Busy-ness as a Proxy for Productivity: Why I Believe the End and Beginning are One
A part of this blog’s title is from one of my all favourite reads, Deep Work by Cal Newport. I will get into the intricacies of the blog title later on in this blog, for now allow me to just provide an abstract definition of my title.
Generally, this blog intends to provide a perspective on looking at work and particularly productive work. As already stated, a part of the title — “Busyness as a proxy for productivity” is an excerpt from the book Deep Work. In the book, Newport shares an interesting assertion: “In the absence of metrics of what it means to be a deep worker, most people fall back on what’s easiest”. This statement means one simple thing — in an environment where being productive is something unquantifiable by any metrics, a person simply chooses to do that which is easiest to do. As we also see from the book, there are metrics created to measure productivity, such as the h-index which is useful for measuring how much work an academic researcher is doing. But in this blog I want to share some ideas and perspectives on how an individual can effectively measure their own productivity in the absence of clear, unambiguous indicators.
Someone might ask: Why is this important, what is the importance of measuring my productivity when at the end of the day I get work which needs to be done done?
This question is answered by the blog title itself. It is easy to be seemingly busy yet never getting anything of value and depth done. As a Computer Science student, I have come to the reality of busy-ness as the proxy for productivity. I have often found myself immersed in low value tasks that seemingly kept me busy but when the work day ends and I wonder to myself: “How much high value work did I do today?”, that is when I realize the peril of this proxy of productivity. Computer Science is a field which, from my experience, requires an individual to have authentic skills which they consciously seek to improve — especially if they want to produce high value work. This is clearly seen from the coding, data analytics, software project management, etc. The depth required for such work is massive and “almost” impossible to reproduce if one does not make a conscious effort to do so. Considering the times we live in — how vast the flow of information is compared to our short attention spans, we partly see why in most cases busyness is an inevitability, particularly in knowledge work. It is easy to be “swamped” with tons of information but one’s attention span is too low and limited to be able to produce high value outputs.
Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.
Now that I have shared possible reasons why people get trapped in busyness and how busyness is a threat to high value work, let us look at how we can avoid the trap of busyness.
The principle of fractal living
Though this may sound complicated it is a principle that most individuals are already aware of, though they may have heard it phrased in another manner. Some may have heard it being phrased as: ”How you do anything is how you do everything.” or “How you do one thing (big or small) is how you do every other thing”. The principle asserts a strong idea — principally and essentially speaking all work (big or small) is the same with respect to the amount of attention and organization required. It is for this reason why I call the principle the Principle of Fractal Living. The idea of a fractal implies self-similarity of a geometrical structure at whatever scale. But in this case we are considering self similarity of tasks at whatever scale — from high value tasks to low value tasks.
As the name of the principle suggests, one has to live life as fractals. In practical terms what this means is one has to be conscious of how he or she spends his or her days, and you cannot be conscious of how you spend your day unless you are conscious of how you spend your hours. You cannot be conscious of how you spend your hours unless you are conscious of how you spend your minutes and you cannot be conscious of how you spend your minutes unless you are conscious of how you spend your seconds. This principle, I believe, leads to what I call the principle of habit expansion.
The principle of habit expansion
This principle was best quoted by author James Clear in his book Atomic Habits when he stated that a habit has to first be established before it can be expanded upon. In essence what this principle is saying is that in attempting to build new habits (positive habits haha) the first goal should be establish the habit itself rather than focusing too much on how well one does the habit. It is only after the habit has been established that one can now focus on how well he or she does the habit. A simple example might have to do with learning programming. Applying the principle of habit expansion, one has to first establish the positive habit of just showing up, and write maybe 2–3 lines of code daily. After this habit is established, it is only then that the individual can now look to doing possibly advanced programming concepts that require possibly hundreds lines of code.
The above two principles can be converted to metrics that are useful in measuring productivity. Take the first principle, the principle of fractal living — this principle chunks down not only tasks but also time in which these particular tasks are done. Taking the example of learning programming again, but let us say we want to learn the basics of Object Oriented Programming (OOP), we can apply the principle of fractal living and break down the workflow. Firstly, we can suppose on average it takes about a week to learn to the theoretical basics of OOP, we then breakdown the work and allocate it into respective days, like this;
Monday: Introduction to OOP
Tuesday: Classes, Objects, Association and Methods
Wednesday: Pillars of OOP: Abstraction, Encapsulation, Inheritance and Polymorphism
Thursday: More OOP concepts: Interfaces and Exception handling
Friday: Using Object Oriented Approaches to Software Development.
Now, we then chunk each day’s work into respective time slots of preferably minutes. Considering Monday, we can say we are to do Introduction to OOP from 09:00–10:00, we further break it down and say, What is OOP from 09:00–09:30 and Why use OOP from 09:30–10:00. And the same is done for the other days.
NOTE: This is a workflow created only for use as an example in this blog and is not meant for any other sort of use.
So we can realize that form the above example, even if I appear busy (busyness), when 09:30 comes, I should be done with the topic What is OOP, otherwise I am simply not being productive. As for habit expansion as a principle, it measures productivity by simply asking, “Did you show up today?”. If no, then you were not productive.
The End == The Beginning
The most strange part of this blog’s title (which I strongly believe to be the reason why the reader is reading haha!) is one on the end and beginning being one. I assure you, this is not some mystical stunt that is meant to teach on how to predict the future (though we can predict the future as I will show you😆). Both principles just shared in this blog are consequences of this phenomena of the end being the beginning itself.
An industry expect was asked at the end of a business year what his thoughts were on the trajectory of the industry for the coming five years. His response — “As an industry expect, I will tell you the answer. To know how the next five years will be, just look at the last five years”.
Why is his response correct? Well, let us consider again the concept of being productive which in our context we can define as being able to produce positive results with respect to the input. As if in a subtle manner, the idea of the end and beginning being one communicates the concept of determinism. Given that we our input is deep work, we are guaranteed to get deeply meaningful positive results. The vice versa also being so true. The attainment of these positive results (the end) starts with deep work (the beginning) and hence Deep Work (beginning) == Positive Results (end). This concepts emphasizes the importance of treating any chunk of work without any bias of that either the chunk is at beginning or ending of a project.
The idea that the end and beginning are one encourages individuals to approach their work with a sense of purpose and meaning. Individuals are made to realize that their productivity is part of a larger cyclical process, individuals can see their work as contributing to something greater than themselves — as in productivity, there is no end to a task since it leads to new opportunities. This can provide a sense of fulfillment and motivation that goes beyond mere productivity goals. All of this gives us the ability to predict the future as it is absolute that we can know what results we can produce from our own input.
