Fake productivity is a term I’ve coined that describes any activity that is not a 10xer on your time, yet it feels like a great use.
From my experience, I’ve noticed these activities take up the bulk of our free time and unfortunately, we are unable to discern it from an absolute waste.
Let me explain with a few examples.
Excessive planning is one of the most useless wastes of time, but we love the feeling of writing down to-do lists.
Watching a TV show that’s based on real-life vs watching a cartoon.
The first may feel more real to you and it may feel like you are getting an understanding of the concepts in the show, but you’re really just watching both for entertainment.
If you really wanted to learn the concepts in the show (Scrum in Silicon Valley), then go teach yourself the concepts directly from the true source.
Over the years, I’ve found myself to be a victim of this terrible fake productivity mindset.
From habitually and mindlessly creating to-do lists to even brainstorming how to go about learning a subject, I’ve always been stuck in the state of planning vs the state of action.
During the past few years, I’ve started to flip this around more and now start with the action as soon as possible.
It has led an insane amount of progress in nearly every facet of my life.
For instance, I no longer think about what foods I should be eating - I already know what’s healthy and what’s not.
A good heuristic I’ve come up with is that if you have to ask whether something is productive, healthy, or good for you in general, then it’s probably not.
So yeah, instead of overthinking nearly every decision, just go try stuff out and see what happens!