Busy does not equal productive

I like staying busy. I have a low boredom threshold, so even on vacation, I’m not much for just sitting around, and like to keep my day full. Admittedly, this is a bit frustrating to my wife, who would prefer fewer activities in a day and a good bit of relaxed hanging out. As I write this, we’re in Hawaii for a month, and a great day for me would include some Happiful work, a long walk at dawn, a strength workout, a run or hike, some tennis, and some bodysurfing or snorkeling. 

Packing a vacation day with activities is harmless. But doing the same with your work is probably causing you to make much slower progress than you could.

Here’s what’s actually happening: When in work mode, if I complete a lot of tasks, it feels good to me because my brain rewards me with a hit of the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine every time I cross something off my to-do list or respond to an email. More things done and more emails means more dopamine shots. Plus, all this activity and busyness makes me feel productive.

When running a business, I’ve gone years at a time working non-stop all day, getting done as much as possible. I can clearly remember the feeling of day after day, knocking off 10 or 15 to-do’s in a day (and usually working well into the evening), working as hard as I could in between scheduled meetings and unplanned phone calls, only to find that by the end of the day  I’d added 20 more things to the ever-growing to-do list. I mean this literally: no matter how much I got done in a day, my to-do list was longer at the end of the day than when I started. Every day, there was always so much to do and more coming in all the time, that it felt like swimming upstream against a raging current. But to be honest, it also felt good and productive.

Eventually, I learned that “busy does not equal productive”. And that if I wanted to achieve my goals, I needed to take the time to think deeply on what really impacted those goals, and then spend each day focusing on doing fewer but far more important things (even if that meant fewer dopamine hits). 

It’s likely that you’re better at relaxing and enjoying downtime than I am, since I think I’m fairly far on the left end of the Bell Curve in that area.

But it’s also probable that you like crossing things off your to-do list because of the dopamine hits you get.

Dopamine is the brain’s mechanism to reinforce behavior. This “dopamine reward system” makes you want to repeat behaviors (whether good for you or bad for you) so you can get another shot of dopamine. In some cases, the dopamine reward system can pull us away from what we really want. In fact, the dopamine reward system is exactly what the big tech companies use to keep people addicted to their devices and social media. 

Once I learned about dopamine, it helped me understand why getting a lot done felt good but wasn’t letting me move fast enough. The problem wasn’t actually that I had too much to do or too little time. And it wasn’t that I was inefficient at getting the work done. The real problem was that I didn’t have systems to ensure that I did what mattered most. To stop chasing dopamine all day long at the expense of real progress, I needed a system to decide what I would work on, and a way to stick to that decision once the day started.

Over time, it became clear to me that I needed 3 things to get me focused on doing the most important things each day, instead of frantically trying to get everything done. No matter who you are or what you do, these same 3 things will also help you to make faster progress. 

1. Prioritize

You need a way to first capture, and then to prioritize, all of the ideas, projects, and tasks that you might do, so you can clearly identify the ones you should do. The big distinction you need to make is between what’s important (because it makes a big impact on your life) and what’s not important. Then within “the important”, you also need a way to judge the impact of each action so you know what order to do things (start with the most impactful ones!). I suggest you write your own definition of what’s important in your work and life that you can then use to objectively categorize and rank order your actions.

2. Plan

You need a weekly plan, prepared over the weekend, that identifies just a handful of the most important things you will do the next week. (My rule is to limit it to no more than 5.)

And you need a daily plan, prepared the day before, that once again identifies just a handful of the most important things you will do the next day. (My rule is no more than 7. If you go beyond that, it’s probable you’ve extended into trivial tasks that don’t really move the needle.)

3. Protect 

A lot of the busyness people feel today is because they simply have too many inputs. They read emails, newsletters, blogs and articles. They watch videos and TikToks. They listen to podcasts. They read online news. All of those inputs are stealing your time and attention. They make you feel good because of the dopamine hits, but they are not helping you to achieve your goals. When you eliminate the inputs, you not only gain back all the lost time, you also get perspective and clarity. You can connect the dots, and realize what really matters. I get more insights and ideas in my input-free dawn walk each day than I get the entire rest of the day combined. 

There’s a lot more to productivity, which we cover in detail in our course, The Productivity Playbook, but start with these 3: Prioritize, Plan, and Protect.

In the end, you can be busy, or you can be productive. If you have any goals in your life, if you have a business, or if you have a job, I guarantee that learning how to be productive instead of busy will make a big difference in your results. 

By the way, what are your biggest issues with productivity right now? We want to make sure we’re covering them in our course. Send me an email at paul@behappiful.com. I read them all.