Productivity is just work

The other day, I wrote a post declaring that I will no longer try to increase my productivity. This doesn't mean I won't read productivity blogs, and tweak things, and manage my "system". It means I no longer think about any of that stuff as having anything to do with productivity.

Productivity is what happens when you're doing work. Enhancing your productivity is what happens when you do a lot of work, for long enough to get better at it.

Look, throw all your stuff in Dropbox, live your life out of plain text files, use gmail to communicate, turn off tasks and chat, leave things in their default settings as much as possible...but then figure out what it is that you really care about.

You can't tweak your way to productivity, and there is no system to enhance yourself to superstardom. You just have to work.

But I'm not trying to be the "just do work" guy. Go ahead, tweak all you want. Enjoy it. Enjoy moving things around and labeling them in different ways. Just don't think of it as productivity, because it's not. And the pursuit of productivity is a distraction.

Don't be productive. Don't work on productivity. Just find something you enjoy, and do that. And if you tweak, enjoy tweaking.