I have written before about how critical it is to be clear on what we mean when we say certain things. Today, I would like to be clear on what I mean when I say “productivity”.

Productivity is often discussed in terms of business or commercial contexts: how to squeeze those extra drops of productivity out of your day so you can ace those TPS reports while also landing your own personal best on your marathon time. While that can certainly be an example of productivity, it can also be a path to burnout.

See, “productivity” is really just the name of a measurement. Taken literally (and I love taking things literally when looking to find clarity), it is simply a measure of “productive activity”.

Activity seems easy enough to understand: it’s the sum of actions taken in a particular time. Hopefully nothing controversial there.

But what does it mean for activity to be “productive”? Again, be literal: what is being produced?

In your boss’s mind, it may well be “value for the company”, specifically those TPS reports, or a new feature, or some bug fixes, or a strategy document. Those are all “products”. And so in a work perspective, those could be good examples of intended products.

There are also unintended products. You might be producing conflict with your activity. Or bugs. Or GDPR nightmares. These are also products, but it would be hard to argue that you’ve been “productive” by introducing a security hole that leaked your entire customer database.

So let’s refine this: we care about measuring activity that leads to intended products.

Is that enough to give us a definition? Let’s see if it fits:

Productivity is a measure of how successful our activities have been in outputting intended products.

There’s still something not quite right about this. I like being literal, but “product” feels off here. When I think about “product” I think about little packaged things. This is a very commercial definition, and actually quite limiting. There are so many things we “produce”, and some aren’t even really “things” at all. Can we broaden our thinking here to make this more universally applicable?

I like to reach into the world of stage magic, here: magicians often talk of producing an “effect”, like make a card disappear, or making a rabbit appear from a hat. In these cases, what is being produced is the “effect” on the audience, as much as it is the rabbit.

I prefer this idea of thinking of our productions in terms of the “effect” we have on the world around us. To channel Steve Jobs, what we’re really producing is our “dent in the universe”.

So let’s revise the definition:

Productivity is a measure of how successful our activities have been in producing intended effects.

This feels much more workable. It absolutely satisfies those TPS reports and that marathon personal best as being “high productivity”, but it also introduces one critical consideration: Intention.

Presumably your boss’s intentions at least somewhat align with yours (they want those TPS reports, you want to get paid). But the marathon? Are you doing that because you intended to? Or because you were trying to live up to someone else’s expectations?

Conversely, if your intention is to produce a completed series rewatch of Stranger Things, then binging on Netflix over the weekend absolutely counts as being productive. And this is not a bug, this is a feature.

See, all these “productivity” tools are just that, tools. You might watch a bunch of YouTube videos about being super efficient with a hammer, or read some articles about getting really skilled at wielding a to-do list, but none of these can really tell you what you intend to do with those tools.

So the really key part of all of this, and without which “productivity” becomes just another treadmill, is to put in the work to get really clear on your intentions.

Because you have more control over that to-do list than you think. Sure, you might not be able to say “no” to those TPS reports that you’re stuck with compiling, but you (hopefully) don’t live at work. And the tools that work on your to-do list in your job also work on your to-do list for the rest of your life too.

And no, that doesn’t mean you have to treat your downtime like “work”. That’s why the admission of that Stranger Things binge to the definition of “productivity” is absolutely a feature. However, if we’re not able to be intentional with our lives, just like at work, you can guarantee there are plenty of people who are ready to fill up our to-do lists with their intentions. As Hank Green points out, nobody is bragging about starting their second hour on TikTok.

But start our second hour we do. And even if you feel like you have very little time in your life that you truly have control over, have any say over, I can almost guarantee that that first hour on TikTok was something you seemed to have complete control over.

Except you didn’t. TikTok did. It took control and convinced you that you were treating yourself to choose to do that for you. It felt like a well earned “break”. And that’s where the “productivity” tools can help us avoid this trap of spending our break times working on someone else’s farm.

What if we spent some time to come up with a few things we actually want to do, whether it’s finishing that book, writing that article, painting that picture, going for that hike, lying in bed, whatever it is. Just took five minutes and wrote a list.

Then what if we reviewed all that “productivity” stuff and applied it to our list, instead of someone else’s.

Because there’s my definition, what I mean when I talk about productivity: taking a few minutes to decide what you want, right now, and then applying some activity to produce it.