freedom. You might be working incredibly hard because you want to provide for your family. You might be creating something because you believe it should exist. You might simply be deeply curious about whether you can pull something off.

Meaning can come from many places.

But understanding why you're producing something makes it considerably easier to decide what deserves to be produced in the first place.

What Are You Actually Producing?

This is the question I've become much more interested in as I've gotten older.

When we hear the word productivity, we almost automatically think about work. But work isn't the only thing we're producing with our time.

Over the course of your life, you're also producing relationships. You're producing a body through the way you treat it. You're producing friendships through the amount of attention you give them. If you have children, you're producing a relationship with them through thousands of seemingly insignificant interactions. You're producing a reputation, a spiritual life, and ultimately a character through the choices you repeatedly make.

A man can therefore become extraordinarily productive economically while being remarkably unproductive everywhere else.

He may have built an incredible company while slowly dismantling his marriage. He may have accumulated wealth while neglecting his body. He may have developed an extraordinary professional reputation while having almost no meaningful friendships. He may be able to manage hundreds of employees while having very little command over himself.

Again, this isn't an argument for abandoning ambition. I think ambitious men should build things, take risks, create wealth and pursue difficult goals if that's what they genuinely want.

The question is whether you can build the thing without unnecessarily destroying the man building it.

Perhaps, then, the better question isn't simply, “How productive am I?”

It's: What is my productivity producing?

The Unexplained

This may be a little esoteric and abstract for some, but I have witnessed this phenomenon firsthand in both my own creative and entrepreneurial ventures and the lives of many others.

There have been countless businesses, creative projects and careers that appeared to have all the necessary ingredients for success and simply never returned their desired outputs. At the same time, something else with seemingly similar inputs takes off beyond anyone's expectations.

Why?

Every management professor, economist, journalist and art critic can offer an explanation afterwards. And some of those explanations will undoubtedly contain useful insights. But the truth is that no one ever has complete visibility over every variable involved.

There is an enormous amount happening outside our individual sphere of reality.

Timing matters. Luck matters. Other people's decisions matter. Markets matter. Circumstances we could never have predicted matter. And depending on your worldview, there may be considerably more happening than what can be represented on a spreadsheet.

I think it is quintessentially human, and perhaps particularly tempting for ambitious people, to believe that we solely determine the outputs of our world through our own efforts.

We don't.

This doesn't absolve us of responsibility. Quite the opposite. I think our responsibility is to do everything reasonably within our power: choose intelligently, develop our skills, work hard, remain disciplined, learn from our mistakes, adapt when necessary, and continue showing up.

But responsibility for the effort is not the same thing as sovereignty over the outcome.

I've had to learn that distinction repeatedly in business and in life.

There are things I've worked incredibly hard for that didn't happen. There are other things that arrived in ways I could never have planned. I've become considerably more comfortable admitting that I don't completely understand why some things work and others don't.

That doesn't make effort meaningless. It just puts effort in its proper place.

You do your part.

And then, at some point, you have to release your grip on the result.

For me, that increasingly means leaving room for God.

So after all the productivity systems, prioritization frameworks, discipline, focus, meaning and ambition, I think my philosophy on productivity can still be reduced to something remarkably simple:

Do your best, with your best, and leave the rest to God.