The Cost of Productivity
Everyone wants to be productive, but not enough people are asking, at what cost? It’s so easy to admire the productivity of others and want that for yourself. But have you considered what it is going to take FROM you to perform at a similar level?
One quick search and you can find productivity tips, tricks, and hacks galore on both google and youtube. However if you are wondering what it takes to be productive, it costs a fee many cannot afford or are not willing to pay. Productivity in its truest sense is growing to be increasingly valuable, as technology advances to keep us as comfortable as possible.
Productivity Fees
Productivity requires focus, concentration, and intense attention to the task. Productivity is simple: focus your attention on performing a single task effectively and efficiently.
Yet how many times do you sit down to work and catch yourself scrolling for 30 minutes before putting your phone down? As simple as it is to say just focus on one thing with extreme attention while optimizing the use of resources required to complete the task - well maybe it doesn’t sound simple at all.
It’s only necessary to break down productivity in this way since many people can’t be productive because they can’t focus for longer than 30 seconds. Unfortunately, the attention average span is only getting shorter thanks to the algorithm revolution with which we are amidst.
In an era of convenience and instant EVERYTHING, many people have not trained their minds for focus and intense concentration. The art of being intentional with your time is dying to the instant gratification that is permeating the lives of so many.
However, the true cost of productivity lies in our available mental capacity while we are working. Now humor me for a moment while I explain this concept in metaphor and analogy.
Imagine your brain as an external hard drive or storage system. Now each person has a different capacity for total storage, some have 128GB while others have 2 Tb of room. Imagine every day the available storage resetting to zero, so that with every new day you have the full amount of storage available to you. For the sake of this analogy, our hard drive is intelligent and is actively sensing and storing new information. The available storage is going to dictate how fast it fills with new information. Now if this hard drive was plugged into a source with a high rate of information transfer, the rate at which it fills up is going to be extremely high, but the quality of new information is going to be extremely low.
So if your brain is the hard drive and the amount of storage available is your mental capacity and decision-making ability, the information is going to be all external stimuli. Our brain is constantly recording new information, conscious and subconscious. When we engage too frequently in instant gratification, it not only reduces our daily capacity it also decreases our overall capacity for deep learning and critical thinking.
Looking specifically at social media, you are consuming an enormous amount of information in such a quick time, yet none of the information you consume is useful. Going back to our analogy, this translates to filling the hard drive insanely quick with a bunch of junk data that you have no intention of using. Once your capacity is filled up, that’s it. So if you fill your capacity with memes and videos that add no value to your life within the first couple minutes of your day, focusing at all is going to be all but impossible.
Guard Your Wallet
Not only are you having to guard your mental capacity like a hawk, but there is also the cost of attention switching when working on multiple tasks. Multi-tasking is one of those myths that gets debunked by experts several times yet those too lazy to minimize distractions still use this as an excuse to claim productivity. You cannot achieve a deep focus or flow state if you are switching the object of your attention so fast, that there is no depth required.
Focus and attention are the highest costs of productivity. Mainly because people are losing the ability to focus because they can’t control their attention. Things will happen out of your control that will grab your attention, and it happens. You have to be dedicated to your project in such a way that completion is the only thing top of mind.
