Breaking Up with Productivity Advice
I am deeply envious of chefs with great knife skills.
The precision, the speed, the consistency. The twinge of fear in your fingertips as their blade glides in front of their nails. The satisfaction of a neat pile of green onions at the end of the cutting board. It’s delicious.
I asked Myles Snider if he could teach me or knew where I could learn. But I was shocked when he said “Honestly man, don’t bother.”
Don’t BOTHER? How could a chef tell me not to bother learning advanced knife skills? Surprised, and a little miffed, I asked him to explain.
“Chefs have to learn these crazy knife skills while they’re staging because they might spend hours cutting vegetables every day. You spend, what, ten to twenty minutes a week cutting things? Basic knife skills are gonna be fine for you.”
Hm, fair point. I could spend weeks practicing knife skills and it would only save me a few minutes every week. There were other benefits of course, like showing off at dinner parties, but it wouldn’t help me with what I really wanted: to get better at cooking.
Myles helped me avoid an easy error:
Putting the tool before the craft.
II
I shared a confession last week: I’ve abandoned most of the productivity techniques I blogged and talked about over the last decade.
My first blog back in 2012 was all about developing good, productive habits. On my old blog, I have a couple dozen articles on productivity. I have tried almost every tool, trick, tactic, and voodoo ritual to David Allen under the sun.
Did they work? Sure, I got really good at checking off boxes and ignoring text messages and breaking my 10 year goals down to minutely goals.
But did all that technique do anything? That I’m less sure about. It’s not like I’m launching rockets or creating new medicines or running for President. It didn’t make my writing better. Maybe I can squeeze a bit more out of my 16 waking hours a day, but that’s hardly the metric we judge our lives on. For the most part, I was using my vast expertise in productivity to… make more content about productivity.
There is, of course, a balance. If you learn nothing about working smarter you’ll waste countless hours. But our productivity methodology is just a tool. And it’s a mistake to confuse tool sharpening, or worse, tool buying, with actual work. Playing around with a new writing app feels like it’s going to be the thing you need to finally sit down and write that great novel inside you, even though 99% of all great books were written by hand or typewriter.
We can’t be too hard on ourselves for getting distracted by this confusion though. There is so much content focused on trapping the attention of everyone looking for quick fixes. All you have to do is open YouTube or TikTok and you’ll learn more about what people with yachts do for a living, the habits of highly successful people, and what some surprising new study says about focus.
But Myles's advice for knife skills applies even more to productivity. Most of us are wasting time we could be spending learning our craft by playing around with our tools and washing our pickup truck instead of hauling anything.
So how do we find the right balance? We need to find the minimum viable scaffolding to get our work started and then focus on doing the work from there, making little adjustments as we go.
To the extent you’re going back to working on your tools, it should be driven by some noticeable shortcomings in the actual work. Your knife isn’t cutting like it used to. You’re losing too much time to email. Tool work should always be a focused attempt to fix a specific problem, not passive information consumption hoping to find a quick win that will make the work easy.
If there’s no major problem, stop looking for solutions. Every minute we spend looking for The Right Tool is a minute we’re not using our perfectly good word processor to bang out the next great American novel.
Don’t put the tool before the craft.
