Busyness as Proxy for Productivity

3 minute-read • 525 words

“Busyness as Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.” – Cal Newport, author of Deep Work

We all love social validation. We do, we want to be seen in a positive light, be respected, and just overall we want people to see us in some sort of pedestal. Maybe not like that, not like ‘PRAISE ME YOU SIMPLETONS’ but more like ‘I am better than you’.

Is that not the root of hustle culture?

If we really were hustling for our own sakes, to better ourselves, it wouldn’t be a “culture”, would it? A growth mindset and a culture where you’re encouraged to hustle because everyone else is doing so, are two completely different ways of thinking.

What Cal Newport was talking about in his book Deep Work, when talking about busyness as proxy for productivity, is a different issue. It’s the “feelgood” of short-term productivity. Spending a day being productive – or rather, feeling productive – makes our monkey brains go ooh ooh ah ah and so we repeat the very thing that gratified us in the first place. Unfortunately, this ‘feeling productive’ is NOT a good measurement of producing and creating value.

Sometimes, the work that needs getting done, or the task where true value lies, takes tremendous effort. And we as humans are experts of minimizing effort and maximizing pleasure. In this case, the pleasure came in form of instant gratification in a disguise.

That’s why priority lists matter, at least to me, so that I can keep track of what’s important and what’s not, instead of doing the 4 trivial to-dos first and saying “wow look I got 80% of my tasks done”, being purposefully ignorant of the 1 remaining, gigantuous task that would take me two days to complete. So priority lists are the framework I use to prevent myself from being caught in this trap.

But busyness as proxy of a productivity, as a trap, goes deeper – if we recall the points about hustle culture and social validation.

I remember what it feels like to lose focus on the present, instead focusing on the hustle. The metrics that everyone could see. The numbers and figures I could share, the titles I could show off. It’s not to say that they’re are bad, because sometimes they do indicate something. But to be tunnel-visioned by them is to lose sight of what truly matters.

Never again, I vowed to myself. Though I wish I knew how to make sure I’ll keep my promise to myself.

“I’ve seen a lot of people who had their sights set on a particular job or project, but the opportunity to actually get that thing was so slim. Their focus on the small thing in the distance became a problem. They grew impatient with where they were. They didn’t tend enough to the responsibilities they did have, because they were longing so much for something else, and so their ambition became counterproductive.” – Robert Igor, CEO of Disney