Commentary: This is my biggest productivity mistake

LONDON: From time to time, my editor will suggest that I write a column about how to be more productive. It’s a sure way to trigger imposter syndrome because, whether or not I appear productive from the outside, I certainly don’t feel productive on the inside.

In fairness to myself, and to anyone who worries that they should be getting more done, personal productivity is a fiendishly hard problem. It demands willpower, since there is always usually some pleasant distraction available.

It demands judgment too. Even a fairly straightforward-seeming question, such as which task to do and when, is going to depend on a shifting kaleidoscope of variables: Whether you have the time, the tools, the energy. As the world changes, tasks will frequently become more urgent or irrelevant.

This makes getting things done a far more dynamic problem than, say, decluttering. Marie Kondo’s simple advice to throw away any possessions that do not spark joy works brilliantly for socks and broken calculators, but it will not help you prioritise your inbox. There are too many options and everything is moving too fast. One does not simply declutter one’s To Do list.

And a final challenge to anyone trying to get everything done: That goal is simply beyond us all. As Oliver Burkeman explains in his new book, "the incoming supply of things that feel as though they genuinely need doing isn’t merely large, but to all intents and purposes infinite. So getting through them all isn’t just very difficult. It’s impossible".

Delude yourself about this, as most of us do every morning, and stress and disappointment will inevitably follow. No wonder so many of us beat ourselves up at our failure to live up to our own impossible productivity aspirations.

SO MANY THINGS, SO LITTLE TIME

This week, then, let’s change the script. Instead of handing down yet more tablets of stone, let me reflect on my own productivity mistakes. My biggest problem is that I always have too many projects on the go. Columns, book chapters, speeches and podcast scripts vie for my attention.

This is not without its advantages. Variety is fun, as well as offering some protection from the vicissitudes of a career in the media.

Projects cross-fertilise each other and if you get stuck on something, you can switch to something else that is equally worthwhile. Many of the great artists and scientists have been inveterate slow-motion multitaskers.

And yet I think many people, myself included, tend to accumulate more active projects than they can reasonably handle. Each project has its own intellectual and organisational overhead, and there’s a risk of a cognitive traffic jam, as more mental energy is spent switching between projects than doing them. There are some tricks to reduce this sense of overload, but I have never found a permanent fix.

“One thing at a time,” advises no less a sage than Arnold Schwarzenegger, and who am I to argue? And yet I have never managed to break myself free from the slow-motion multitasking habit, and I have never really tried.

DON'T LET EMAILS REPLACE REAL WORK

My second productivity confession is that I respond to email too quickly. I realise that risks being a humblebrag, along the lines of “my biggest weakness is that I work too hard”. But it’s not difficult to be responsive to email: All that is required is a simple filing system and a willingness to make decisions.

Indeed, that’s the problem. Email is so easy to deal with that it’s tempting to let email replace hard work.

Faced with a genuinely difficult task, it’s the path of least resistance to open up my inbox instead. It doesn’t feel like I’m ducking the real work - what could be more professional than dealing promptly with email?

But ducking the real work is exactly what I’m doing. For me, the most dangerous distraction is not YouTube or Instagram: It’s the things such as email, which are nearly, but not quite, the work that needs to be done.

My rapid emails are a symptom of a deeper productivity malaise: A habit of switching on my computer without having my To Do list at hand. Lacking a clear plan for what I was going to do, habit takes over, and I am deep in the email inbox, letting other people’s priorities override my own.

On a good day, there’s plenty of email, so at least I’m getting something done. On a bad day, I clear the inbox quickly and am then in danger of losing my grip and browsing the internet looking for something to do.

The solution is childishly simple. I should ensure that whenever I switch on my computer I have in front of me a good list of what I need to do. It is a huge step towards forging ahead and doing it. The fact that I do not always follow this childishly simple advice may make it seem more childish still.

I suppose I could always get my computer to remind me. In 2018, Alex Williams, Harmanpreet Kaur, Gloria Mark and others presented research about using chatbots to stay on task. Their bot pops up to prompt people to reflect on their goals for the day - either what they wanted to do, or how they wanted to feel. Both kinds of prompts were effective at getting people to focus on the real work - for an hour or so. And then? Then the effect starts to fade. Gloria Mark has suggested writing the goal on a sticky note so the memory lasts a little longer.

It seems absurd that I and many others neglect so basic a thing as to remind ourselves what we wanted to do when we sat down at the computer. But with distraction only a click away, get those sticky notes out.