This Is Better Than Being Productive
This Is Better Than Being Productive
Elon Musk, prioritizing, and changing the approach.
One of the things I’ve noticed about high-performing people is their relationship with high-performing work.
For the first several years of my career, I was focused almost exclusively on productivity. I was never really in a hurry but I was moving fast. I was sure that if I just worked harder, I would be successful. I was sure that if I sacrificed more personal time or rest, I would be moving faster than my peers.
I was going for speed. I felt I was smart enough to tell the difference between good and bad projects or good and bad tasks. I felt like I knew what to work on and I felt I knew how to prioritize effectively.
I’m pretty sure that I even heard Elon Musk say something like “if everyone else is working 40 hours a week and you’re working 80 hours a week, you’ll be getting twice as much done.”
This isn’t an exact quote, but the sentiment is accurate.
As I approach my mid-30s, my attitude has changed. I’ve also realized that I didn’t know as much about prioritization as I thought.
It turns out, there is an upper limit of effectiveness. There is a maximum threshold of work capacity where no human can hold onto the redline of the tachometer. I discovered this by pushing myself a little too hard. You can read about that briefly in this post I wrote in 2019.
Those of you who’ve been reading for a while know that I’m an advocate for the abolition of the “work/life balance” thing. Work is part of life. Life contains work. They’re not at odds and you’re not living two different lives. They must merge or you’ll go crazy putting your “real” life on hold.
One of the important lessons I learned from working a little too hard was the idea that there’s always an infinite amount of work to do. The firehose will never, ever stop.
The difference between high-performance people who are also successful and high-performance people who are just moving fast is the nearly exclusive focus on the right work.
As I move into the next chapter of my career, I’m more focused on the 20% of the work that will get me 80% of the output and I’m less concerned about checking every single box.
Sure, it’s cool and fun and rewarding to be able to accomplish 100 tasks per day. But you know what’s better than just being “productive?” Accomplishing 2 tasks that have a huge, disproportionate impact.
Just like anything else, the ability to detect important work and reject the rest is a skill that we can all learn. It’s going to take me a while, but it seems like a prerequisite for a high-impact career.