Productivity on Purpose
Productivity on Purpose seeks to address this problem by featuring content that:
Examines and critiques the Productivity status quo
Show ways studying productivity/using tools/frameworks can help people better understand themselves:
- identify values, strengths/weaknesses, distinguish natural gifts and talents from mere skills,
- how they process information, deal with the day, other people… in short, how they work—and can do their best work.
This awareness can help people choose not only more effective roles, but more meaningful ones as well.
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently something that should not have been done at all.
Issues to explore
Optimization:
Instead of optimizing for productivity, How might we be better served by pursuing:
– Creativity? Serendipity & synchronicity? Curiosity? Effective downtime?
When is optimizing: overkill, premature, and/or fragile/unsustainable?
Is optimization even for humans, or just machines?
Motivations
How much productivity is pursued for its own sake?
Do productivity tools get/force people to do work they hate?
How to intuit whether we’re pursuing “productivity porn” or toolishness?
Signal vs Noise
How can people eliminate some noise from their work lives so they can better:
- focus on what matters most
- receive signals: most importantly what calls to them.
Individuation
How much of productivity best practices are unexamined “Well, works for me” (survivorship bias)?
How to move from “works for me” to “works for my work” (context)
See how “works for me” comes from “works with me” (talents, values, ways of being)