Executive Coach, CEO of Something Major, and author of the forthcoming book "Something Major: The New Playbook for Women at Work" (2023).
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“The truth is I girl-bossed too close to the sun, and I got burnt,” Liz explained.
By 35, she had “worked her ass off,” notching more career accomplishments than most people do in a lifetime. She'd gotten her dream job during the hand-over-fist-growth years for one of the world’s major ride-hailing apps and, 15 years into her career, this was the only way Liz knew how to work.
Liz was trapped inside the myth that if we can do it all, we’ll achieve our dreams. If we’re not careful, however, we end up living inside a nightmare—like Liz did, when she woke up one day and realized she was completely burned out.
The belief that productivity equals success is a dangerous myth that is damaging too many careers by threatening our longevity and fulfillment at work. That’s why every high-performing woman has to ask herself these four questions when it comes to her relationship with "productivity" at work:
1. Are you procrastinating inside your productivity?
It sounds crazy that we would make ourselves more overwhelmed when we’re feeling overwhelmed in the first place, right? But according to Dr. Ashley Whillans, an author and a professor at Harvard Business School who studies the relationship between happiness and how we use our time, it’s incredibly common. As she writes in her book Time Smart:
"When we feel time-poor, we take on small, easy-to-complete tasks because they help us feel more control over our time. We think, There! I made a protein shake and finished that errand. I’m getting stuff done! In this case, it’s a false sense of control that doesn’t alleviate the root cause of our busyness."
Instead of finding ways to pare down our calendars, commitments and to-do lists, we hide out from the hard work of making the lifestyle changes that would reduce our to-do lists—focusing instead on the often meaningless things we can check off as “small wins.” This is a false sense of control that keeps us procrastinating inside our so-called productivity.
2. Is this another 'Yes... Damn!' moment?
How many times have you said “yes” to something in the future because this week was busy but your calendar had a lot more white space three weeks out? You say yes to the task force meeting or that going-away happy hour for the colleague you’ve barely ever spoken to... only to see it on your stacked-to-the-brim calendar three weeks later and say, “Damn! Why did I commit to that?” You either (a) cancel and feel bad because you’re not being “productive” in following through on your commitments, (b) no-show and feel worse or (c) attend and feel resentful.
That is the “Yes... Damn!” trap. Coined by Yale School of Management’s Dr. Gal Zauberman, it’s a psychological phenomenon (also known as a “planning fallacy”) in which we overestimate how available we’ll be in the future. With our eyes bigger than our stomachs, we create a cycle where we’re too often setting ourselves and others up for disappointment—overwhelming ourselves with an overabundance of commitments.
Our programming around productivity makes us want to say “yes” to doing everything, and we often convince ourselves the future will be less busy in order to make good on those productivity commitments. But research shows that the biggest statistical predictor of how busy we’ll be in the future is how busy we are this week. So before you fall into the next “Yes... Damn!” trap in your life, ask yourself this question: Does this commitment serve my goals in a meaningful way?
3. Are you going to be 'productive' or 'impactful' today?
As we just discussed, keeping our goals in mind is essential. Unfortunately, too many of us have confused “productivity” for “impact” at work and it’s holding us back: time spent developing new ideas is lost to checking off a to-do list. That’s why every woman leader (and aspiring woman leader) needs to ask herself: Do I want to be “productive” or “impactful” today? The key isn’t to expect that we’ll ever stop having obligations but to manage them differently. Consider the difference between getting it all done (the “productive” mindset) versus getting it done well (the “impactful” mindset). The impactful version of you often doesn’t get everything done, but it gets the most important, high-visibility stuff done really well. The productive version of you often gets saddled with extra “office housework”—the nonpromotable tasks that women are 50% more likely to take on in the office, like proofreading the slide deck, taking meeting notes or ordering the sandwiches. This isn’t about slacking, it’s about being strategic, which brings us to...
4. What will you 'fail at' today?
Making peace with not “doing it all” is hard—and that’s exactly why Oliver Burkeman reminds us we must choose what to “fail at” when it comes time. As the author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals explains, our desire to win against the “dictatorship of the clock” inherently makes us a loser. “Time can’t be mastered at all and we’re wasting it [by trying],” he explains. “Getting comfortable with the discomfort of knowing that we can’t win time helps us come to grips.”
That’s why Burkeman argues we must choose what we will “fail at” so that we can succeed at the things that matter most. For example, he notes, “Mastering your email only makes you get more emails.”
Think of this as putting your money where your mouth is on the “impactful versus productive” mindset you may have adopted a few paragraphs ago. I trust you to decide what you need to “fail at” or “let go of” in order to succeed at the things that matter most. The question is: Do you trust you?
Being less “productive” is not being lazy or unsuccessful. When we can untether from the false narrative that our obsession with productivity is driving us forward, we can better see how it’s holding us back and design new strategies.
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