Common Sense With a Philosophy Degree
The Productivity Industry's Favourite Ghost
I've been getting things done for fifty years.
Not elegantly.
Not with a system.
Not with a Sunday reset ritual or a definition of done framework or a two-minute rule for small tasks.
Just getting on with it, because the alternative was not getting on with it, and I'm fundamentally lazy enough that if I don't do the hard thing first I'll spend the rest of the day finding reasons not to do it.
This is not wisdom.
It's self-knowledge in the service of getting the dishes washed before I convince myself they can wait until tomorrow.
This week I read a Medium article that told me the same thing.
In seven habits.
With Seneca.
The Article
It promised to save me twenty hours a week.
Twenty hours.
That's half a working week.
Two and a half days.
The article implied that by following seven habits I would effectively gain an extra two and a half days every seven days, which over a year would give me approximately 1,040 bonus hours, which is forty-three additional days of productive life, which seems like a lot to get from batching your emails.
The twenty hours figure is not sourced.
It is not the result of a study. It is a number in a headline, chosen because it is large enough to be compelling and small enough not to trigger immediate scepticism.
It is doing considerable work for a number with no evidence behind it.
The Seven Habits
Here they are, stripped of the apparatus:
- Do similar tasks together so your brain doesn't have to keep switching.
- Do the hard thing first while your energy is high.
- Keep a consistent routine for the ordinary parts of your day.
- Give yourself tighter deadlines than you think you need.
- Plan your week before it starts.
- Know when something is finished and stop.
- Do small tasks immediately rather than writing them down.
That's it.
That's the article.
Those are seven things that sensible people have been doing and suggesting for as long as there has been work to manage. Your more organised colleague has been saying most of them for years, for free, over coffee, without invoking the Stoics.
The Philosophy
The article invokes the Stoics.
Specifically, it invokes something called prosoche, the practice of sustained attention to the present task that Epictetus taught his students.
This is deployed to justify batching your emails.
It also invokes Seneca, who said that to be everywhere is to be nowhere, which is used to support the same point about batching your emails.
Two ancient philosophers, then, for the price of one piece of common sense.
Then there's Hemingway, who stopped writing mid-sentence each day so he always knew where to begin the next morning.
Applied here to the advice about artificial deadlines.
Then Peter Drucker, who said plans are useless but planning is indispensable.
Applied to the Sunday reset ritual.
I want to be honest. I know almost nothing about philosophy.
I know slightly less about the Stoics.
What I can tell you is that these citations are doing a specific job. They're taking advice that your more organised colleague gives you for nothing and cleaning it up, putting it in a nice suit, and presenting it as the distilled wisdom of two thousand years of philosophical tradition.
The advice doesn't change. The authority does.
Seneca said it.
Therefore batching your emails is ancient wisdom rather than obvious common sense.
My System
I am, at heart, a lazy person.
I don't mean this as self-deprecation. I mean it as the honest explanation for every productivity habit I've ever developed.
I do the hard thing first because I know that if I don't, I'll spend the rest of the day walking past it, thinking about it, feeling vaguely guilty about it, and eventually deciding it can wait until tomorrow. At which point the same thing happens again.
Doing it first is not discipline. It's an acknowledgment that I cannot be trusted to do it later.
I batch tasks because switching between different kinds of work is kind of annoying and I don't enjoy being annoyed.
I standardise the routine parts of my day because making decisions about things I already know how to do is a waste of time I could spend watching birds or photographing bees on my balcony.
I know when something is finished because I'm lazy enough that additional polishing requires effort I'd rather spend elsewhere.
None of this required Seneca.
It required fifty years of noticing that I'm not as disciplined as I'd like to be and adjusting accordingly.
This is, I think, what most people's productivity systems actually look like underneath the philosophy.
Not ancient wisdom.
Not optimised frameworks.
Just a series of accommodations made with your own particular laziness, inertia, and talent for self-deception.
The Twenty Hours
I didn't save twenty hours.
I spent seven minutes reading it, which is the opposite of the intended outcome.
The seven minutes were not wasted.
The article prompted this one, which is something.
But if you're looking for the genuine productivity insight buried in both pieces, here it is, free of charge, without Seneca:
- Figure out what you tend to avoid and do it first.
- Stop doing things that are already done.
- Get on with it.
That's the system. It works about as well as anything else.
A Note
The author of the original article has built something genuine: 106,000 followers, tens of thousands of newsletter subscribers, courses, books, a content company, a decade of consistent work.
The system described is clearly working for him.
I don't begrudge him his 106,000 followers. I'm just not convinced it works for the rest of us, or that Seneca would be flattered by the association.
I'm just a 71-year-old Welshman who gets things done by acknowledging that he won't if he doesn't do them immediately.
Seneca would probably have had something to say about that. I haven't read enough of him to know what.
But I do know that for fifty years, common sense hasn't needed a philosophy degree to get the dishes done.