Productivity Rain Dances

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A reader recently sent me a clip from Chris Williamson’s podcast. In the segment, Williamson discusses his evolving relationship with productivity:

“Look, I come from a productivity background. When I first started this show, I was chatting shit about Pomodoro timers, and Notion external brains, and Ebbinhaus forgetting curves, and all of that. Right? I’ve been through the ringer, so I’m allowed to say, and, um, you realize after a while that it ends up being this weird superstitious rain dance you’re doing, this sort of odd sort of productivity rain dance, in the desperate hope that later that day you’re going to get something done.”

I was intrigued by this term “productivity rain dance.” Some additional research revealed that Williamson had discussed the concept before. In a post from last summer, he listed the following additional examples of rain dance activities:

• “Sitting at my desk when I’m not working”
• “Being on calls with no actual objective”
• “Keeping Slack notifications at zero, sitting on email trying to get the Unread number down”
• “Saying yes to a random dinner when someone is coming through town”

What do these varied examples, from obsessing over Ebbinhaus forgetting curves to waging war against your email inbox, have in common? They’re focused on activity in the moment instead of results over time. “The problem is that no one’s productivity goal is to maximize inputs,” Williamson explains. “It’s to maximize outputs.”

When you look around the modern office environment, and see everyone frantically answering emails as they jump on and off Zoom meetings, or watch to solo-entrepreneur lose a morning to optimizing their ChatGPT-powered personalized assistant, you’re observing rain dances. Everyone’s busy, but is no one is asking if all these gyrations are actually opening the clouds.

The solution to the rain dance phenomenon is not to abandon organizational systems or routines altogether, nor is to crudely commit to working less. It’s instead, as Williamson suggests, to turn your attention from inputs to outputs. Identify the most valuable thing you do in your job, and then figure out what actually helps you do it better. This is what you should focus on.

The answers to these questions aren’t necessarily easy. As I talk about in Slow Productivity, making more time for key efforts often requires that you first tame the less important activities that are getting in the way. You probably need a more formal workload management philosophy to avoid overload, such as using quotas or separating “active” tasks from “waiting” tasks. You’ll also need better collaboration processes that avoid the distraction of constant messaging, such as using regular office hours for complicated discussions, and some notion of time management, such as time blocking, to maintain control of your schedule.

What separates these grounded productivity efforts from productivity rain dances is that they’re not symbolic, nor are they exercises in busyness for the sake of busyness. (What I call “pseudo-productivity” in my book.) Their success is instead measured by the concrete results they produce. As a result, they’re not flashy, or high-tech, or even all that exciting to deploy. But they work.

Rain dances can be satisfying. They feel important and active in the moment, and give you all sorts of little details to tweak and adjust. But ultimately, if your goal is to reap a rich harvest, there’s no avoiding the necessity to get down among your crops, sweat on your brow, and actually work the land.

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In other news…

–> For an extended discussion of productivity rain dances, check out Episode #340 of my podcast.

–> If you want to see me discussing productivity with Williamson, check out my appearance on his show from last spring.

–> Over at Growth Equation, Brad Stulberg recently wrote an essay I really enjoyed: “The Case for Mastery and Mattering in a Chaotic World” [ read | subscribe ]

–> Amazon has my latest book, Slow Productivity, discounted all the way to $18.00. If you were on the fence about checking it out, this would be a good time!

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