The Standard for Healthy Work - Productivity within reason

In the pursuit of more productivity and efficiency, we can easily go overboard.

If we have even one project going on, we may find ourselves never feeling content with the work we put in, since there is always some time wasted during the day. Our efficiency is never 100%, due to a multitude of reasons - we spend time on our phones, we recharge between tasks, we sleep in, we get distracted. It’s all within reason, but still, the workaholics in us get annoyed that we somehow can’t get literally all of our work done in a single day.

It may often stem from the fact that we as humans have a difficulty in distributing our workload throughout a longer timeframe. I personally prefer to stay up late and write this article in one go, rather than divide the writing into two or three sessions during the week.

However, this wish to always chase the 100% and finish up literally all the tasks on our to-do lists every day can be, well, unhealthy. And vastly unrealistic.

Not having a realistic expectation of how much we can get done in a day is a surefire way to get burnout, so in this article, I will be listing some ways in which we can start feeling more content with the work that we do, even if it is not perfect.

Setting limits

The primary principle of teaching yourself to accept your work as good/passable is to detach the emotional reaction from the objective progress made.

It is easy to beat yourself up because you didn’t do task #14 on your to-do list today. What is harder is to take a good look at what you did during the day and objectively evaluate whether you're moving on track or not.

The method that I use to avoid the unnecessary perfectionism is to rank my to-do's based on their priority. If they happen to be of 1st or 2nd priority, like working out, doing my daily studying, etc., I will make sure I get them done despite the obstacles. However, if they are of 3rd, 4th, or 5th priority, and the day goes by without them getting checked off, I can fall asleep contentwith the work done and leave them for another day.

There is a finite number of important things we can get done in a day, and the number is rarely above 5, at least in my case. Sometimes things just take longer than expected, and unless you’re missing deadlines and rushing, you don’t need to fret. As a society, we have been optimising our productivity for centuries, and sadly we have reached a point where we are beyond the standard for healthy work.

This is why we need to set limits for ourselves, to keep our sanity intact.

MVP for productivity

MVP, in business jargon, stands for Minimal Viable Product. This is a term for the initial project for your business, which contains the core idea and little to no details. In software this could be the code which gets the task done, but doesn’t have any design applied to it, and isn’t the most optimised yet.

The point of an MVP is to evaluate the pros and cons of a given product in its most raw stages, when the effort put in is minimal. Then, if you happen to fail and the product is not liked by the customer, you can restart with a fresh new MVP, instead of throwing away a full-blown, well-designed project and the countless hours of effort that went in production.

The same concept of an MVP can and should be applied to your personal productivity. If you have a basic structure and some MVP goals to reach, you vastly increase your chances of meeting your self-set aspirations.

Say, if I choose among my list of priority tasks only a few, sometimes even one, that when I do them I can feel good about myself. If I only do 1 essay for the day or only study this 1 chapter of the book that I specifically chose to focuse on beforehand, I can move forward without unnecessary guilt. Yes, I may have not moved the needle for my 10 other side-projects, but guess what?

There’s always tomorrow.

Sustainable for the long term

The difference between this kind of methodology and the workaholic type of mindset is the sustainability for the long term.

With almost a 99% success rate, people who don’t have work-life boundaries get to burn out after a set period of time. Depending on the projects and job in question, this could be days, weeks, months, but it is within a hand's reach for sure. The standard of healthy work can get you much further, and provides a way to continuously improve your productivity within reason.

The only obstacle then left is patience. With enough patience and consistence, all goals are within reach.