The Truth About Productivity: Time is Not Money
“I was the world’s foremost brain surgeon and genetic engineer. I had top secret contracts with the Pentagon, Apple, and Mattel. I was driven. Exhausted.” – Claire Wellington (Glenn Close), The Stepford Wives
It’s true that all our boundaries around work time have been destroyed by smartphones and apps designed to be addictive. The iPhone came out in 2007, and the first Android clone in 2008.
But I recently rewatched The Stepford Wives (2004 version). While it’s not a great movie by any means, I was struck by how some of the same problems women business owners (and women in business generally) had even before the smartphone era.
Even back then (20 years ago!!), rest was a dirty word.
True productivity is about accomplishing the things you need to get done
This may seem simplistic or obvious, but when you look closely you see there are several pieces to it that go against the prevailing wisdom.
First of all, what is “true” productivity? I’m calling it that to separate it from toxic productivity. You know what the toxic stuff is: being told to get up at 4 in the morning, going through rituals with multiple steps whether or not they fit your household, feeling like if you become more efficient you’ll just get loaded down with more work, and so on.
True productivity not only allows you to have a life outside work, but actually encourages time away from the business.
The second piece is accomplishment. Very often, when I’m giving a talk on productivity, I’ll ask the audience if within the past two weeks, they had a day where they were busy all day and felt like they couldn’t catch their breath until later in the evening. Yet when they looked back over their day, they had actually not accomplished a single thing.
Practically every hand in the room goes up. Every single time I ask that question.
Being busy is not the same thing as being productive. In American culture, being busy is a badge of honor. But that doesn’t make your business grow, or improve your career, or help you accomplish anything.
The third piece is the things you need to get done. As you know, you can do a whole lot of things in eight hours, but they may have nothing to do with your company or your job.
Or, they may be things that your company needs to get done, but they don't necessarily have to be done by you, the business owner.
Do you need to answer every email that comes in? Do you need to answer your phone? Do you need to order the office supplies? Do you need to fix the computers? Do you need to make the copies? Do you need to send the payments to the vendors? (Even if you’re a solopreneur, a lot of these can be delegated and/or automated.)
True productivity isn’t necessarily efficient
A lot of people don’t like the word “productivity”, and I get it. Sometimes the word conjures up the toxic stuff, or people aren’t sure what it really means.
But does it mean being efficient? I don’t think those two words are synonymous. Efficient means that you get work done as quickly as possible, without detours or wasted effort or expense.
Efficiency works well in factories, or any task where you’ve got discrete steps that go in a certain order every time. You know how long each step takes, so you know how long the task takes.
But for knowledge workers, particularly anyone who’s in the financial and legal space, there’s too much thinking to do to really measure efficiency. This work takes the amount of time it takes.
When I was a financial planner, for some clients I could blast through the plan in half an hour or so. But others took hours, due to the complexities of the case.
Or even take writing content for thought leadership. I had to go for a walk this afternoon and get some coffee, then pace a bit between paragraphs to make the words go. (As you can see from the last sentence, maybe I needed a bit more coffee. Or a longer walk.)
That’s not particularly efficient, and you could argue all the walking and coffee-obtaining was wasted effort. But to create this article, which hopefully makes some sense, I needed that extra effort to get to where I wanted to go.
Time management for true productivity isn’t about acting like a machine
Back in the 80s and 90s, we had these weekly paper planners where every day was broken down into 15-minute blocks. My personal opinion is that trying to block time in 15-minute increments is insane. As soon as one task or one meeting goes over, your entire day is shot. Where do you make that time up?
That’s why batching tasks into one-hour increments (or more) makes more sense. Devote an hour in the afternoon for emails, for example. If your morning meeting runs too long, you don’t have to worry about that ruining your whole day.
You know what else we did in the 80s and 90s, though less of it as we got closer to the millennium? Go to lunch.
Some of the lunches were liquid, which I don't advocate bringing back. But colleagues would sometimes go out together, or the boss would bring everyone for a team lunch. And not just ordering pizza, though there was some of that. People would actually physically leave the office to do other things.
When I lived and worked in NYC in the late 90s/early 00s, I sometimes would go to the gym for boxing or kickboxing class at lunch. Or I’d hit up the Barnes & Noble (I still have one of the original Reader’s Advantage cards) and then go grab lunch nearby somewhere. Every month my boss would take us to a steakhouse for a team lunch together, on the company of course.
Not particularly efficient. But (unless there was too much liquid at lunch, which did happen sometimes), that brain break made us more productive.
The human brain is not a computer. Anyone who tells you that it is either knows nothing about computers and/or brains. In some ways the brain is far more powerful than a computer: it can figure out your position in the social hierarchy at the same time it’s regulating your breathing and heartbeat and guiding you down the sidewalk.
All a computer can do is obey computer code.
At any rate, we can’t crunch numbers as fast as a computer can (but we can sure as hell recognize when a supposed picture of a person has six fingers on each hand and an extra leg.)
The concept of time = money fails when it comes to productivity
Going back to the efficiency thing: if your discrete tasks take a certain amount of time, you can easily compute an hourly rate. If you earn $500 a day and work eight hours in widget production, then your hourly rate is $500/8 or $62.50 an hour. You’ll also know how many widgets you make per hour, so if you do ten widgets an hour then you earn $6.25 per widget. Simple, right?
But when it comes to knowledge work, because there aren’t many tasks that take a discrete amount of time, calculating the time value of money is a lot harder to do.
For example, what’s the rate on financial plans, if some financial plans take half an hour, some take an hour, and others take multiples of hours?
What’s the rate on tax returns when you have to spend hours just getting the data from some of the clients, and some companies have ten subsidiaries and others have one or two?
There are so many toxic productivity so-called gurus who advise thinking about everything in terms of money earned per hour when you’re trying to prioritize. Well, how much money do you earn while sleeping, eating, and moving your body? Does that make them unnecessary?
Are all the things that the human brain needs to flourish – which includes socializing (introverts too), eating, sleeping, resting, daydreaming, doing whatever activity counts as fun for you – somehow less important because you can’t assign a monetary value to them?
What’s the rate of return on sleep? Only a very small percentage of the population can get away with less than seven or eight hours a night. Regularly getting less means you run the risk of neurodegenerative diseases later in life, not to mention your performance will be bad and so will some of your decisions. How do you factor in those externalities?
What’s your ROI on eating? You can’t do focused work while you’re eating, though maybe you can scroll through your emails or whatever. But you do have to eat, especially since your brain requires nutrition to function.
But it takes about 20 minutes for your stomach to get the message. If you’re cramming lunch in 5 minutes, you could end up with indigestion from eating so fast. Plus you might eat more than you planned because you think you’re still hungry.
Computers don’t need to eat and sleep, but people do.
How much are your friendships worth? What’s the ROI of your family?
Time on this planet is scarce, but money is abundant.
These “nonproductive” activities are absolutely necessary for humans to function. Ignore them at your peril.
There are two movies that I always think of when it comes to spending all your time working and no time playing.
The Shining taught us that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy (and a homicidal maniac to boot.)
And as far as overworked and underpaid Claire Wellington in The Stepford Wives? “... late one night, I came home to find [husband] Mike with… Patricia. My brilliant, blonde, 21-year-old research assistant. It was all so… ugly. Then the next morning, as I gazed across the breakfast table at their lifeless bodies, I thought, What have I done?”
You already know you’re feeling overworked and struggling with productivity. The answer is not to do more and be “busier”, as if that would actually be possible for you!
The answer is true productivity that allows you to have a profitable business and still thrive as a person.
Recap (tl;dr)
True productivity is not toxic. It allows you to accomplish the necessary things while still having a life outside your business. Not all time is money.
I work with business owners to help them achieve true productivity: reclaiming their time away from work while running profitable and growing businesses. Schedule your free consult here to see if we’re a good fit to work together.