Is Your Productivity System Is Lying to You

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🎙️ Your Productivity System Is Lying to You

Podcast Episode · Process Debt · 06/06/2025 · 17m

If you’re like me, your day starts with a slap in the face from your task list. Then Slack chirps. Email pings. Calendar tiles multiply like rabbits. It feels like momentum. It isn’t. It’s noise dressed up as progress.

Here’s the problem: most of us are trying to measure a whole life of work inside half a dozen tools that don’t talk to each other and don’t care about our sanity. JIRA thinks velocity is truth. Email thinks “unread = failure.” Your calendar thinks every 30-minute block is equal. None of them knows what a good day looks like for you.

A hundred years ago, your cobbler neighbor didn’t wake up and check his inbox. He woke up and finished the shoes for the paying customer who was actually coming by. That wasn’t “hustle culture.” It was an honest prioritization model: do the most valuable next thing at a human pace. We’ve replaced that with the “exhaustion Olympics,” where we compare who suffered more in meetings and who slept less under the glow of Outlook.

The turn: the scoreboard lives in the wrong place. When the score is inside your tools, your tools optimize your behavior. When the score is inside your work, your work shapes the tools you use.

I’ve been experimenting with what Cal Newport calls “slow productivity”: do fewer things, work at a natural pace, obsess over quality. Simple to say, hard to do—especially when your world is scattered across Aha!, JIRA, Obsidian, email, Slack, Teams, and three stray sticky notes on your monitor. Here’s what it looks like in practice:

1. One project per day. Not one task—one project family. If today is “proposal build,” I give myself permission to live inside that world. I’ll write the outline, grab prior examples, clean up the pricing template, and draft the client email. That’s four tasks, but one mental model. Context switches are the tax; this shrinks the bill.

2. Boundary as service. Clarity is kindness. I tell people, “Happy to take this on. It becomes Day X once I have A, B, and C. Right now I’m booked on Y and Z, so it’ll start the week of [date]. If that changes, I’ll update you.” That shifts me from “always-on request sink” to “reliable system with known inputs.” It also exposes push vs pull: if you push work to me, you accept that something else gets pulled out.

3. Natural pace, on purpose. We are famously bad at time estimates. So I double them. I block “20 minutes” as an hour. And I turn the dopamine machines off—Slack, Teams, email—during that block. When the calendar tile ends, I stop. If it’s not done, I schedule the next session. The goal isn’t to sprint forever; it’s to make steady deposits into work that matters.

4. Tasks serve projects, not the other way around. A task can be 15 seconds or 15 months. The stress feels the same because our brains don’t distinguish well. So I force every task to show its boss: “Which project are you feeding?” If it doesn’t serve a project on deck, it goes to the backlog. That small rule vaporizes a shocking amount of busywork.

5. Count outputs, not inputs. Inputs are hours, meetings, messages sent. Outputs are drafts shipped, integrations live, handoffs finished, clients unblocked. I review the day by asking, “What moved?” If the answer is a list of conversations, I didn’t work—I talked about work.

None of this is about being anti-tool. I love good tools. It’s about reclaiming the scoreboard. A calendar tile is not progress. An empty inbox is not excellence. A thread of high-five emojis is not value shipped.

Process Debt Truth: When your tools define “productive,” you optimize for activity and accumulate debt. When your outputs define “productive,” you optimize for impact and the debt starts to melt.