Rethinking productivity

2007 was my year of uber-productivity, with undue amounts of time spent thinking of how I could cram more work into each and every day. And while I made great progress in my personal and professional lives in '07, I also noticed some nasty side-effects, like having a harder time really enjoying downtime, because I was always nagged by the work I could have been doing.

So when Rob and I started our New Year planning on January 1, I added a goal of redefining productivity in the hopes of finding the balance between quantity of work and quality of life. Nevertheless, when Tuesday rolled around this week, all I wanted to do was get back in bed, maybe read a little, definitely get some more snooze time in... but having not yet achieved my redefinition goal, I instead forced myself to sit at my desk until 4:30, pecking away at work, most of which will likely end up in the sad "never to be completed" file on my C: drive. But, for the sake of consistency and discipline, it felt like the right thing to do.

Research conducted by Dr. Roy Baumeister, which I unfortunately didn't read until Wednesday, suggests otherwise. According to him, "self-control might depend on a limited resource — a resource that, like a muscle, depletes during repeated, continuous use."

Like muscles, he says, we can build out capacity for self-control through "regular exertions of self-control," such as getting up at the same time every morning or doing a given task everyday. But, just as even the American Gladiators reach fatigue eventually, self-control resources eventually wear out, requiring down-time: activities that require little focus in order to recharge the stores.

Also interesting is that Baumeister's research further suggests that neither the difficulty nor the importance of the self-control sucking task is relevant to how it depletes the stores - only that self-control is used, as evidenced by a study in which the depletion task was simply to eat only radishes from a plate that held both radishes and chocolate.

It seems that in this case, the adage holds true: slow and steady win the race. Regular exertions of self control coupled with an awareness of fatigue are our best bet for remaining as productive as possible without killing ourselves.