12 Productivity Myths Wasting Your Time

right so myth number one is when you tell yourself that I should have been more productive and you use that as a reason to flagellate and beat yourself up at the end of the day yes maybe you could have been more productive but telling yourself that you should have been and you're going to beat yourself up it doesn't change how much work you managed to get that day it doesn't change how productive you are it just makes you feel terrible about yourself and so these days whenever I'm tempted to tell myself I should have been

more productive today I just remind myself you know what I can just simply choose to be satisfied with how much work I've done today and it's totally fine I can always begin again tomorrow all right myth number two is that consistency is more important than intensity there is a whole movement these days that says it's all about consistency it's not about putting in loads of effort right now it's about putting in small amounts of effort over a very long period of time and then you'll get those results and I definitely agree with that but there

are some important caveats here and I think almost we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater and we have kind of given intensity a bad name there's nothing wrong with being intense about something like not everything in life is a marathon where you have to pace yourself some things can be sprints if you're for example trying to get a project out the door and you just want to finish the thing then it's totally fine to have like a brief period of intensity if you're for example thinking of starting a YouTube channel and you're like have

never done any of this stuff before then it's totally okay to just decide you know what today I'm just going to spend all day just trying to get this YouTube channel started and get my first video out that's not sustainable forever you can't spend like a whole 18 hours or 12 hours in a day focusing on your YouTube channel every single day but it doesn't need to be sustainable forever it just needs to help you work towards your goals so yes consistency is obviously super important for most things in life but I think it's worth

remembering that actually small periods of intensity punctuated by long periods of rest is also a very reasonable way to go about things depending on what you're working on all right tip number three this is an absolute classic the myth is that motivation leads to action the myth Is that ah if I want to do something I need to feel motivated to do it but actually the truth is as a lot of you guys know if you've been consuming the productivity genre for as long as I have motivation is a myth like you don't need motivation

to take action you can simply choose to do something even if you're not motivated to do it and so rather than motivate leading to action it's more that action leads to motivation the more you do something and the more small successes you can get under your belt the more motivated you're going to be to continue doing the thing alrighty myth number four is that hustle culture is bad again don't cancel me for this but like we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater Bible hustle culture is the worst thing ever yes I agree a

culture that encourages people to like overwork themselves to the point of burnout is bad but there's no getting around the fact that if you actually want to for example start a business or make passive income or start side hustles or like succeed in a competitive field you do have to work for it like there's no getting around that fact like sometimes just working nine to five Monday to Friday showing up clocking in clocking out is not actually the way that you win depending on what winning means to you I get emails from people being like

hey I love the idea of having a YouTube channel that makes me ten thousand dollars a month do you think I can do that with four hours a week and I'm like no absolutely not if you have the audacity to try and make 120 000 a year from a YouTube channel where you have fun Freedom flexibility you can do what can make more available what videos you want how could you possibly think that that doesn't take any work and I think this is kind of the issue with the whole hustle of culture is bad kind

of model these days if you ask any successful entrepreneur if you ask if you ask anyone who has done something that you maybe aspire to then they will often say that they hustled really really hard and then once the thing became successful then they cared more about work-life balance and that kind of thing so ultimately it all comes down to what is your goal like what's the point of doing the thing if your goal is to do something extraordinary whatever that looks like for you you probably have to put in extraordinary amounts of work if

your goal is not if your goal is like actually I just want to have a balanced and chill life great fantastic you don't need to hustle at all but it really just depends on what the goal is and I also don't like the fact that like we've gone so far the other way of like hustle culture is the worst thing ever that encourages people that like hard work is actually a Bad Thing alrighty so continuing these somewhat hot takes in this video myth number five is that productivity is not self-care there's a great book by

Grace Beverly called working hard hardly working that talks about this it's basically about like how we've somehow ended up with these two different camps we've got team productivity that's like yeah I want to work and we go team self-care that's like no don't do any work go have a bath go like get some rose petals go for a walk in nature and these are not like diametrically opposed things they're actually kind of two sides of the same coin they're also they often kind of go together and sometimes productivity is self-care it's not necessarily self-care if

you've got your taxes due the following day to be like you know what screw hustle culture screw productivity I'm just gonna you know pour myself a warm bath and I'm gonna take a walk in nature and I'm going to have a nice time so I know you're going to get fined potentially end up in prison like bad things will happen if you don't do your taxes similarly oh I'm not going to hand in my dissertation tomorrow because I deserve self-care now screw that sometimes the greatest thing you can do for your own self-care is to

actually be productive is to get that thing in on time is to actually spend a few extra hours working in the evening because that is the best thing you can do for your mental health rather than thinking that like cool I must finish work by 5 PM and if I don't like screw all the consequences of that I'm just going to focus on self-care so again please don't cancel me for this but what I'm trying to say is that like we've possibly gone too far in the direction of separating out productivity and self-care actually in

some cases productivity is self-care and in some cases self-care is productivity in some cases actually taking a break taking a vacation is exactly what you need to boost your productivity and so you know these are not like two very different things all right myth number six is that goals should be smart now this this one is interesting if you look any if you look at any video any blog post any book about goal setting you'll come across the acronym smart specific measurable achievable realistic and time-bound or something like that the issue with smart goals like

there's nothing particularly wrong with them on the surface but they don't tell the whole story we want to add a few things to that firstly we want to add proximal I.E you know there's a bunch of evidence that says that goals that are more like close to us in time are better than goals that are really far out from us in time and often if you think about a goal of like I really want to build a million dollar business and you have never built a business before like that goal generally is not particularly helpful

or particularly motivating but instead sending the goal more proximally of I want to make a hundred dollars a month with my business that's actually way way more like kind of proximal than the goal of I want to make a million dollars with my business even though both might be equally achievable depending on kind of what your what Your Time Horizon is but the other thing to keep in mind with goals is the difference between intrinsic goals and extrinsic goals and I've been doing so much research about this like reading a ton of papers and stuff

for research on my book but essentially an extrinsic goal is a goal that has a specific kind of like external goal post applied to it so for example hitting a million subscribers would be an extrinsical trying to trying to win a particular competition would be it would be an extrinsical because it's like broadly these things are outside of your control whereas an intrinsic goal might be something like I want to make connections with people or I want to grow my own skills it's more of like an internal drive rather than external thing that's sort of

outside of your control and now your goals are not subject to the whims of the market or the whims of other people they're purely within your own control and so you're more likely to feel a sense of autonomy and power and competence as you work towards those particular goals all right myth number seven is that you can do everything that if you are just a little bit more productive if you had a little bit more time if you were just a little bit more disciplined you would actually be able to do everything on your to-do

list and this is a this is a bit of a myth all of us today all of our to-do lists are never ending there is an endless amount of work we could be doing there's an endless amount of household improvements we could be doing an endless amount of quality time we could be spending with our family and friends an infinite amount of tasks we could be doing for our work or our business an endless amount of hobbies we could be working on we want to do all these things the list is never ending and this

is something that Oliver Berkman talks about in the book four thousand weeks which is actually really good and it's basically about embracing our finitude and embracing the fact that we're gonna die and we're not gonna have time to do all the things and so we can just strategically decide what are the things we're going to be mediocre at I have strategically decided I'm never going to be good at replying to messages on Whatsapp or emails and stuff I'm like you know in a dream world if I had magically five extra hours in the day I

would love to reply to everyone who messages me physically I can't do that I'm going to not like beat myself up for doing that I cannot do everything and I think when you Embrace that attitude of finitude that attitude of I actually can't do everything it means you're like cool I could probably only do like three things today what are those three things I want to do and then you can just sort of safely ignore the rest and hope that it doesn't come back to bite you uh in a bad way all right moving on

myth number eight is that you don't have time I hate it when I hear people say I don't have time to do X I used to tell myself this back in the day back when I think when I was in school but as I started reading productivity books and getting more into this thing and try to genuinely be more productive I realized that whenever I tell myself I don't have time A I'm lying to myself and B I am taking autonomy control and power away from myself because it's never that you don't have time it's

always that the thing is not enough of a priority and this is just a subtly different way of phrasing the same thing like right now I don't have time to take singing lessons regularly but like realistically I do like you know if I really wanted to if you offered me a million pounds every time I took a singing lesson I would make the time to take singing lessons the problem is it's like a thing I want to do my calendar is a bit chocolate block with other things I'm working on my book I'm trying to

do some videos and podcasts and all this other kind of stuff trying to have a balanced life singing lessons are not really a priority right now so it's not that I don't have time for them it's that I'm choosing not to make them a priority and almost whatever circumstance you find yourself in you can always choose to reframe things that way because saying it's not a priority for me right now it's just a more High autonomy way of saying the same thing of I don't have time but as all the research shows when you feel

autonomy you feel more self-determined you feel like your life is more under your control and even if it's not even if you genuinely don't have time by just telling yourself that no I'm choosing not to make the time you get more of that feeling of control and therefore you're far more likely to be productive at the thing but also you're gonna feel better because you know we as humans have evolved to have this innate need for autonomy and so if you can satisfy that need by just changing the story you tell yourself about whether you

have time or whether you're choosing not to make it a priority that is a thing that then bleeds into every other aspect of life and just makes life feel a lot better alright myth number nine is that productivity is about doing more and yes it's about doing more to an extent but actually productivity is more about doing more of the right things and the way I think of it is the productivity equation which is that productivity equals meaningful output divided by time multiplied by Fun the output needs to be meaningful there is no point driving

super fast down the road if you are driving the wrong direction that's like actively counterproductive and so really productivity involves like a balance of all of these different terms it's not just about doing more things faster it's about doing more meaningful things and the reason I've got fun in there as a concept is because I kind of think that if you can approach productivity in a way like where you can try and enjoy the things that you're doing and you can try and enjoy the journey that is just a massive multiplier on your productivity because

the real problem with trying to get things done is when you freaking hate doing the thing and actually if you're interested in learning more about this stuff you might like to check out my online class all about productivity which is available completely for free on skillshare who are very kindly sponsoring this video if you haven't heard by now skillshare is the world's leading online platform for educational classes they've got classes on all sorts of things productivity video editing youtubing cooking interior design business so many things but the reason why you should sign up for skillshare

if you haven't already is because I've got around 12 different classes on skillshare that are available completely free of charge when you sign up to skillshare or when you take out a free trial so you can check out any of my three classes around productivity if you're interested in starting a YouTube channel you can check out my YouTube for beginners class I've had comments from people being like I can't believe this is free I would have paid 500 for this and it's all completely available for free on skillshare so if you are one of the

first 1000 people to hit the link in the video description and you can sign up for a free one month child of skillshare and in that time you can watch any of my classes to your heart's content and you can explore all of the other things that skillshare has on offer so thank you so much skillshare for sponsoring this video all right myth number 10 is that you need large amounts of time to do good work this is a myth that I find myself buying into quite a lot I'm like ah I only have 23

minutes until my next meeting or my next appointment or my personal trainer session at the gym I can't I can't really get anything done in 23 minutes you know what I'll just like screw around and scroll Twitter and keep up to date with what's going on with like FTX and all of this fun stuff but actually that's a bit of a myth because if I wanted to I actually could be more intentional with how I'm using those 23 minutes and there's a fantastic book by Matthew Dix called someday is today that is like super super

inspiring and amazing if you want to boost your productivity but also if you just want to improve your life in general and one of the things he says like Matthew is has written about like 10 books 10 plus books in his life um while also being a full-time teacher and also doing a bunch of Internet stuff and also having kids and he says that the way he manages to write all these 10 books is that he does his writing in between random moments in the day like if someone is seven minutes late to a meeting

he'll just get his laptop out and get his notebook out and just write seven sentences because you can write seven sentences in seven minutes I mean yeah it's not a whole chapter but it's seven sentences and those seven sentences get you closer to the goal of actually writing the chapter and I just love that I find it so inspiring I think it's so true that with so easy for us to convince ourselves and believe the myth that we need these large uninterrupted blocks of time to do deep work yes it's really nice to have but

if you have a busy life if you have other things going on if you have kids I like I haven't got kids I have no idea what it's like having kids but it's like people I know who have kids I'm just like how do you do it but you know what Matthew says in the book which I probably agree with is that you find the time you make the time in these like little pockets of time and if you kind of waited for the opportunity where you magically had I don't know three free hours and

a coffee on a nice in a nice environment to do your work you'd never ever ever get anything done and so really I think this is a myth and we should kind of take advantage of being a little bit more intentional in those little moments in the day where otherwise we'd find ourselves doing totally pointless things like scrolling Twitter obviously nothing wrong with scrolling Twitter but as long as you're doing it intentionally I find myself scrolling Twitter a lot and I always think to myself do I really want to be doing this and sometimes the

answer is yes when I'm like I really want to with Twitter right now which is totally fine but at other times the answer is I actually don't the only reason I opened up Twitter is because I just kind of muscle memory and then I choose to close it down and do something a little bit more intentional with my type on a related note myth number 11 is that your environment has to be perfect I love a good desk setup like anyone else I have all these accessories on my desk I have a little candle it's

a nice having a candle I have a little fake plot it's nice having a fake plant but crucially it's a bit of a myth if I'm telling myself I I require these things to be more productive yes they can help but they're not requirements they're what the Stokes are called preferred indifference and broadly indifferent to the presence of a candle or a nice headphones or a nice lamp on my desk but it would be nice if I had it but that doesn't necessarily mean I can't get work done without having these things and I've met

a lot of people over the years who have sort of added up these fake requirements to them in their minds it's like oh I can't get any work done until I do my morning routine it's like BS because I can't get any work done unless I have like two monitors in front of me like no you absolutely can you're just kind of being a bit precious about it and like there's really no need for that like people have been doing lots and lots of very useful and very productive things since like the dawn of time

without having access to all this fancy Tech and Aesthetics and like coffee shop and latte art that we convince ourselves that we actually need we don't need any of that we can be productive in the most acetic environments really I think kind of the the fewer requirements you can have in your own mind for what you need to be productive the more likely you are to be able to actually achieve the things that you want to set out to all right myth number 12 is that the small stuff does not matter you will hear some

productivity books saying that it's not about how fast you type it's not about the keyboard shortcuts it's not about like these little micro adjustments it's about the big picture stuff and I agree to an extent yes it's about the big picture but actually the small micro adjustments that you can do to your productivity do actually help like I have found it incredibly valuable training my typing speed to the point that I can type like 150 words per minute that makes it like that means that everything I do on the computer is twice as fast as

someone who types at 75 words per minute and so for me to reply to emails very quickly is twice as fast for me to write a script for a video is twice as fast as someone else and in a way it's like the way I think of it is that if I can like when interacting with a computer for example if I can reduce the amount of time between me having a thought and that thought like happening on the computer it just reduces the friction for absolutely everything whereas my mum for example will take about

10 times as long to do exactly the same thing if not longer and so for her like there is actually genuinely a cap to how much work she can get done in a particular day I found this like really really held true when I used to work as a doctor as Junior doctors you have to do a lot of typing you have to do a lot of admin after when once you see a patient you type up the notes all this kind of stuff the other three doctors that I was working with who were also

kind of the same level as me their typing speeds were like kind of slow and so they would stay behind for like an hour after work to fully type up the notes that they were doing for the patients but for me my typing speed was fast and so I could see a patient and like while the patient was like in the waiting room and waiting for the blood results to arrive I would just like type up the notes it would be super detailed because I can like type pretty fast and then I wouldn't need to

stay behind after work well these guys were like scrolling notes on Bits of Paper and then having to sort of type them up afterwards training or typing speed is actually not that tricky they also have a cause and skill show about how to type faster if you're interested but training your typing speed isn't that hard and it's a thing that really then bleeds into every area of your life and it's like genuinely a useful thing yeah fine it's not going to move the needle for your productivity but if you can go home an extra half

an hour early because you've managed to type things faster than other people around you it's just generally nice for your life as well and finally myth number 13 is that reading too many books is useless now again this is sort of like a consistency intensity stuff if you are the sort of person that reads absolutely no books at all then your life will be immeasurably improved by actually reading like there's just there's just like mountains and mountains of evidence that people who read it's like if you basically ask anyone who's successful they will they will

credit their success to reading books um so if you don't read anything at all then you need to read some amount of books but there's almost this Counter Culture that says there's there is such a thing as reading too many books you know sometimes I'll mention that oh yeah I read about 100 books a year and people are like what 100 books a year there's no way you could possibly get any value from those books because you're listening to them at 3x speed or because you're just skimming them because like it's so much better to

read one book a year and just really absorb and apply the insights it's always a little bit more nuanced than that the way I think of it is that when it comes to reading there are really two modes of reading there is reading for exploration and then there's reading for exploitation or action or Insight or whatever you want to call it so when I'm reading for exploration you know recently I've become interested in like world history and so I'm listening to sapiens I've read a book called The Bomb by Fred Kaplan which is all about

the history of the nuclear bomb and it's like interesting things like that where realistically I'm not going to be patrolling through the book about the the invention of the nuclear bomb and being like what insights can I apply to my life here I just don't know how that's just not how it's going to work it's more like I'm interested in the topic I found a book that a friend recommended to get a cursory overview of the topic and so if I listen to it at three times on speed and get done with it in four

hours now I just have all this knowledge and background context in my brain about the nuclear bomb and maybe I can't recite like by memory exactly the names and dates and stuff of the people that were involved in inventing it but at least I know enough of the big picture and so that is reading for exploration I'm exploring a new topic yes yes I agree if I'm reading for exploitation if I'm reading a business book for example and I'm trying to actively apply the insights to grow my business it makes a lot more sense for

me to just read a few of them and apply those insights rather than read 500 of them and not apply any of them at all so I think it's not quite as simple as reading loads of books is bad for you like some people say it's more like well it depends what are you reading them for are you reading for exploration or are you reading for exploitation or Insight so that brings us to the end of this video if you liked this you might like to check out this video over here which is 12 cheap

purchases under twenty dollars that have genuinely improved my own productivity if you're interested in being more productive like you might find some things in there that you haven't thought about you can buy very very cheaply you can add to your desk and it will just level up your productivity so thank you so much for watching have a great day and I'll see you bye