I am a horribly disorganized person.

My desk is a mess, my silverware isn’t sorted, and none of my socks match. I use colorblindness as an excuse to not dress well. I’ve started making spreadsheets of my spreadsheets in order to keep track of my shit, and somehow I STILL forgot to buy garbage tags yesterday. I’m probably the least productive self-improvement writer on the internet. But productivity is bullshit, so that doesn’t really matter.

Now now, stop choking on your coffee. I’m sure you, and the 2 billion other people who pretend they have OCD, aren’t used to your pretenses being abused (buckle up; it gets worse), but here’s a raw fact you need to accept:

Your process doesn’t matter if you can’t deliver.

It doesn’t matter how many color-coded spreadsheets you use, how many journals you keep, or how much you paid for that fancy ‘life tracker’ app. No one cares about how efficiently you handle your morning emails. No one cares about your suuuuper special milestone system. No one wants to see your new filing system. The only thing they care about is the product you deliver, and the value you communicate. Anything short of that is feel-good nonsense meant to keep you warm at night.

Now, that doesn’t mean that productivity is bad. On the contrary, productivity is an incredibly important thing once you’ve delivered your first product. But, until you deliver, until you finish your first iteration of whatever the hell it is you’re working on, productivity doesn’t mean a single damn thing.

Produce! Then refine.

Some jobs have easily quantifiable deliverables — software developers, artisans, writers, etc — while others provide less tangible products. No matter what industry you work in, though, there is at least the idea of an end product. And just as there’s an end product to almost everything we do, there’s also the rough draft, the prototype, the beta, that comes first. And finishing that rough draft is the most important thing you can do.

Outside of the nerdosphere, you probably won’t hear much about iteration. Which is kinda funny, given the fact that we iterate every day. Every time we repeat a set process (our morning rituals, our daily to-do list, our quarterly reports) we’re iterating. It’s what the service industry is built around. It’s a fundamental part of computing. It’s a part of manufacturing, designing, prototyping, and pretty much every other process that involves doing something more than once. It’s a not-so-fancy-word that applies to practically everything humans do. It’s repetition.

It’s during iteration that we’re supposed to refine. That’s where ‘productivity’ belongs. Before that, the biggest concern should be efficacy, your ability to deliver. Worrying about productivity before you have a product is pointless because you don’t have shit for a baseline. You don’t even know what your end product is going to look like.

When you’re doing something for the first time, your number one concern should be your efficacy. Anything else is mental masturbation.

To give you a concrete example, I write anywhere from 3–5k words per day. Writing is my business. But when it comes to producing the first draft of any particular article, newsletter, or ad campaign, the last thing I worry about is how anal my outlines are, or the flatness of my folder architecture. My first concern is completing a rough deliverable, performing a post-mortem, and refining the product and process based on those results. Before doing that, nothing else matters. No matter how much time, energy, or planning goes into that first iteration, it’s going to take the longest. I could lament that, or I could shut up and work.

And so, obviously, I shut up and work.

Are some of the processes the same? Yes. And those are the processes that I’ve worked on to refine. But treating each client the same is like trying to roast a chicken the same way you’d smoke a ham. Both are for dinner, but they’re different meats.

The current obsession with productivity serves as a distraction, not a tool. Check out the top articles about productivity on the web — do they actually apply to you? Can you actually apply them right now, or after a post-mortem? Will reading them actually help you deliver?

No.

Most of them are so general (clean your desk! Find inspiration! Do yoga!) that they’re worthless. They’re suggestions that might remove distractions or get you over the hump, but they have very little impact on the actual process you use to get things done. They tell you how to deal with distractions, how to keep your wandering mind in check, but they don’t help you work. Reading a productivity article won’t make you more effective, and efficacy is what counts.

I mean, really, how the hell could some writer on the internet know where the main bottleneck is in your research/report writing/chicken roasting/widget making process? Unless they’re peering through your windows right now, the only thing they can give you is generalized advice.

So here’s some generalized advice on how to forget productivity and actually get shit done:

Choose Post-Mortems Over Excessive Pre-Planning

Replace your anal pre-planning with brutal and honest post-mortems. Condense your pointlessly detailed goal statements and outlines with with a brief list of three-ish objectives, and spend no more than five minutes on it. Then, once you hit those objectives, put your time and energy into breaking down what you’ve actually done. That way, when you pick things up later, you’ll have a refined and objective-oriented breakdown of what you need to do and a rough version of the entire deliverable that you can get feedback on.

This applies to writing, cooking, designing, doodling, prototyping, experimenting, and all the other verbs that involve creating stuff. Whenever you’re doing something new, you have to experiment in order to find the best way to do it. You can’t plan your way through every obstacle. But you can — and should — learn from your successes and failures. A proper post-mortem will help you refine each iteration of whatever, and push you to finish and deliver so you can understand what you’ve done.

The old ‘measure twice, cut once’ rule is a great one (and it’s still important to be thorough and precise), but it’s intended for situations where the core design — and function — has already been figured out. I’m not telling you to throw caution to the wind and deliberately use ineffective methods, but there’s a difference between building a table based on designs that have been thoroughly prototyped and trying to create a unique solution to a unique problem on a limited timeline.

So finish damn the job, and do a post-mortem.

Set (And Follow) Deadlines, With Consequences

It’s easy to slack off when you’re working on personal projects. You tell yourself that you’re going to write 2000 words a day and finally finish that novel, but you end up dripping a mere 500 words per month onto the page and still pat yourself on the back. Screw that shit. Give yourself a deadline, a reward if you meet it, and a consequence if you don’t.

Creating an amazing product on the first draft is a matter of luck, not skill. It takes experimentation, variation, and iteration to produce something remarkable. But, in order to get to the point where you can refine, first you need to deliver. Treat your time as a limited resource, and use that limitation as an advantage.

And no, that does not involve finding the perfect playlist and getting into ‘the zone.’

Deadlines should motivate you to cut the fat and focus on the core product. Deadlines should inform your scope and process selection. Deadlines should make decision making easier. If you don’t treat your deadline like a tool, you’re doing it wrong. Going past your deadline should prompt a post-mortem, after which you cut deeper and make some hard choices. That might mean turning your epic novel into a short story, or shelving the project and pivoting. Whatever the result is, you should be learning from every deadline you meet or miss.

First drafts are rarely pretty, whether it’s a lab report or a nightstand. But if you have to choose between an ugly product and no product and you’re already past your deadline, you need to learn how to ship an ugly product. You might need to change the scope of the project, the level of detail, or the number of extraneous features. It might not be as comfortable, it might not be as stylish, but as long as it hits your core objectives it’s still your deliverable.

So set a deadline, and deliver it.

Be Professional About It

As you may have noticed, I’m not Marie Kondo. I’m not talking about your bloody closet or the emotional value of pitching your old dish towels. I’m a cranky young freelancer who sees efficacy as a business. And I apply that approach to everything I can, because that effectiveness is what makes those things fun. I don’t just like doing things, I like completing things, too. I like having goals, I like being hungry, I like accomplishing things. I like winning. But you can’t win a race you don’t finish.

Instead of being lackadaisical about whatever, give it the same weight as your professional life. Be serious about it. You still get to have fun, you still get to play around with it, but you also get to utilize a production-oriented mindset and a whole pile of rhetoric designed to make communicating ideas that much easier. Do cool things, with objectives.

You work out with a goal in mind, right? The same thing goes for cooking, sewing, woodworking, painting, and drinking. You don’t just do it to do it, you do it to do it better. You do it to lift heavier, taste better things, sew larger things, build more interesting things, paint cooler things, and forget more important things. You do it to see how well you can do it, and in order to do that you break it down into objectives and processes and deadlines. You have goals, deliverables, end products, byproducts, overhead, and resource management. You have time shortages, resource shortages, and scope changes. You already know how to handle these things professionally. Nothing’s stopping you from using that same approach for your personal shit.

And no, it doesn’t suck the fun out of it. You laugh at your job, right? You find ways to enjoy what you’re doing even when you’re in work mode, right? And I can guarantee that your hobbies aren’t fun all the time. It’s all a mixture of hard work and accomplishment, and both sides of the equation benefit from a calm and professional approach.

So go be a pro.

Wrapping This Up

Since I’ve already taken up enough of your time calling your productivity articles bullshit and making fun of people who never finish their projects, I’m going to chuck a pithy little summary onto the end of this that you can quote to all of your friends.

Productivity, as a concept, is useful. But the vast majority of the productivity audience needs more help with finishing things than they do doing things better. We’re all so focused on making tweaks and changes to what we do, that we ignore the fact that we don’t really do anything. When was the last time one of your friends wrote a book, launched a company, or released an app?

And how often do they talk about doing it, while never following through?

If you want to actually finish whatever it is that you’re doing, don’t worry about productivity. Worry about efficacy. Leave productivity for the second revision, and pour your energy into creating an awesome prototype. Use post-mortems, informative deadlines, and a professional mindset to make your process more effective and let the productivity shit sort itself out between drafts. Leave color-coding your silverware to your drunken weekend misadventures; use your active time to achieve things.

And, most importantly, stop reading productivity articles.