Productivity is a Game

and you make the rules

Productivity is a game.

The best part? You make the rules.

Most people don’t do that, and instead, they let other people make the rules.

Big mistake.

Chris Bailey defines productivity as “Accomplishing what you intend to do.”

I love that definition because it starts and ends with you. It’s also clear when you win and how. Also, it highlights an important fact about productivity: It’s no longer about how efficiently you work. It’s about how much you accomplish.

Intentionality is what allows you to accomplish the right things.

After reading his books, I started building my own rulebook for productivity. I added what for me is an important phrase to Chris Bailey’s definition of productivity. More on that in a bit.

Productivity is like jazz

Here’s why this is so important. If you don’t improvise, add, and adjust productivity to fit your life, you’ll be locking yourself in, and productivity no longer works for you. You’ll start working for productivity by how other people define it. Or worse yet, with no rulebook whatsoever.

We do that to an extent, for example, your boss might give you deadlines and projects to tackle, and therefore, they are giving you boundaries for being productive.

But within that, there are always ways you can take control of the process and make it yours. This is one of the key ways to make work more enjoyable and allow you to get more done.

All I know about jazz is a quote I heard once,

“You can’t improvise on nothin’, man.”

I think productivity is similar. We can use other people’s strategies, but we work best if we take them and improvise to make them our own.

Chris Bailey’s strategy is to set 3 intentions to focus on each day. He measures his productivity by asking himself at the end of the day, “Did I get done what I intended to do?” As you can see, he has set the rules for his productivity, and this is how he measures it.

I prefer to measure my productivity hourly instead of daily because of the productivity system I made and use. Here’s how I improvised on this.

My system, my rules

First, I define productivity very similarly, but I add a little phrase.

Productivity- Accomplishing what you intend to do, when you intend to do it.

While Chris Bailey gives himself deadlines and timelines for his work, I tend to take it a little further by using timed focus sessions to measure my deep work. Which means that when I determine what I intend to do, I also determine how long it should take me, and when I should accomplish it. This is how I make productivity into more of a game.

If I think writing this newsletter will take me 2.5 hours, I usually break it into focus sessions that are slightly shorter. In this case, 2 focus sessions, each for 1 hour. This increases the challenge slightly, but not too much, and gives my competitive nature something to focus on. If I finish it in 2 hours, I was highly productive. If I finish in 2.5 hours, I was averagely productive, and if I way overshoot, either I was very unproductive, or more likely, I need to calculate the “when” a little more accurately.

I have a planner that helps me track all of this, but even without it, as you can see, I get immediate feedback on my productivity. I can see if I’m being productive in real time. Not only that, if it’s something I do repeatedly, I can get a sense of my energy and focus levels based on how fast I did it last time.

Contrast that with how I used to do it. A task list of 17 things that HAVE TO BE DONE TODAY, when in reality I needed about a week or two to do all of them. Which usually left me feeling frantic and like I wasn’t a fast enough worker.

Time, Energy, and Attention

We covered a piece of the productivity equation, but according to Chris Bailey, to win at the game of productivity, we need to learn how to manage our time, energy, and attention. He has a whole book about his productivity journey called The Productivity Project, and a whole book dedicated to mastering focus. Both books cover his strategies, but I personally got a lot more out of his second book, Hyperfocus.

If you feel a bit lost and don’t know how to create your own set of rules for productivity, these books are a great place to start. They will save you hundreds of hours and help you accomplish far more than before.

If you don’t want to read these, I did a mini breakdown of how to manage your energy and attention in this post. It’s a 13-minute read.