How to Destroy Your Productivity
Improving productivity is a typical objective at work. But one blogger published a tongue-in-cheek piece about ensuring that your personal productivity tanks.
The post, called How to murder your productivity, opens with a sarcastic promise:
In this post, you are going to learn proven techniques that you can immediately put to use.
I am going to show you exactly how you can:
- Decrease your IQ by 10 points while working
- Make sure you won’t accomplish anything
- Increase your stress levels by at least 100% or more
- Get completely overwhelmed
If you learn the techniques presented in this post, you will:
- Become completely insignificant
- Earn less money
- Repel successful and capable people
- Be slave to the random whims of others
- Get fired from your job or drive your business to the ground
Sounds good? Let’s get started!
Consider reading Jiri Novotny’s complete post for details. However, here are the highlights of how you can do the opposite of improving productivity at work:
- Check email 50 times a day to prevent focus
- Clutter your desk with piles of paper for constant anxiety
- Sit in a crappy chair for physical fatigue and tiredness
- Multi-task to decrease your IQ by 10 points
- Get as many notifications as possible for constant distraction
- Be interrupted as often as possible to avoid getting in the flow
- Build the longest to-do list in the known universe for guaranteed stress
Of course, the author of this post is joking. If you want to improve productivity, you should reverse all of these statements and then put them into practice.
In fact, we’ve talked about most of these issues here on The Methodology Blog. We’ve given tons of email productivity advice, and we’ve reviewed the impact of a messy desk at work. Naturally, we’ve reported on dealing with interruptions at work and the myth of multitasking.
The most important message is that employee productivity is about choices. It’s a question of what we decide to do and what we decide not to do at work.
What choices are you making so you can get more done?
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