![]() Above all, these apps and tactics tend to be designed with a very specific kind of productivity in mind: that which is expected of the average office worker, whose days tend to involve a lot of computer tasks and be scheduleable and predictable. Work bleeds into your personal time, which isn’t actually efficient. But those services’ unexpected downsides have also become clear. Shareable digital calendars do hold certain practical advantages over their paper predecessors, and services such as Slack and Google Docs, which let people work together at a distance, provide obvious efficiencies over mailing paperwork back and forth. If you make a to-do list in your notes app, it disappears into the ether when you finally lock your phone in an effort to get something-anything!-done. ![]() Didn’t a calendar app seem much neater and tidier than a paper planner? Wouldn’t a list of tasks that need your attention be that much more effective if it could zap you with a little vibration to remind you it exists? If all of your schedules and documents and contacts and to-do lists could live in one place, wouldn’t that be better?įifteen years later, the answer to those questions seems to be “not really.” People habituate to the constant beeps and buzzes of their phone, which makes rote push-notification task reminders less likely to break through the noise. In the late 2000s, optimism abounded about the capacity for consumer technology to help people overcome personal foibles and make everyday life more efficient. By the time I was in the working world, smartphones were beginning to proliferate, and suddenly, there was an app for that. It took me an embarrassingly long time to try putting pen to paper. Perhaps counterintuitively, that makes me somewhat of an amateur expert in the tactics that are often recommended for getting your life (or at least your day) in order. Years ago, I bought a box with a timed lock so that I could put my phone in it and force myself to write emails. I have abandoned countless planners three weeks into January. ![]() I have tried the tips, the tricks, the hacks, the apps, and the methods. My executive function is never coming back from war. I, by contrast, have what a psychiatrist once called a “really classic case” of ADHD. They were, in my opinion, largely born on third base and think they hit a triple. Now they send out calendar invites to their friends once next weekend’s dinner plans are settled and have never killed a plant by forgetting to water it. Much of the advice on these topics is given by people with a natural capacity for organization and focus-the people who, as kids, kept meticulous records of assignments and impending tests in their school-issued planners. For that, I come bearing but one life hack: the humble to-do list, written out on actual paper, with actual pen.įirst, cards on the table: I’m not an organized person. There probably is a bunch of stuff that you need or want to get done, for reasons that have no discernable moral or political valence-making a long-delayed dentist appointment, picking up groceries, returning a few nagging emails, hanging curtains in your new apartment. Underneath all of the tiresome discourse about enhancing human productivity or rejecting it as a concept, there is a bedrock truth that tends to get lost. ![]() Self-help books that cobble together specious principles of behavioral psychology to teach you the secrets of actually using all of the stuff you’ve bought in order to optimize your waking hours (and maybe your sleeping ones too). Planners as thick as encyclopedias that encourage you to set daily intentions and monthly priorities. Platforms that reimagine your life as a series of project-management issues. Are you doing enough to hold on to your job? To improve your marriage? To raise well-adjusted kids? To maintain your health? What can you change in order to do more?Īnxiety breeds products, and the tech industry’s obsession with personal optimization in particular has yielded a bounty of them in the past decade or two: digital calendars that send you push notifications about your daily schedule. The more practical questions of productivity are no less freighted with anxiety. Americans invest personal productivity with moral weight, as though human worth can be divined through careful examination of work product, both professional and personal. Philosophically, the concept is a nightmare. Productivity is a sore subject for a lot of people.
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