“Productivity” culture is broken

Time management can be one of the biggest challenges of shifting away from full-time work because there’s no one to hold you accountable every day and deadlines often come every few weeks, if that. How, then, do you shape your day in a way that serves you? Where’s the middle ground between over-busy and burned-out, and active procrastination?

Let’s start with story time: Leila showed up for coaching last year with a fixation on productivity. She worried that she was unproductive, and she told me right away that she needed to figure out a way to maximize her productivity so she could make more money in her content marketing business. She’d been trying all sorts of hacks but they weren’t working for her.

My first question was: What do you mean by “productivity?”

If we head over to the dictionary, we’ll find that productivity is defined as “a measurement of output per unit of input.” The input is typically your time, energy and effort. The output can be labor, capital (money) or any other resource. Usually, productivity is expressed as a ratio that reveals a device or person’s efficiency. It basically assumes you’re a robot.

Productivity is impacted by many different factors, including how much expertise and education you have in the area of work, what your support system looks like, how you’ve set up your…