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That research focused on four stages: Cue, Craving, Response, and Reward. From a toxic productivity perspective, the cue may be some kind of request in our inbox or voicemail, or even seeing what one of our colleagues is doing, and feeling like we have to learn to emulate that behavior.

That feeling of “Ooooh, my successful colleague just started a YouTube channel and is getting all of this attention. I want to feel respected and admired, so I need to add videos to my repertoire of what I deliver to the world.”

The response in this case might be you buying video equipment, writing scripts, and pushing yourself beyond your capacity to start developing these videos, and the reward might be the sense of achievement of having completed it. You’ve satisfied that craving! Yay!

Wait, yay? Are you sure?

Rewards are supposed to teach us which cues and cravings will make us feel good. But remember what we said a few weeks ago about the hedonic treadmill, how you get used to a certain level of productivity and thus no longer feel any level of excitement or satisfaction? Time after time, your automatic process of building your habits may be contributing to your sense of productivity dysmorphia!

So, how can we use Clear’s ideas to help us create better habits that will separate ourselves from toxic productivity? Clear’s book is too packed with wisdom for me to cover its value in a blog post, but here are two methods to try, based on his teachings. His guidance is in bold type.

To embrace healthier habits that will get you away from the cues to keep working:

Make It Obvious — If you want to get in the habit of taking a walking break at lunch, put your lunch bag (or wallet) on top of your walking shoes.

Make It Attractive — Arrange to take a yoga class or go for an adult beverage (or ice cream, or an afternoon tea) with a good friend. Make taking a break social to remind you of when your life was fun. Then do fun stuff! 

Make It Easy — Block time on your schedule for non-work things so nobody can steal your self-care by making a Calendly request for time that isn’t available. That person will never know that you’re not in some other “productive” meeting.

Make It Satisfying — Make those get-off-the-hamster-wheel experiences delightful; if you’re an introvert, don’t schedule social things that will steal your energy, and if you’re a hiker, don’t book a yoga class because it seems socially preferable. You do you, boo!

To break your bad (toxic) productivity habits and get off that hamster wheel of constantly feeling like your value depends on your output: 

Make It Invisible — To reduce your exposure so you don’t experience the cues to constantly feel like you’re not doing enough, reduce your attention to requests when you don’t need to deal with them. Turn off your notifications unless you’re waiting for a particular response. Stop checking your email every 15 minutes; check it in the morning, right after lunch, and about an hour before the end of the day. Otherwise, focus on your priorities, not other people’s.

Yep, this is the same advice I’d give you if I were encouraging you to be more productive; the point isn’t to be less productive, per se, but to feel less driven by those cues to feel like your value equals your productivity!

Make It Unattractive — The point here is to re-adjust your mindset (as we discussed in the second post in this series). You want to accent the benefits and importance of avoiding the bad habits (of working through lunch, checking email when your kid is talking to you, etc.). Maybe a photo posting your last blood pressure test or the lyrics to Cats In the Cradle will remind you of what hyperfocusing on productivity costs you. (Wait, you don’t know that song? Grab a tissue!)

Make It Difficult — This is about increasing friction so it’s harder to work long hours and feel obligated to keep going when you’re completely wrung out. Set your computer to turn off every day at 5 (or 6 p.m., or 4:30 p.m.). Delete one-third to one-half of the available time slots from your appointment scheduling software. Prioritize yourself on the schedule (and see the time-blocking section, below).

Make It Unsatisfying — You know what makes you tick. Would the social cringe of failing to knock off work and go home (after you’d promised to do so) do the trick? For good or ill, the fear of disappointing your spouse might not be enough, but support from an accountability partner, someone without the guarantee of unconditional love? Could work!

Normally, we’d use accountability to get us working, but sometimes, having a body-double for the “last hour” of the day will ensure we shut down when we need to. If that’s the case for you, reread Count on Accountability: 5 Productivity Support Solutions for some key ways to get help honoring your goal to respect yourself, your time, and your value.

Two P’s Against One: Conquer Toxic Productivity With the Pareto Principle and the Pomodoro Technique

There are two popular strategies in the productivity realm we experts apply to help people not only achieve more, but more of the right thing. Sneakily, these two concepts can also help you get off that hedonic treadmill.

Let’s start with the Pareto Principle, which you might know as the 80/20 Rule. It comes from a theory of economics that says that 80% of outcomes come from 20% of causes, and it’s been found that 80% of successes come from 20% of efforts or sources. This is one of those weird concepts that while not always perfectly true, is surprisingly accurate.

Freelancers will find that 80% of their money comes from 20% of their client base. All those toys your kids are actually playing with (and the apps on your phone that you actually use)? About 20% of them are what’s yielding the most activity.

Use the Pareto Principle to figure out what of the work you’re doing is actually the vital work. The deep work (in the words of Cal Newport). The meaningful work. The work that appears in the Eisenhower Matrix’s “important and urgent” quadrant!

Look at your list of everything you accomplished today. Wait, you don’t know what you did?

You probably added “done” things to the to-do things so you could cross them off. But if not, look at your outbound emails, your calendar, your “recent documents” and “recent spreadsheets.” Going forward, you might track your time with an analog list on paper or software like Toggl or Rescue Time.

Look at everything you’re doing and measure the value — is it financially remunerative (does it pay?!), is it helping you grow professionally or personally, is it emotionally rewarding? It’s very likely you’ll find that the vast majority of your work’s value is coming from 20% (OK, or even 30% or 40%) of your output.

Use the Pareto Principle to give yourself permission (there’s another P-word!) to stop doing everything! With luck, you’ll be able to appreciate all that you have accomplished, focus less on what you didn’t complete, and eliminate a bit more of that productivity dysmorphia. 

Same results. Different expectations. pic.twitter.com/fXbf6gY1AA

— Janis Ozolins (@OzolinsJanis) March 27, 2022

Next, let’s look at the Pomodoro Technique, developed by Francesco Cirillo. We’ve discussed this many times on the pages of Paper Doll, most recently in Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? 5 Strategies to Cope With Pandemic Time Dilation, but at it’s most reductive, you decide what you want to work on, you set a timer for 25 minutes, and you work on just that thing until the timer goes off. Then take a break.

This is another tactic we productivity gurus use to help clients get their butts in the chair; to conquer inertia, we encourage someone try just five minutes (on the treadmill, writing a blog post, studying a chapter), and more often than not, this is enough to get someone over the hump and keep the mojo going.

However, the Pomodoro Technique also works to dissipate toxic productivity because breaks are built in. In usual circumstances, the Pomodoro-er is thinking, “Sigh, OK, I have to do this. But in 25 minutes I get to take a break.” To the person who struggles to let go of their sense of worthiness being tied to their output, being forced to take a break is a real eye-opener! Permission to stop working is one thing; being required to stop is a much bigger deal!

For more on the Pomodoro Technique:

Take It From Someone Who Hates Productivity Hacks—the Pomodoro Technique Actually Works

The Pomodoro Technique

Explore Being a Kid Again: See How Playing with Blocks Can Flummox Toxic Productivity

We’ve already talked a lot about time blocking. Your best bet is to review:

Playing With Blocks: Success Strategies for Time Blocking Productivity

Struggling To Get Things Done? Paper Doll’s Advice & The Task Management & Time Blocking Virtual Summit 2022

Paper Doll Shares Secrets from the Task Management & Time Blocking Summit 2022

How to Use Block Scheduling to Revamp Your Workflow (Wired)

Usually, when we discuss time blocking, we’re trying to fit as much into our limited, valuable, time as possible, to make sure we create homes for all the work that’s necessary to do. But we’ve already established that not everything we’re doing is of equal value.

When we want to circumvent toxic productivity, reduce busy-ness in favorite of doing our most important work, and get a hearty mix of what we discussed back in the second week, we need to think about our brains!

In that post, I explained that using our central executive network (think: executive function, not CEOs), or task-positive brain network, activates to help us use our memories of previously-acquired information to comprehend new information, focus our attention, come up with solutions, and make decisions.

But our brains also need to operate in the default mode network — it’s what your brain is thinking about when nobody’s expecting anything from you.

What does that have to do with time blocking? Simple — block time to do all those things we talked about in Toxic Productivity Part 3: Get Off the To-Do List Hamster Wheel that turn active the brain off for a little while. Just blocking your time, without considering downtime, will let you get a lot done, maybe even the right stuff done, but it won’t reduce that drive to be “always on.”

In his July 3rd email, How to Be a Productivity Ninja author Graham Allcott talked three ways to use his attention: to create, to collaborate, and to chill.

When you block your time, “create” is going to be anything that achieves that deep work, that 20ish% of effort to yield the 80ish% of success. Allcott says, “When I’m in Create mode, my mindset is disciplined, closed and distraction-free.”

“Collaborate” is as you’d guess, all of those meetings and calls and emails, those Zooms and those moments you’re in shared documents. And it’s the collaboration (whether anticipated or unanticipated) that often steals the time we need to spend on the other two C’s.

And, obviously, “chill” is about engaging the default mode network by disengaging from the task-positive brain network. 

When you put together your time blocks, be sure to consider all three elements. Balancing your creative and collaborative time with your chilling time will help your step off the hamster wheel and live a healthier, more fulfilled, and less toxic life.

Momentum matters more than perfection. pic.twitter.com/ju76b7gsqj

— Sarah Arnold-Hall (@saraharnoldhall) April 6, 2022

 

Give yourself a break. Give yourself some grace. Give yourself a more organized space, more planning time on the calendar, and more opportunities to “win” by not expecting so damned much of yourself.

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With so much to consider regarding toxic productivity, there’s actually one more post to round out the series. We’ll be looking at how tools, whether analog or digital, can help or hinder us as we seek to reduce the toxicity of our productivity. And then we’ll close with a little philosophizing and sum up all we’ve discussed.

Until then, I hope you’ve found some of this helpful to reduce any of the unwelcome stress you may feel as you approach the second half of this year.