Don't Become a Productivity Tourist
If Your Workflow Bores You, It’s Working
🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, you’re in the right place.
While you’re here, a few things I’ve built: Kerouac, a writing app | Post Through It, a solo microblogging tool | Distributism.ai, my MCP platform | Laterware, all the AI news you need | Studio Self, a thought leadership agency for founders x VCs.
You can buy my book Permissionless here.
It’s a mistake to make “productivity” itself a hobby.
The idea that switching systems and optimizing tools, workflows, and widgets around your work is a fun little pastime is a dangerous quagmire to fall into.
It might seem harmless - it’s just another AI assistant! To-do app! PKM tool! - but it will catch and keep you in an endless cycle of vocabulary changes that never shape or produce the words you so desperately want to share.
Productivity chasers talk about building systems - but that’s not actually the activity. They’re more sampling systems; trying a taste of this and that, and with every flavor they fall in love with, declaring they’ll eat nothing else for the rest of their life, until the next taste…
I’ve started to see the loudest voices and influencers in the productivity space as little more than productivity tourists; the travel influencers of the various Getting Things Done cults, all of whom pronounce that they’re becoming better people for their experience and documentation of the world, and none of whom stay in one place long enough to absorb anything meaningful.
Every new system gives you a sense of hope without accountability, because the process of setting it up in the first place gives you an illusion of momentum and every stage of optimization produces more dopamine - until it runs out all at once, and you’re on to the next open source harness for knowledge work.
You go from discovery, announcing “this changes everything” and watching videos of beautiful and non-functional setups, to migration where you lose hours importing tasks and reformatting notes, to evangelism where you insist that everyone must try your new shiny toy, to friction where the whole thing breaks “unforgivably” to departure where you post insufferable Goodbye World messages on subreddits to go start all over again somewhere else.
Peter Drucker in the Harvard Business Review:
"What is the major problem? It is fundamentally the confusion between effectiveness and efficiency that stands between doing the right things and doing things right. There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all. Yet our tools, especially our accounting concepts and data, all focus on efficiency. What we need is (1) a way to identify the areas of effectiveness (of possible significant results), and (2) a method for concentrating on them."
A simple enough formula.
Simple enough to be boring.
But every productivity tool and system eventually becomes boring.
The good ones, particularly so - they work well enough to blend into the background and stop taking up your mental bandwidth with all their tricks and troubles and frills. If you’re bored with your workflow, that’s not a bad thing - it means it’s time to do the work.
Someone might be able to get more done, in a vacuum, with whatever tool just went viral on Twitter.
But that someone is unlikely to be you.
And it is unlikely to be me.
Being mere mortals, we are better off picking a single system, even if it feels clunky and broken from time to time, even if nobody interesting is tweeting about it, staying with it even if it bores us to tears, and sticking with it come hell or high water.
Because the only metric by which you can actually judge a productivity system is this: did it allow you to produce something or not?