Every now and then I get an email from a student preparing for a hard exam. They have their schedule planned out for how they’re going to study, and they end the email with a nervous “What do you think?”
Invariably, my answer disappoints: “Well, it depends …”
There are some obvious reasons: I don’t know the exam. I don’t know their ability level. I don’t know what they already know.
But there’s a deeper reason for my ambivalence: I don’t know if they can stick to the schedule they’ve set for themselves.
Setting up a schedule is easy. Sticking to it—especially when the work involved is cognitively demanding—is incredibly hard.
The Myth of Time Management
A few years ago, I started working on a deep, research-based essay on the history of productivity, akin to my other Complete Guides [1]. I eventually pivoted away from the project to work on my second book [2], but I can still recall reading many 19th century books about the emerging science of productivity.
Early thinking on productivity was dominated by factory work. Time management was understood by the second, not the hour, with theorists like Frederick Winslow Taylor [3] literally timing worker’s movements with a stopwatch in hand, attempting to squeeze ever-more efficiency out of the laborers who happened to be under his gaze.
This focus on time continued, even as “work” increasingly moved from manufacturing parts to manipulating symbols. Peter Drucker [4], the management guru who coined the term “knowledge worker” also put the problem of productivity squarely in the realm of managing one’s time [5]:
Effective executives, in my observation, do not start with their tasks. They start with their time. And they do not start out with planning. They start by finding out where their time actually goes.
To Drucker’s executives, work was an unceasing flow of tasks, interruptions, appointments and meetings. The issue they faced was trying to assert control over the torrent of demands on their time, rather than the endurance required to stick to a studying schedule described in so many of the plaintive student emails I’ve received.
However, based on both my own experience and my correspondence with readers over the decades, I feel like most of us don’t resemble either the simple “human machines” studied by Taylor and his ilk, nor the captains of industry advised by Drucker. Instead, most of us are more like the students in my inbox: we want to manage our time, but actually sticking to a schedule is much harder than planning it out.
I’ve faced this problem myself. Whether it’s doing research and writing all day or trying to stick to the pace I set for myself during projects like the MIT Challenge [6], scheduling things isn’t hard—but actually doing the work is.
Energy is the Missing Key
One of my first popular essays I wrote nearly two decades ago was a review [7] of The Power of Full Engagement [8], an excellent book that helps explain the gap so many of us feel between what we feel we ought to be able to accomplish given our available time and how much we actually accomplish on a routine basis.
The authors, Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr, argue that high-productivity work is similar to athletics, where cycles of intense effort followed by recovery produce training gains, and both non-stop work and non-stop rest result in poorer outcomes.
Schwartz and Loehr found that their typical client is overworked mentally and underworked physically. They work long hours, but sleep and exercise little. As a result, their capacity for productive work falls, and as they slip further from their “theoretical” productivity goals, as defined by time management, they resolve to work ever harder to make up the gap—further entrenching their exhaustion and decreasing their capacity.
I think the prevalence of this type of productivity trap helps to explain why so much productivity advice rubs people the wrong way. When we hear “productivity”, the first thing to come to mind is usually a push to work even harder. Reflecting on our own busyness and mounting exhaustion, our subconscious recoils at the thought of added pressure.
But, if you reflect on it, our most productive moments aren’t actually like that. Instead, when we’re at our most productive, the work has a certain lightness. Focus is easy, the work is interesting, and even if we feel tired at the end, it doesn’t feel exhausting.
When your energy—rather than your time—is managed well, work doesn’t feel all that hard. It can even be joyful.
One of the things people find strange when I’m retelling the stories of some of my intensive learning projects is that they were, on the whole, not so effortful. While studying 60+ hours per week required focus, I felt pretty content most days when doing those challenges.
That wasn’t because I’m always extremely productive (I’m not). I’ve had plenty of projects that were slogs to complete, where getting even an hour or two of work done felt like pulling my fingernails out.
Productivity advice, if it is to be helpful, should be a road map explaining how to make work more like those joyful projects and less like the slogs. It should teach you how to create more situations where, even if you’re working incredibly hard, the work itself feels easy.
Energy is More Than a Fuel
Unfortunately, there is no secret to easy productivity. Energy itself may be a somewhat misleading metaphor. “Fuel” implies that what’s constrained is some internal resource that can be deployed against any task with equal efficacy.
Instead, the ease (or lack thereof) with which we stick to the schedules and plans we make varies according to a complicated mess of factors both biological and psychological.
These factors are what I’m going to explore over the coming weeks in a series of essays. I’m looking at what the best-available research says about how to think about this problem. I’m also sharing what strategies I’ve found work best, from my own experiments in the nearly two decades since I first wrote about this topic.
Right now, I’d like to end with a thought experiment: What would you work on if doing the work was easy? This ideal may not be entirely achievable in all cases, but it at least exposes us to the gap between the things we’d like to achieve and what we feel we have the energy to accomplish. Write your answer in the comments!