The ultimate productivity hack

It has less to do with the state of your inbox than your state of mind

Sunderji’s Law

Any child of immigrant entrepreneurs knows the true meaning of hard work. My parents worked around the clock, six days a week, running a chain of hearing clinics in Canada—until they sold the business and retired in 2008. These days their lives are tranquil and calm—full of oil painting, bird watching, and meditation.

Just kidding. Here is the opening of pretty much every call home:

Aziz: “Hi Dad how are you?”
Dad: “We are just…so busy. So many things to do!”
Aziz: “Well, hopefully when you retire you’ll be able to relax a bit”
Dad: “Yes, very funny!”

Only a couple of years ago—when I left the corporate world to figure out my career 2.0—did I come to understand what my dad is going through. I went from working 11 hours a day, five days a week, for fourteen years—to having no boss, no deliverables and, at a stretch, doing something resembling “work” for a mere 11 hours a month. Yet, I felt as busy as ever.

Just as my dad replaced the time he used to spend negotiating leases with going to the gym—and felt equally busy, since one “to-do” seamlessly replaced another—I substituted reading and playing tennis for the long hours I used to spend working on spreadsheets. These new activities, if more enjoyable, still felt as urgent.

It seems to me that Parkinson’s Law (“work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”) has a corollary (Sunderji’s Law?), which might go something like, “available time finds work to fill it”.

Implications for productivity—and for happiness

Sunderji’s Law (come on readers, let’s make this happen) suggests we will never be able to slake our productivity-thirst: if our to-do list is like a bottomless cup of coffee at a diner, then we’ll never get to the end of it—and to try is futile.

But Sunderji’s Law (please?) has even more important implications for our happiness: if tasks are infinite and time is finite, we will always feel rushed to get to the next item on our list—and as today’s chart (above) shows, academic research suggests that people who report often feeling rushed tend to be much less happy than those who almost never feel rushed.

The solution, though, doesn’t seem to be gutting our ambitions entirely, throwing away our to-do list, and loafing around. In the research, those who report often having “excess time” (defined as “having time on one’s hand and not knowing what to do with it”) are also less happy.

It turns out that there is a time sweet-spot: the happiest people—accounting for roughly one out of ten respondents—are those who feel neither rushed nor bored.

Productivity is a state of mind, man

I’ve come to suspect that escaping the tyranny of productivity and finding happiness both have less to do with mastering our email inboxes than changing how we think about time.

Now, I’m not against changes to the way we work to make us more efficient. One of the best things I’ve done for my productivity recently is switching from Apple Mail to AirMail. It’s allowed me to tame my overflowing inbox, mainly by being able to quickly put things in a “to-do” folder and to “snooze” items that require more urgent action.

But email tricks and other productivity hacks merely allow you to get through more to-dos, they do nothing to assuage the anxiety that our to-do list completion percentage tends towards 0%. They do nothing to alleviate our feeling of being rushed from one task to another.

I’ve come across one strategy, however, that might help. It’s called the Pomodoro Technique.

The Pomodoro Technique

It’s a strategy that its creator Francesco Cirillo describes as a way to turn time from a "predator" into an "ally".

There are variations of the technique, but they all essentially call for the same thing: divide your day into 25-minute chunks (called “Pomodoros”, maybe because this is the amount of time you are supposed to simmer a tomato sauce?). Assign a task to each chunk of time. After each Pomodoro, take a five-minute break. Do four Pomodoros then take a longer break. If you finish the task assigned to a Pomodoro early, don’t move onto the next one—therein lies the temptation of the productivity treadmill. Instead, review your work, or contemplate your newly relaxed state of mind.

On the surface, the Pomodoro Technique seems like yet another lame productivity hack. But it’s more profound: we are not just talking about how you schedule your days, we are talking about reckoning with the finite nature of time and the infinite number of tasks that lie ahead. By assigning tasks to time, we bridge the gap between the two: tasks also become finite. We feel less rushed.

We might even feel a bit happier.

Further reading:
Oliver Burkeman’s posts and book on productivity and philosophy
JP Robinson’s seminal paper on time perception and happiness