There is truly a bottomless pit of advice on how to do work faster, harder, and more efficiently, and all of these ideas have been comforting to me at various times in my career. Now, having made myself sick living like that, I find myself looking for new advice on how to adhere to some other approach, one that does not focus primarily on beating... See more

When your goal is to be the most efficient machine possible, your work never ends. We never reach the point of being done, no matter how many daily widgets you churn out. Productivity, without barriers, is a race to the bottom, a race where no matter how fast we go -- we never truly arrive.

Let’s say you have perfectionist tendencies—meaning that your assessment of quality may exceed others’—you’re working on a project and you’re approaching a deadline to submit a draft for feedback. The idea of submitting something below your standards feels wrong, so you grind late into the night until it feels right to share it. However, if your... See more

shift to a new paradigm

Our current definition of “productivity” is broken. It pushes us to treat busyness as a proxy for useful effort, leading to impossibly lengthy task lists and ceaseless meetings. We’re overwhelmed by all we have to do and on the edge of burnout, left to decide between giving into soul-sapping hustle culture or rejecting ambition altogether. But are... See more