On Finding Your Own Rhythm

If you want to get good at something, have more energy, and feel more accomplished, there’s one key thing you need to do: stop trying to be more productive.

We’re Not Meant to Work Like We Do Now

Most knowledge workers can’t work for even four hours straight, let alone the 8 plus hours modern offices demand of them. Modern work culture is at best naive and at worst just mean and punitive when it comes to workers’ schedules.

This ground is now well trodden. Cal Newport has written several books about it. Most people seem to know in their hearts that most other people spend most of their working time… not working. Sure, there are lots of meetings, lots of slack messages. Lots of emails. But little actual work.

It’s all about looking productive.

Indeed, it’s clear that humans didn’t evolve, and our culture didn’t develop, to do intensive mental work (or manual work for that matter), all day, every day, all year round.

In the 1st Century AD, Roman workers enjoyed about 150 days of holidays per year. Medieval peasants, while poor, also worked seasonly, with a very busy harvest season followed by a quiet winter (often dictated by lack of light and cold temperatures). Hunter gatherers, depending on their environment, might only “work” (if that’s even a relevant term), for 20-30 hours a week. Work hours are better now than in the industrial revolution, but, that’s not saying much.

James Suzman’s book Work is a great primer on all of this.

Sure, some people can work intensely in bursts. But to do so for an extended period is obviously not conducive to our mental and physical health, or the quality of our work. The hard charger putting in 12 hour days for years on end eventually pays the price.

People are afraid

I think deep down most of us are afraid that the modern industrialist narrative of grind and hustle must be the real way to work.

We think that other we are just soft. That everyone else has a reserve of energy that we just don’t. Or, worse, everyone is just as exhausted as us but, it’s the only way!

It’s fear talking. Maybe the best concept from Newport’s recent book, Slow Productivity, is this idea that modern knowledge work is so ethereal, so opaque, that managers have essentially invented proxy metrics to measure productivity with. It must be better than nothing, right?

Nope. It’s all just misinformation and fear.

Slack messages, emails, and time at the desk are not just imperfect metrics, they are often actively bad for your work.

The hustle narrative is not just annoying and soul destroying, it’s wrong.

David Graber, in Bullshit Jobs, argues that modern work culture hides an uncomfortable truth: capitalism has quite simply failed to provide good, worthwhile jobs, and it therefore dooms us to lives of busy bullshit.

Except, we don’t have to live like that.

Don’t Waste Your Time

As a small business owner, I feel incredibly lucky that I don’t have to deal with that. In fact, the main perk of what I do is that everything I do is productive. Or else, I wouldn’t do it.

I have the luxury of not sending that email, of not scheduling that meeting, of not staring at a screen trying to look busy.

My time is my own.

And you know what I’ve found? I can be incredibly efficient and productive with only a couple of hours of work a day, and a lot of time off.

The true work, the important work, is not all that busy stuff. It’s making good, compelling content. It’s recording a thirty minute podcast (and posting it raw), it’s writing long form, it’s reading books. What Cal Newport would call Deep Work.

And it’s not some fantasy. It’s how the world should actually work. I look at so many of my friends with corporate jobs and I think, are we all so silly and insecure that we have to just… look like we’re working all the time??

I am MORE productive—by which I don’t mean my output is maximised but that I make more strides towards a life I want to live—because I do less.

Be Brave Enough to Do Nothing

As an artist or small business owner, one of your hardest tasks is to not get suckered in to looking busy.

Looking busy will drain you. It will destroy your ability to do the work you actually need to do. And, it’s not fun.

You weren’t born to sit on a computer all day opening and closing browser tabs. There is no productivity police ready to come in and ruin your lift because you took a nap or went for a walk.

In fact, if there was a productivity police and they were good at their jobs (which they probably wouldn’t be), they’d realise that you need to goof off to be good at what you do.

You will produce your best work, and make the life you want, so much faster and more easily, if you keep the main thing the main thing.

Find your rhythm.

This can take years. But it’s possible.

I’d love to hear from you about your work rhythms below!