Productivity in the Knowledge Economy
Did you know that before the industrial revolution, watches, or timepieces as they were called, were unobtainable by anyone other than the super rich. This is because most people had no reason to measure time accurately. Most of us were working on farms and had way fewer deadlines, meetings and events to string together. It was only after the industrial revolution that people began to trade their time for money by working in factories, due to which measuring time to the minute became important. It made sense to have a nine-to-five workday because running machines required the coordination between multiple people being present in one place. The time economy was born.
Today, we’ve made a major shift from working in factories to working in offices. The Professional and Business Sector has tripled over the last six decades in the US alone, and is only getting bigger. However, office jobs demand more than just your time. They also demand attention, energy, skills, knowledge, social intelligence and network; they demand productivity. You see, in today’s knowledge economy, time in no longer money, productivity is money. Time is only a piece in the productivity equation, and contrary to popular belief, it’s the least significant one.
In this article, I elaborate on ideas taken from The Productivity Project by Chris Bailey where he goes into detail about how time management shouldn’t be your primary concern, but managing your energy and attention should be in order to become more productive. As he says, “If you want to become more productive, managing your time should take a backseat to how you manage your energy and attention”. Time should be the backdrop against which you work in the knowledge economy.
Work Less, Do More
It’s not odd that we try to cram as much work as we can into a week because we confuse busyness with productivity. The act of “doing” makes us feel like we’re making meaningful progress in our work. We’ve all been in a place where we’re constantly working long hours, and it feels like we have no time to ourselves by the end of the day. Working longer hours means having less time to recharge, leading to more stress and less energy. It’s a vicious cycle that seems to have no end.
The way to fix this goes against what you might be thinking: by giving yourself less time to work on a task. This is because of something called Parkinson’s Law, which states that work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion. If you give yourself a month to finish a task, you’ll procrastinate because you know you have more than enough time to complete it. More importantly, you will expend less energy and attention on it because you know you can get back to it later. Giving yourself less time to work on an important task forces you to use significantly more energy and attention on it, hence allowing you to finish it quickly. Don’t believe me? Try setting a timer for your homework assignments and see how much you can do before the timer runs out. You may be surprised by the results. This is also a great way to warm-up to difficult tasks. Tell yourself to work on something for 20 minutes instead of an hour and you’ll usually overshoot your smaller target, but finish the task within the hour you initially allotted. Another very important benefit besides just finishing the task is you get more time to relax and recharge. Working too long has diminishing returns, and in the knowledge economy, is less productive as you compromise on your energy and focus.
Working for an hour a week isn’t enough to get anything done, but working for significantly long hours has little to no benefit. We tend to care much more about spending more time on a task, not realizing that this is vastly inefficient because our energy and attention is greatly reduced. By forcing yourself to spend less time on a task, you force yourself to spend more energy and attention on it, allowing you to be more productive because you accomplish more in less time.
Harness Your Energy
Have you noticed there are certain times of the day when you have a lot more energy than others? For me, this is usually between 2-5pm. Before and after these times, my brain doesn’t function at its best. This is what Chris Bailey calls your “Biological Prime Time”. During this time, the amount of energy and attention you bring to your work doubles. Taking note of when this happens for you during the day will allow you to schedule your highest impact tasks during that time, so you bring the most energy and attention to them. The more of your important tasks you schedule during your BPT, the more impact it will have on your life.
It is also important to understand that your energy levels will fluctuate for various reasons over the day - and the week. Some days you’ll get a lot done, while on others you won’t. This is why on days when you have less energy it’s important to schedule tasks that will not take up as much energy to work on. Now I understand this may not always be that easy. Some people have more control over their schedule than others, so figuring out your flexibility will allow you to identify how essential time management is to you and how much structure you should expect in your day. As a college student with 4 or 5 classes on some days, it is hard to block off my BPT for my highest-impact tasks, but I try my best nonetheless because something is still better than nothing. So, don’t write this fact off like I did because you feel you’re tied to a specific class or work schedule. Use it to your advantage wherever you can.
Lastly, something many people don’t realize is how important it is to structure your free time as well. This goes against your intuition, I mean, shouldn’t free time be open blocks of time where you can do anything? Generally yes, but how many times have you been given a free couple hours and spent it in bed scrolling social media? We are inclined to do the things that are easiest, and not necessarily the ones that bring us the most satisfaction. So, even when you want to spend time playing video games, writing, or talking to a friend, you end up wasting it all doing nothing important because the lower-impact tasks like scrolling social media or taking a nap are much easier. Also, research shows that structuring your free-time allows you to be more focused, creative, involved, active, happy and motivated in what you do. Be warned, too much structure can make your life feel rigid and out of control, but a little bit allows you to nurture your attention and energy and guides you to work on your goals.
Maintenance
If you have a somewhat functioning life, you no doubt have a bunch of things you need to do that support your most important tasks. Things like cleaning, cooking, and shopping are some important ones. These “maintenance tasks” are important to live a happy, healthy and productive life, but use up at what little time you have to work on the tasks most meaningful to you. One way to deal with these is to have a maintenance day where you complete all your maintenance tasks you’ve written down throughout the week in one big chunk. As these tasks are very basic and use little to no energy or attention, you can do them alongside other relatively low-intensity tasks such as listening to an audiobook, calling a friend, or listening to music. These make the tasks more enjoyable. Lastly, chunking your maintenance tasks allows you to stop being a perfectionist by forcing you to spend less time on menial tasks that offer minimal return if done perfectly. Things like cleaning your desk or organizing your files have diminishing returns if you spend excessive amounts of time on them.
Conclusion
In the knowledge economy, the most productive people today are those who know how let time management take a backseat to how they manage their attention and energy. Some time management is essential for working around other people’s schedules and demands of you, but if you want to take your productivity to the next level, learn how to manage your energy and attention. Time is impossible to manage - it’s been ticking for billions of years, and it isn’t going to stop anytime soon.