Read any blog, scroll through Twitter for a few minutes, listen to almost any podcast, and you’ll find someone confidently telling you how to structure your day. A CEO shares their morning routine. A tech billionaire gives you a list of life hacks. A lifestyle influencer promises that if you copy their ritual of cold showers, bullet journaling, and mushroom coffee, you too will reach the heights of efficiency.

Every list is presented as if it’s a transferable, universal blueprint for success.

What they actually reveal is the gulf between the circumstances of the advice-giver and the listener.

These practices might make (some) sense for the individual in question, rooted in their environment, their resources, and their obligations.

But they simply do not provide a reliable playbook for either you or me.

The problem is not the advice itself; it’s that the context that makes it work is rarely portable.

It's one thing to hear how a billionaire structures their week; it's another to assume those strategies map onto the rhythms of someone with a job, with kids, and with crushingly limited autonomy over their time.

Imagine a single mother raising three children in the 1980s.

No smartphones, no grocery delivery apps, no Slack notifications.

She may have juggled multiple part-time jobs while ensuring the kids were clothed, fed, and ferried to school. She didn't optimize with a Pomodoro timer or color-coded productivity software. She built a system of survival and adaptation rooted in necessity. To ask her what she learned about prioritization, about resilience, about squeezing efficiency from chaos, is to access something closer to the truth of productivity for most people.

Contrast that with a tech founder who commands an army of assistants and tools.

His productivity advice might boil down to "outsource everything that doesn't require your unique vision."

Which is sound guidance for someone with millions of dollars in discretionary spending.

For almost everyone else, it borders on parody.

Seneca offered advice to young noblemen who wanted to live wisely, but his counsel on detachment and tranquility carried a different weight when spoken by a man who could withdraw to his villa rather than grind at the bottom of society.

Productivity, like philosophy, is always conditioned by circumstance.

The genre of productivity advice smuggles in an assumption: that if you imitate the great, you will become great. This is a familiar fallacy. Alexander the Great slept with a copy of the Iliad under his pillow, aspiring to emulate Achilles. But his conquest was not the result of nightly readings of Homer; it was the product of upbringing, resources, timing, and his own audacity. Achilles’ example may have inspired him, but it didn't give him a tactical manual.

When a modern mogul outlines their ten rules for “working smarter not harder,” the encouraged act of imitation ignores the invisible scaffolding around their life. You can get up at 4:00 a.m., but if you still need to cook breakfast for your kids, commute an hour, and work two shifts, your day is just not going to resemble the billionaire who gets chauffeured to the office gym.

Why do we fall for this?

Partly because there's a comfort in the thought that greatness can be reverse-engineered. If only you knew the hacks, you too could rise above mediocrity. The alternative explanation - that productivity is bound up in structural conditions and messy human entanglements - is less appealing. It tells us (awfully, cruelly, chillingly) that there are limits to the cult of optimization.

One-size-fits-all frameworks pretend that everyone’s day can be sliced neatly into blocks, everyone’s motivation can be stoked by the same rituals, everyone’s brain chemistry responds the same way to caffeine and early rising.

But our lives are not so malleable.

When Benjamin Franklin drew up his daily schedule, balancing work, reflection, and leisure, it fit the life of a man with autonomy over his time and a household to support him. When modern knowledge workers try to replicate the same philosophy, they find themselves interrupted by meetings, messages, and the unpredictable and unforgiving demands of Microsoft Bloody Teams.

Franklin’s structure was admirable, but it's not universal.

Every decade produces its own genre of advice: the Victorian self-help manuals, the early 20th century efficiency movement, the postwar craze for management science, the late 20th century obsession with "7 Habits." Today, the flavor is "life hacks" and quantified-self experiments.

What unites them all is the assumption that productivity can be engineered.

But humans are not machines.

We grow tired, we grow sick, we grow old. We are embedded in networks of obligation. The fantasy of optimization collapses when it meets the stubborn surface of human limitation. If you ever doubt this, look at the wave of burnout stories we get every year from ambitious young professionals who meticulously tracked their sleep, diet, and workouts until the whole damn thing fell apart.

Productivity advice should be treated as an experiment, not a commandment. Try it if it suits your context; discard it if it doesn’t. More importantly, look closer to home for your models. How do people in your own life manage their obligations? What systems have you already built unconsciously? What can you learn from the folks who live like you?

I think the most radical thing any of us can do is to stop worshiping at the altar of the productivity hero. Elon Musk’s schedule might make sense for Elon Musk. It probably makes zero sense for you. Copying the purported habits of the world's richest man is unlikely to keep your family in clean socks.

The hunger for productivity advice will never disappear. People will always want to believe there exists a secret technique that can unlock their potential. But we'd be wiser to remember that advice is never free-floating. It's always tethered to context. Before adopting someone else’s prescription, ask whether their circumstances resemble your own.

If the answer is no, listen politely, then look elsewhere.

The art of productively isn’t maximizing every hour in the abstract. It's making the best use of time given the actual shape of your obligations and resources. And sometimes the best guide is the parent who managed to get three kids to school clothed, fed, and more or less on time, not the billionaire who wakes at dawn to meditate while their personal chef prepares breakfast.

That's real productivity.

And it's wisdom worth seeking.