It’s common to confuse productivity with optimal productivity.
Organizing the filing cabinet is productive, but it’s far from an optimal level of productivity. When I think about what is optimal, three things come to mind:
- The value of the work (on a scale from minimum wage to $100+/hour)
- The urgency of the work
- The potential ROI
Optimal productivity maximizes these three things. Cleaning the filing cabinet is minimum wage value, with low urgency and pretty low ROI. That’s not to say it never should be done, but it’s far from optimal.
On the other hand, there are tasks that are very urgent, like responding to email, that have a low value (as in, it doesn’t take someone making $100/hour to respond to an email), and variable potential ROI.
Moving up in optimality, there are tasks like strategic planning sessions where you are course correcting a project, program or product. This is work that typically will not be done by a minimum wage worker, is urgent and has an enormous potential ROI.
There comes a time when there is WAY more to be done than is possible to get done. Unfortunately, that’s not how school works. In school, you must complete all your assignments all the time. So when we graduate, we’re not ready for a world of prioritization rather than 100% coverage. Hopefully this light framework for optimality could help you make better decisions about what to prioritize.