Author spends a year living productively
The Productivity Project Chris Bailey Random House Canada
As a teenager, Chris Bailey wasn’t playing video games in his room.
He was obsessed with productivity. Even he isn’t really sure why, except to say that he had picked up a book on the subject and that sparked something inside this child of psychologists.
That early obsession took Bailey to Carleton University to pursue a business degree, which included more reading about what makes an economy function more effectively.
In turn, that led him, upon graduation in 2013, to dive deeper into being productive on a personal level.
He did not accept a couple of job offers and turned himself into a year-long experiment. He blogged about his Productivity Project and that became very successful. That led to a book of the same name. All in all, a pretty productive result.
In his year, he conducted interviews with productivity gurus and experimented on himself. He cut out caffeine and sugar, shut off his smartphone and went into solitary for 10 days.
“For me, productivity is one of these curiosities I have. I’ve been curious about it for a decade,” he said in an interview.
“A lot of people like to call themselves productivity gurus or experts, but what I have found from the interviews I have conducted with these folks (such as Charles Duhigg, a New York Times business writer), some know what they are talking about, others not so much.
“A lot of people believe productivity is efficiency, effectiveness. These are cold corporate terms. I view productivity as a way of accomplishing what we intend.”
Bailey is not really focused on corporate efficiencies. He believes personal productivity can “scale up” to a business environment. But it starts with the self.
“The best productivity tactics aren’t about working harder and more frantically, they are about becoming more deliberate about the work that we do.”
It’s about having a game plan for every hour of every day, he says.
He is full of practical tips, one of which could even be seen as a shot at his book.
“One of the things I discovered in the Productivity Project: It’s one thing to read about it, but then you have to make back all the time spent reading about productivity for that advice to worthwhile.”
He says he believes most of this advice isn’t worth that time investment.
“Every minute spent planning is a minute spent not working. In my view, you are perfectly productive when you accomplish what you intend to.
“If you intend to have the best nap you have ever had in years, and you have that nap, I would say you are perfectly productive.” It’s not all about work. Much of Bailey’s interest is more about psychology than it is about business practice. Perhaps that’s because both his parents are psychologists.
“That made me a bit weird, I think. I think too much about everything.
“As a kid I was reading psychology books. I remember picking up Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity by management consultant David Allen at 15 or 16.” He says he was hooked. Bailey didn’t play video games. “I like to accomplish stuff with my time. I was a freak even then.”
After a year, Bailey has learned a lot about himself, including when he is most productive.
“One of biggest myths out there is waking up early makes you more productive. One of the experiments I conducted was waking up at 5:30 a.m. for three months. I struggled with shoehorning this change into my life until I realized after the three months that I hated it.
“I was in love with a fantasy of being an early riser and I didn’t focus enough on whether change was meaningful to me. I’m definitely more of a night owl.”
Did his year of living productively help him?
“I think it did. One of the biggest lessons: I discovered how easy it is to become hard on yourself as you invest in productivity.
“It’s counterintuitive but I became more invested in happiness during the project. And I started doing simple things like slowing down during the day, stopping multi-tasking, defining three simple intentions at the beginning of every day for what I wanted to accomplish. These things helped me become more productive.”
Now he also has something else: a career as an Ottawa-based productivity guru.
“I have a hard time figuring out what to do for fun these days because my work is what I used to do for fun.”