You’ll Never 10x Your Output

We live in a weird time. On one hand, the wellness folks are all telling us to take a beat and slow down. A lot. Articles with titles like these dot the internet landscape:

• “Why You Need to Slow Down”

• “Slow Down: You’re Not Falling Behind”

• “We Need to Slow Down”

On the other, productivity “gurus” are baiting us with titles like:

• “How to Structure Your Day to 10x Productivity”

• “10x Productivity — Eight Hacks”

• “How to Boost 10X Productivity”

• The 4.30am Club for 10X Productivity” [sic]

It’s hyper-wellbeing versus hyper-productivity. The internet world doesn’t seem to believe there is a happy medium.

Why don’t you grab a coffee, a Dr. Pepper, or that cucumber water that’s all the rage right now, and let’s be candid with each other for just a minute. Is that okay?

Most of us don’t live in the world of the wellness folks where the kind of “spend your life in meditation” they preach is even possible. I am 100% in favor of taking some time to embrace life a little bit more, but until there are some massive societal shifts, I’ve still got bills to pay, food to buy at ever-increasing prices, and I have to figure out how to help my five children (yes, I said five) survive in a world that, according to the news media, is determined to chew them up and spit them out as mindless zombies who follow the loudest voice of the day.

On the opposite end of this hyper-spectrum, unless you currently spend 90% of your waking hours watching Netflix (and aren’t getting paid for it) or you monotask all day long at a sloth-like pace, 10xing productivity is statistically impossible.

Think about it. Let’s say you go to a job for 8 hours a day. Let’s say that you’re only productive for 1 hour. To 10x your productivity, you have to figure out how to do 10 hours of work in 8 hours. If you’re productive for around 5 hours per day, now you have to figure out how to do 50 hours’ worth of work in just 8 hours to 10x your output.

Do you see how wrong-headed that thinking is?

For my part, I refuse to read articles that promise me x times anything in any endeavor.

Todd Stocker, author of Becoming The Fulfilled Leader, writes, “Your morning routine generates a 10x return for good or for bad. Make it good.”

To borrow a term from our friends across The Pond: that’s poppycock.

Can you imagine a morning routine so effective, so impactful, that it allows you to accomplish 150 hours’ worth of whatever in the 15 or so remaining hours you have after your morning routine?

Impossible.

If you buy into the 10x philosophy, please do yourself a favor and stop drinking the Kool-Aid.

It’s apparent that the issue is really with the foolish and potentially harmful message of the hyper-productivity end of the spectrum. Embracing the hyper-productivity philosophy at a minimum leaves you feeling burned out. At its worst, that kind of focus on productivity is damaging to relationships and your health.

Jess Corbing, contributor to Forbes, wrote a very recent article titled, How Toxic Productivity Is Harming Your Health And How To Find Balance. In the opening statements, she writes:

Toxic productivity can be described as the uncontrollable need to feel productive at all times, at all costs, and it can become harmful to your mental and physical health.

Corbing quotes Dr. Will Cole, author of Gut Feelings who points out that toxic productivity is often confused with success.

It’s an accepted form of stress and an example of unhealthy boundaries in our culture. It’s seen as a badge of honor and is glamorized in many ways. There’s nothing wrong with being successful, productive and proficient, but when it comes at the expense of your health, it becomes a problem.

In 2011, Gallup** conducted a survey in 146 countries where they surveyed around 1,000 people per country. (For perspective, that was about 1 in 48,000 people worldwide.) The intent of the survey: figure out what percentage of the population was thriving or merely surviving.

For more reasons than can’t be enumerated here, only around 24% of the adults surveyed responded that they were thriving. In developed countries, the number was more than double the world average. The United States reported around 58%.

But all of that was before COVID, before massive price increases on everything, and fearmongering that have led to levels of anxiety and depression unheard of in the last 50 years.

How’s that for sobering?

If you’ve felt your anxiety level increase, let’s pause and take a breather. It was intentional.

This is where the need for the wellness folks comes into play. To a degree, we need to pay attention to their message. We also need to pay a little bit of attention to the productivity folks.

A basic human right is the right to thrive. Thriving shows up in a lot of different ways; probably as many ways as suffering. If you’re privileged enough to have discretionary time, consider using it not to numb your mind with social media and streaming services. Use it to figure out what a thriving life looks like for you, but don’t be overly preoccupied with how productive you have to be to be successful.

Thomas Oppong recently wrote, “Ultimately, the key to creating a better version of oneself is to identify and prioritise [sic] your intellectual growth goals and to take intentional steps towards achieving them.”

The principle is sound, but only pursuing intellectual growth is also a lop-sided approach. A well-rounded life is “taking intentional steps” in the following areas which recognizing one’s own innate limitations.

• Intellectual — continuously learning

• Emotional — learning to feel the feels and deal with them appropriately

• Spiritual — organized religion or not

• Physical — daily activity which also includes adequate rest

• Social — spending sufficient time connecting in meaningful ways with others, including service

Thriving in any / all of those areas doesn’t generally require grand gestures. Tiny, incremental steps are enough.

No 10xing required.

Thanks for reading!

• * If you’re interested in reading the report as well as how Gallup determined what to consider thriving, surviving, and suffering, visit: https://news.gallup.com/poll/153818/nearly-one-four-worldwide-thriving.aspx and https://news.gallup.com/poll/122453/Understanding-Gallup-Uses-Cantril-Scale.aspx