Can We Rescue Personal Productivity?

A foray into the "lost crispness problem" of the self-help genre

This post is part of The Productivity Chronicles, a slow series exploring the history and future of personal accomplishment and some tangents along the line. The first part in this series was Beyond GTD – Pioneering The Future of Personal Productivity; the second was In Pursuit of Productiveness.

I’m currently working on a book, but I’m repeatedly bumping into a challenge.

A challenge that has plagued the self-help genre for a long time.

Unlike in academia, the language of self-help authors often favors colloquial meanings over crisp definitions.

Think "habit," goal," and "project".¹ These all have taken on vastly different meanings from what they originally referred to. While sometimes this is done to make texts more accessible, I think more often the author's laziness or ignorance is to blame.

For sure, using terms without defining them sometimes works. However, with the decreasing credibility of the self-help community, I don't want to add to this trajectory. I don’t want to feed what I’ve come to call the lost crispness problem.

So, I can no longer succumb to this laziness in writing my book. Even if it means it will take much longer before it becomes a reality.²

Since my book will outline my Fractal Productivity System (FPS), it led me to encounter one of the prime examples of our inflation phenomenon, the term personal productivity itself. This term has strayed far from its economic roots. It has adopted meanings far beyond producing things faster.

While some authors still view it through the lens of time management, this is a rare occurrence. More and more people conflate the means and ends, defining it as getting the upper hand on whatever life throws at you. Others overextend it substantially, equating it with achieving worthwhile goals. Still, others shift their perspectives entirely and inflate them to heights like leading a fulfilling life.³

As it stands, the term "personal productivity" has been washed out entirely and lost most of its meaning. Many people outside of our community laugh about it. It means everything and nothing.

I have made this mistake myself. Over the last 50 essays on this blog, I have most likely employed different meanings without being clear enough about them. But if I am to help people solve a productivity challenge with my book, I need to ensure clarity. I need to define "productivity" in crip and objective terms. How else could I build a set of arguments on top of it?

Why do I need to go through all of this? Many words evolve and gain new meanings over time. That is perfectly fine.

However, we went terribly wrong by making personal productivity about everything. It makes it incredibly easy to rumble on about the topic without really saying anything.⁴ There is even talk of a “productivity porn” now.

That’s why I proposed replacing the term personal productivity with something like a personal accomplishment to better encompass the diverse goals discussed in self-help literature. Alternatively, we could join the trend of creating a whole new mindset around productivity but do so with a novel term. And I already attempted this by coining the concept of productiveness in the second installment of this series.

No matter the term, this would set "personal productivity" free, allowing us to bring it back to the roots of its meaning. In this essay, I want to explore this possible future. A future where productivity refers again to a concrete and quantifiable thing.

Despite the current confusion, redefining and salvaging the concept might be possible. Here are my current thoughts on how to go about it…

Where Personal Productivity Came From

Economic productivity is and has to be, by definition, an objective concept. It is a performance metric measuring output per unit of input. For instance, a car manufacturer may measure how many cars it produces in a given hour. One hour is the input⁵. Cars are the output. So, the higher the number of cars outputted per hour, the higher the productivity. We can say that “company X has the productivity to produce Y cars in an hour”.

Personal productivity, of course, has economic roots as well. The rationale is that if the productivity of an individual worker can be increased, it will lead to an overall boost for the corporation. The company goals inform what is productive and what is not. Today, however, we encounter something very different when we read about personal productivity. A few decades ago, our "private" lives were more straightforward, and there was no need for "personal productivity at home.” There were also relatively few people with "side businesses" that could have required a productivity boost outside of work. So, personal productivity originally only referred to economic personal productivity. And in this context, it still makes a lot of sense, as it is simply a breakdown of economic productivity for an individual worker. Nowadays, however, personal productivity has taken on a variety of other meanings. It refers to productivity at home, productivity in side hustles, and the productivity of the solopreneur. It refers not only to work with an economic background but also to many other things. While the term is still about "achievement" in some form or another, the details of what it is differ greatly depending on who you ask, as I have outlined in the introduction.

This may have happened because the purely economic stance does not work outside the working world. Yes, we can say very generally that personal productivity is a function that turns our personal resources (materials, time, cognitive power) into some form of output. However, how do we define (and measure) the "input" into this function? And how do we determine the output? As we will see, these are a lot harder to quantify in the personal realm.

The biggest problem, however, may even be that within an economic context, productivity meant something. Why does a company try to increase its productivity? The company may have some pulling values, a clear mission, and an inspiring vision. In the last instance, however, most companies do their best to reach economic goals. In short, a company exists to make money. That's the highest goal of economic productivity, and everything done within the company is ultimately judged against it. That's what’s broken down through the hierarchy layers and what makes a manager – figuratively speaking – stand there with a stopwatch to increase the output of cars.

What, however, takes the place of this crystal clear rationale in personal productivity? If there is no company mission, no written down WHY, what does the individual try to increase his productivity for in the first place?

Input, Output, Rationale — Let’s look at these areas separately.

Input

Personal resources differ from company resources. Inside the context of a company, a “person hour” is a valuable metric, as it essentially boils down to the hourly wage of the people working. Money, or the cost of an hour, makes an hour a valid reference point.

Not every hour of input, however, is equal in terms of its potency. A machine does not care whether it operates in the morning, at midnight, or after the lunch break. But chances are that you do. So, an hour in one’s biological prime time is not the same as one after having a big lunch. Over a whole workforce, this impact of some lower productivity hours can be flattened. The individual specifics of anyone’s "hour" are brushed away by averaging them over many people. While your hours may have been high energy, another one may have been low energy, in the end averaging out.

As an individual, however, you can’t do this. Even if you could guarantee equivalent work hours, using this concept of hourly wages only makes sense when, for instance, you are self-employed and attribute yourself to a wage to manage your business effectively. However, comparing anything and everything in your personal life to “money” doesn’t feel right.

So, as for input, we must somehow encode and differentiate between more and less productive hours. We could try to do so by, for instance, distinguishing between deep work hours in the morning and more collaborative, creatively driven hours in the afternoon. We could also, in theory, track how many materials (espresso shorts, laptop charges, pens, …) we spend on a specific task or project, albeit with knowledge work, what most of us do, this seems less relevant. As for more intangible resources like energy, we could create proxies like “exhaustion level on a scale from 1-10” and at least approximate them.

Defining and comparing "input" is challenging, but at least it seems solvable.

The output, however, is where it gets tricky.

Output

In product-based companies, an employee often or most of the time produces the same or similar things repeatedly. The output can be used as a valid reference point. In personal productivity, we rarely do the same thing twice. Yes, I may write multiple essays over time, but I'd argue that comparing these essays is much more complicated than comparing a mass-market product like a car. Even though most cars nowadays are unique, they differ a lot less than the two essays will.

Moreover, we can compare them very precisely by comparing their configurations. Essays and all creative work aren't like that. How do we compare two pieces of art?

This makes personal productivity output much less suitable as a reference point than economic personal productivity output. We have a "moving target" problem at hand. If everything we produce is in some form "new" and differs from all we have made before, we cannot meaningfully compare our products in terms of how productive we were in creating them. We could try to introduce some "quantifiable" metrics around that. However, if you go down that road and say compare "words written per day," you can quickly end up neglecting quality, arguably the only thing that matters.

Moreover, while you have many employees in corporate settings who can compare their output against each other, you can't do that in personal productivity. In personal productivity, we can only compare ourselves with ourselves.

This necessitates that we somehow measure our performance against the past. We build very rough “buckets” we can place similar outputs into and then try to at least compare these buckets to each other.

Defining and comparing "output" in our productivity is an even more challenging problem than comparing input. But it gets even more interesting than that.

Rationale

We as individuals are not "factories," but if we want to improve our performance, just like with a business, we need some higher reason. Only a meaningful goal justifies productivity. And yet, most literature and most people treat personal productivity without even mentioning the vision and mission of a person’s life. Too many try to improve the output of "something" mechanically, acting as if getting more productive in something has a meaning in and of itself. It has not.

If you know people who get very irritated when you talk about personal productivity, it might be because they don't see any reason to increase their output. Maybe they don't have a mission in their life. Without a higher rationale, productivity is utterly useless. You may be faster. But if you don’t see any benefit in becoming faster, why do it in the first place?

So, let me repeat: if you don't have a mission or clear vision for what you want to be productive about, there is no reason to try to be more productive. So, we have yet another problem without a reason for doing something.

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Taken together, even if we try to be all economic about it, personal productivity seems to defy precise measurement. That's maybe why the question of how we should define it has been raised countless times by different authors over the last two decades; to my knowledge, we haven't reached any meaningful consensus (yet). That's maybe because no one authority can give it a fixed meaning. Instead, we want it to mean everything we have in mind. We want to provide it with our very own personal meaning. So the question is, can we even change that? And should we even try?

Well, yes! Otherwise, this essay would be rather pointless after all…

So let us see….