The Cult of Productivity

you know you are a lazy person and there are thousands of people who want to tell you exactly how to fix that but the truth is you are probably just fine and falling too far into the productivity rabbit hole will just make you lazier more stressed and poorer than when you started productivity productivity productivity productivity productivity productivity productivity productivity productivity Modern Life is full of an endless list of things to do you spend a lot of time getting to a job putting in your 8 hours a day if you lucky getting home again and only

then can you go shopping clean your house wash your clothes pay your bills cook and help out your family with anything they need thanks to the rising cost of living and stagnating wages you might also want to include a side hustle or a business project in addition to everything else oh and at some point have some time to relax with friends and family or just get a good night's sleep it's a lot and US humans were not meant to be this switched on all the time so to keep you on your grind and to help

you feel a little bit less overwhelmed by everything that you need to do there is a new movement of pseudo self-help gurus these people promis to teach you simple tricks that conveniently fit into seminars books or 15minute YouTube videos that will help you to better organize your life stay motivated and achieve your goals even if your goal is not having to work two jobs it sounds helpful or at the very least harmless but following this advice could put you further behind for four reasons the first reason is that it just doesn't work productivity Brands and

influencers have the opposite problem to influencers another group that promises to fix your finances instead of everything else in your life good personal finance should be boring and simple save diligently avoid High interest debt maximize your income and invest responsibly for long-term goals it's so simple that everything you need to know about personal finance can fit on a Post-It note and people have done it that's a problem for personal finance influencers because they make a lot of money by posting weekly content and can't keep saying the same thing thing every week so they end up

making uninformed predictions or telling financial success stories that were more a product of luck than diligent financial planning but we have already talked enough about these guys before productivity influencers have the opposite problem there is just too much to talk about and without knowing each and every one of their viewer situations they can't come up with good suggestions and uninformed advice is the same thing as bad advice a report by Psychology today found that so-called toxic productivity is one of the leading causes of Di anxiety and depression a strong focus on productivity also produces worse

outcomes for everyone a report by the Harvard Business Review studied employees who were fired for bad workplace Behavior the study found that a large share of those terminated employees were high performers in the roles but brought down everybody that worked with them a strong belief in their own abilities a strict adherence to their own routines and a high expectation for everybody around them made them worse at delivering good results for the business the researchers found that a worker that that had an intense focus on their own productivity might return $533 in cost savings to a

company through increased output avoiding a toxic higher will net an estimated $2,489 because they collaborate more easily with co-workers and clients are less resistant to changes in the organization an extreme focus on productivity in your personal life can also simply make you less productive as you spend all your time and effort hyper optimizing every task in your life instead of just getting them done in a way that works for you despite the crazy amount of harm this can do there are three terrible reasons why the cult of productivity isn't going anywhere so it's time to

learn how Mone Works to find out why trying to become more productive is only going to make things worse this week's lesson was sponsored by brilliant let's face it paying money for people to tell you to be productive is a waste of your money so spend it where you're actually learning a valuable skill with brilliant brilliant offers real applicable courses on topics that provide you economic value specifically in today's fast changing environments with artificial intelligence I recently finished a course they offered called how technology works I love the name by the way and I learned

a variety of interesting things like how video compression Works GPS and strong passwords by committing 10 to 20 minutes a day on brilliant you can pick up a ton of new found knowledge easily from the flexibility of your phone tablet or desktop computer whenever I'm feeling lazy I'll do some brilliant courses it's weird usually I used to avoid that stuff but brilliant makes it fun and not psychologically stressful and just this week they launched a new course on Creative coding that I'm excited to jump into since you've come here to learn I know you'll love

brilliant to get brilliant for free for 30 days go to brilliant.org many works or click the link in the description and the first 200 of you will get 20% off brilliant's annual premium subscription the number of hours American's work has gone down over the decades according to the oecd but at the same time people report having less time to themselves and there are three reasons for this technology has made our work easier but it has also made it easier to be at work a 2017 Gallup survey of 15,000 American workers found that 43% of people

spent at least some of their personal time working remotely no follow-up Studies have been done but that figure is likely to rise with the mass adoption of work from home from 2020 until lately employers are also demanding more unpaid overtime for non-hourly workers and these requests are often coming at odd times reducing the amount of quality uninterrupted free time where workers are allowed to totally disconnect from their job the psychologist Adam alter said that if you carry around a phone that your boss or team can message or call you on at any time you probably

haven't had real free time to yourself for years the second reason is that people who work are working less but more people are working a stay-at-home partner who takes care of chores children and other tasks is now a luxury that most people can't afford a growing number of people are also remaining single for for longer so people have to do their jobs and their chores when they get home without the help they would have gotten the past from more traditional family units the third reason is simply that there are more distractions when was the last

time you felt bored probably a long time ago right because today right there in your pocket is a phone that gives you access to games messages and apps that are literally designed from the ground up to give you dopamine on demand and are hyper optimized to keep your attention companies and people pushing the # hustle mindset have unded created these problems and they are also cashing in on the opportunity to sell you the solution and that's the third reason why the cult of toxic productivity has grown so large it's too profitable according to Precision reports

a market research firm the global market for productivity apps was worth 9.42 billion in 2022 and is expected to grow by 9.2% per year until 2028 in addition to this Market there are also people selling books courses consultations and tutorials on avoiding the world's distraction ction and squeezing the most out of your day it's a big market for one simple reason people who have decided that they want to be more productive are high intent customers and they are willing to spend a lot of money on a good solution because they think of it as an

investment rather than a purchase if someone could give you an app or a course that would let you focus for longer and build out a side business that doubled your monthly income of course you would pay a lot for that people seeking out ways to maximize their productivity are also on average wealth the as people who are into self-improvement and are short on time often are this means that people can make millions of dollars very quickly if they can amass an audience and convince them that they have the secret to maximizing productivity I'm going to

stop short of calling these a get-rich quick scheme style grift because I do believe that the most popular Personalities in the space like Ali abdol Alex heroi and even Gary ve really do have good intentions with their audience and they don't intend any harm some other self-improvement personalities don't care as much and just want to get you to buy their course by any means necessary but even these good guys still have something to sell you it's a classic strategy of hey look at me I am rich and successful and you could be too if you

do this thing that I am selling a video about how someone made $10 million a year and a breakdown of their revenue sources might genuinely be made with the best of intentions of transparency but it also serves as a demonstration of how well their advice has worked for them and how it could work for you too in the interest of my own transparency I have made the same kind kind of video because I thought it was interesting and I thought it would get views but I don't have a course on how to run multiple businesses

or get big on YouTube some of these tools these people in companies are selling are totally free but some can cost thousands of dollars and with an audience that is so intent on changing their life for the better it's not unusual for people to take on credit card debt to attend a mindset conference or buy a course that they think will change their life now if you pick up some tricks that help you stay on top of your meetings or just feel less stressed about your everyday chores that's great and if that's worth investing some

money go ahead but there aren't millions of people watching this with the goal of minor improvements people are expecting something much bigger that simply can't be bought working out how to stay focused for every hour of the day is probably not going to radically change your life in my career as an investment banker I got to work directly with hundreds of very successful company Founders that were raising hundreds of millions of dollars for their businesses all of them were very busy people but none of them tried to optimize every hour of the Working Day or

work 100 hour weeks to make their business a success it's also not fair to even compare regular people to highly successful business people either because they often have assistance and other staff to take care of them so even if they are spending long hours in the office they have everything else in their life taken care of and that's the third reason why falling into the productivity Rabbit Hole can leave you much worse off in the long run which is that you are probably wasting your time this works in two ways so let's call them reason

3A and reason 3B the first way this will end up wasting your time is is that after setting up calendars reminders journals meditation sessions attending seminars and watching productivity content you have probably wasted more time than you will ever save with a simple plan that you work out as you go along reason 3B is a little bit more interesting though being productive is not the same as being busy but if you're focus on not wasting any of your time you are more likely to divert your attention to things that aren't going to do you any

good a survey conducted by 1,989 office workers in the United Kingdom found the the average person was on task for Just 2 hours and 53 minutes a day trying to optimize that time to get more done in a day is only going to result in you being given more work to do which is great for the company you work for but doesn't help you much strong performance is important for career progression but being the guy that does the work of three normal co-workers isn't the right way to show you're the right person for a promotion

being too good at your job is also one of the leading reasons that managers have given for not promoting staff because they will be too hard to replace even if you are a business owner and you do financially benefit directly from every additional bit of work you get done the mindset that a lot of productivity gurus preach is not going to make your business sustainable or scalable the cold to productivity is weirdly split on this some people Advocate working 100 weeks until you are a billionaire and only then are you worthy of a day off

and some argue that if you are getting paid based on how many hours you work you are a loser that can't properly delegate there is no single right way to run a business and owners usually do work more hours than their employees but nobody can produce good quality work 100 hours every week and not every business owner can or wants to delegate their jobs to a team taking us back to the problem of specific advice for a broad audience if it wasn't clear by now it's okay to not be productive comparing yourself to people online

who are outstandingly lucky or simply make it their career to talk about how organized they are is not going to do anything good for you if you don't really care about how much more money you can make your employer then take it easy and watch this video on the rise and fall Rise Again of unions they are the reason that you can get away with watching this video at work like you probably are right now if you are stuck in an open Office plan and need to keep your screen looking busy then you can sign

up for my totally free email newsletter not only will you get these videos a day early but you can also get tons of bonus content that will never be made available here on YouTube so sign up to compounded daily to keep on learning how money works