Change your life with time management
>> Saturday, January 19, 2019
Is
the secret of productivity really just doing what you enjoy?
By far the biggest predictor of whether
something gets done is whether it’s fun to do
The problem
with the genre of “life lessons from the world’s most successful entrepreneurs”
is one of causal direction: just because Elon Musk works 120 hours a
week, it doesn’t follow that if you work 120 hours a week, you’ll experience
Musk’s success. (Whether or not Musk has an enviable life isn’t the point here;
that depends on your enthusiasm for space travel and defaming cave
divers.)
Musk works
insane hours because he wants to.
We can argue about the psychological roots of that wanting: does it stem from a
big-hearted desire to help humanity, or a pathological workaholism and
desperation to prove himself? But either way, in some sense, Musk likes it;
whereas if you tried
to follow that schedule, you’d have to make yourself do it. The same applies to
less extreme advice. “Write every day” won’t work unless you want to write. And
no exercise regime will last long if you don’t at least slightly enjoy what
you’re doing.
This clicked
into place for me as I read about the hyper-productive German
sociologist Niklas Luhmann, in a fascinating book called How To Take Smart Notes by Sönke
Ahrens (based on the intricate index card system Luhmann used to organise his
knowledge). How did Luhmann publish 58 books and hundreds of articles – plus,
impressively, several more books after his 1998 death, thanks to manuscripts he
left behind? Because, said Luhmann,
“I never
force myself to do anything I don’t like. Whenever I am stuck, I do something
else.” That sounds scandalously self-indulgent – except that, as Ahrens writes,
“doesn’t it make much more sense that the impressive body of work was produced
not in spite of the fact he never made himself do anything he didn’t feel like,
but because of it?”
I’ve
experimented with countless time-management techniques, but the results leave
me forced to agree: by far the biggest predictor of whether something gets done
is whether it’s fun to do. The secret of productivity is simple: just do what
you enjoy.
Oh, you have
some objections? Thought so. A big one is the fear that if we just let
ourselves do what we enjoy, we’d waste (even more) hours each day on social
media, or eating Nutella from the jar, instead of doing what mattered. There’s
some limited truth to this: when you’re just beginning a session of challenging
work, you often need to give yourself a push, reminding yourself you don’t need
to “feel like” starting in order to start. But after that, it’s enjoyment
that’ll sustain your motivation, not productivity techniques. Indeed, they can
make things worse: if you tell yourself you must spend, say, four hours every
day on a certain project, come hell or high water, you’re liable to turn
something that once inspired you into something you can’t bear to do.
The
other big objection is that countless people don’t have the luxury of
enriching, meaningful work, so they can hardly organise their days by focusing
on what feels good. This is true. But it’s not a problem with Luhmann’s
enjoyment-based approach to productivity. It’s a problem with society –
the kind of problem, in other words, that no productivity technique is ever
going to fix.
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