DonationCoder.com Software > The Getting Organized Experiment of 2009

Why Trying to be Productive is a Huge Waste of Time

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Deozaan:
(e.g. Shit does not Happen on a time table).-Stoic Joker (September 20, 2010, 12:06 PM)
--- End quote ---

Sounds like you need to get more fiber in your diet. ;)

rxantos:
I kind of agree, if the job or project is something creative. Creativity is something that needs inspiration. And, emotional activities cannot be scheduled. Same thing applies to things you want to do, no one needs a reminder.

But, in defense of the to-do list, there are things that need to be done, and you don't want to do and thus postpone forever. Doing your taxes, cleaning your house, writing a report that no one will read.

This is the purpose of to-do list. To remind you to do something that you don't want to do, but must be done anyway.

If it has a deadline, write it down so you don't miss it. If it does not have a deadline write it so you don't forget it.

As of time wasting. Unless you have terrible memory, you only need to check your to do list 2 times a day.

In the morning, to remind you whats yet to be done.
In the evening to take out what was done and add any new things to do.

As of planning every minute of your day: Unless you are a total control freak, you wont be happy with that.

The purpose of life is living it, not slaving yourself for someone else.

housetier:
When I need to be more productive I sleep more and work less. Of course this only works because my direct supervisor thinks alike :)

For me productivity is not only about Getting Things Done as in writing lines of code but also about the (subjective) quality of the work: is it nicely formatted, is the in-code documentation adequate, did I really remove all debug and test code? I spend a great deal of my working hours formatting code and writing documentation. I even do this for code from my colleagues. However, I still get features implemented myself :) It's not like am just mopping up after the others.

Our management once tried Fear Driven Development as a means to improve performance. For about a day: by then almost all developers had threatened to quit. Now we have several buffers between management and us; in turn we can work quietly and concentrated. So far we have met any deadline although we loathe them. The more "they" let us, the better (read more productive) we become.

Which brings me to the next topic: I think it is so very much easier to increase productivity by building a good team than by any other means. All other means tend to wear off after some time and the increase in productivity vanishes.

In short, I don't want to be productive, I just want to do good work :)

Stoic Joker:
In short, I don't want to be productive, I just want to do good work
-housetier (November 11, 2010, 12:41 PM)
--- End quote ---
+1  :Thmbsup:

Paul Keith:
Addendum to the TS link: Productivity Paradox: How Sony Gets more out of People by Demanding Less

I think the comments underneath the article, while vague (at least to me), is more notable than the actual article but only if you agreed with the article.

At least I think everyone reading this thread hopefully gets that time management is passe even when GTD was written. It was all about energy management and both links hopefully show that this too, is just an old bandwagon that's already waning.

App's link showing this more because I feel strongly that the writer was wrong and this link hopefully shown by the comments on how the idea of energy management is a loop back to just getting managers to act more like councilors rather than fake acting politicians.

In my opinion, productivity shouldn't be secondary. Good luck getting that to work with to-do lists. Productivity should be imaginary and to-do lists should be primary and primary to-do lists often are not involved with dealing with everything. It would be like letting the federal government legislate on drugs or gay marriage. Yes, there should be laws and not everything necessarily have to be left to the state but to-do lists shouldn't be boggled down with things that don't belong to it or it would stop becoming a primary tool and become a secondary tool with the responsibility of being a stressful primary tool in our head.

Anyway, I apologize for interjecting my post now. Really this was a topic I avoided because I could literally rant forever about this but I just happened to read the above link today and I felt GOE section lacks a definitive topic dealing away with both time, focus and energy management as being what personal productivity is supposed to represent.

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