Too Busy Organizing to Be Productive
27 June, 2022
That’s the headline of a newspaper article I read many a year ago. A headline which illustrates some of the absurd lengths more than a few people go to when hacking their systems for productivity. While the article first saw the light of day in 2007, its thrust is as true now as it was all that time ago.
This paragraph from that article sums it all up for me:
[A]s the productivity-obsessed swap tips online and around the office about filing systems, checklists and time management, advice often moves from the practical to the arcane. And the glut of suggestions and systems can actually cause people to become less productive while trying to master a constant barrage of new methods.
Some of that might be a simple case of procrastination — it’s more fun to investigate tools and techniques than to do actual work. But if your goal is to be more productive, you need to stop twiddling and twerning and actually start doing the work.
Unless you do the work, all the productivity systems and all the apps and all the trappings won’t help you. They become a crutch instead of a tool to help you do what you need to to and to achieve your goals.