Effective Work > Productivity

Nowadays it seems like everyone is trying to gain a competitive edge through productivity hacks. It seems there is an endless flow of methods and tools that make you more productive. But productivity is for machines, not for people. Metrics about units per hour improving in a certain amount of time or squeezing more out of less is not meaningful to people.

Focusing on productivity, puts emphasis on being busy and occupying your time. Being effective means that you are able to finish your tasks, but leaving you with time for leisure, family and friends, or even time for nothing.

Yes, it's okay to have nothing to do and still be able to delegate things as not worthy of your time. Why not stop working if you only have 3 hours of work to do in a day. Doing something that isn't worth doing, isn't a good use of your time.

At the end of the day, you can not outwork the whole world. There is always going to be someone willing to work harder for much less than you. Someone just as hungry or hungrier. Putting in 1,001 hours to someone's 1,000 hours won't make much of a different.

Let's make work ethic about doing what you say you're going to do, putting in a fair day's work, respecting the work, customer, coworkers, not wasting time, not creating work for other people, and not being a bottleneck. This is what gets you ahead of everyone else, not hustle culture or little productivity contests.