Hyperbole Are We?

Today, I’m not going to show you how to 10x your productivity or 5x your reading speed while increasing your retention 14.7-fold. I’m not going to show you how to get 3x more done before most people make it to the bathroom in the morning or why getting up at o-dark 30 is the best way to succeed.

Truth is. I don’t have it figured out. Not even close. I got distracted by email 3 times while writing this little article.

Personal belief here: I also don’t believe most people who write about productivity have it figured out. There’s an old tongue-in-cheek saying (that I’m reticent to share because my father and father-in-law are both retired educators):

Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.

In most contexts, I don’t believe that at all. My dad, for example, is an excellent doer and teacher. He devoted more than 30 years of his life to teaching kids with special needs. It’s one of the things I admire most about him: his absolute selfless devotion to all those kids he helped.

However, in the case of all the ludicrous productivity hacks out there, I’m a believer that many (not all) write about it because so many of us (myself included) are willing to drink the daily Kool-Aid. Period.

Even the idea of 1% improvement is impractical and unsustainable. First off, it’s essentially impossible to isolate a single area and focus on just that in a way that you can measure a 1% improvement day after day. Here’s a thought exercise to support my point.

Let’s suppose I can do 20 push-ups. If I improve just 1% each day, by day 5 I’m doing 21 push-ups, by day 20 it has grown to just 24 push-ups. Seems pretty reasonable until you extend that out to 100 days. At 100 days, it’s now 54. Still not completely unreasonable. At 365 days, however, it’s 748 push-ups. At 2 years, an astonishing 28,269 push-ups.

You see my point. Even in the 1% improvement category, for most people there will be a practical limit where you don’t have the desire, the time, or the physical capacity to progress any further. There is some physiological limit where synapses can’t fire any faster and muscles can’t move any quicker. I won’t pretend to know what that limit is. Once upon a time, people believed it was impossible for a person to run a mile in under 4 minutes.¹

I am an advocate for making goals (though I am actually pretty terrible at it myself). I’m also an advocate for being productive (see the previous comment about email distraction).

There are, however, some areas in our lives that are not meant to be measured.

“But, if I don’t measure it, how will I know I’m improving?”

In a lot of instances, that’s a relevant question. For other things, you just know.

For example, when was the last time you went out of your way to do something kind for someone else?

Some years ago, I started devoting a portion of many Sunday afternoons baking bread with my youngest daughter. Over time, we’ve pretty well perfected a recipe of our own creation — a kind of cinnamon swirl bread with no processed sugar and a healthy smattering of things like almond and coconut flower and monk fruit extract. When we bake the bread, we generally deliver it to a neighbor or friend.

I do keep a list of the people I’ve taken bread to, but I never measure the time I spend chatting with those people when I deliver a loaf to them — hot out of the oven, I might add.

Last week, for example, I delivered a loaf to some friends I haven’t seen in more than 20 years. They invited me in and I spent an hour getting reacquainted with them.

If I were measuring for improvement in delivery speed, that particular visit would have destroyed my average.

But it was a beautiful moment of reconnection; time so well spent. I have to believe we’re all better because of the experience — though the incremental improvement is impossible to quantify.

Here’s the point: maybe we’ve become a little too obsessed with productivity. Maybe it’s time for us all to take a beat, breathe deeply 3 or 4 times, and just do something good for someone else.

Thanks for reading!

¹Hicham El Guerrouj of Morocco currently holds the record at 3:43.13. What will it take for someone to do it in under 3:30?

²Merriam-Webster has a rather fascinating read on the origins of that phrase. You can find it here. (Not an affiliate link.)