What I learned from the productivity gurus

Hello and welcome to Working It, coming to you from a still-deserted City of London.

I was surprised by the silence on the streets and in offices this week. Many people, it seems, have had the good idea of extending the seasonal break for a few extra days ✈️. Read on for more on why doing less (or just being more realistic about what we can achieve in a working day) might be the best thing any of us can aim for in 2024.

PS We’ve got this new sign in the FT canteen 👀. Please send sightings of unusual workplace notices [you can be anonymous!] to [email protected]

How to work better in 2024: the verdict 👩🏽‍💻

How can we be more productive? What will keep us motivated at work — for longer? And how can we all become better co-workers/managers/humans in 2024?

LinkedIn feeds and email inboxes are awash with motivational posts and tips on these topics — and many more — during this week of good intentions for the year ahead. I am a sucker for self-help content and never saw an “empowering” book I didn’t like. (My Spotify Unwrapped highlight was being in the global top 5 per cent of Esther Perel’s podcast listeners. You get the idea.) So . . . who better to pore over as much advice as possible, and distil the best bits? 😳

First and easiest, I’d recommend this just-published interview with Oliver Burkeman by the FT’s Henry Mance. Oliver’s book Four Thousand Weeks is the single best productivity/life manual I’ve ever read — and I have got through a lot of them.

Here’s the argument in a nutshell: Oliver “starts from a place of bad news: you do not have long to live. Neither does he. Nor do any of us. Western life expectancy is about 4,000 weeks. You might get lucky: Henry Kissinger got 5,244. Then again, 52 weeks just flew by. And you know from experience that, whatever optimistic targets you set for 2024, they are likely to be crowded out by competing demands.” As Oliver tells Henry: “The classic approach to New Year’s resolutions is doomed.”

Once we accept we can do less with each day, we will, Oliver contends, find “sanity and a sense of meaning”. So that means ditching the endless to-do lists. Focus instead on a few we can do. And make tough choices about how we spend our time.

My next recommendation is internet sensation Ali Abdaal, whose book Feel-Good Productivity is just out. He’s coming on the Working It podcast soon, so I’ve been reading the book — and it’s very good. Ali trained as a doctor and really researches his stuff. The essence of the argument here is that: “The secret to productivity isn’t discipline. It’s joy.”

My favourite takeaway: “Success doesn’t lead to feeling good. Feeling good leads to success.” So if you are stuck in a job you hate, or are finding it hard to get up any enthusiasm for tasks, then Feel-Good Productivity might be the book for you. Like Oliver, Ali does not suggest that we blindly aim to do more — or try to become much more efficient. That way, unhappiness and burnout lie 🥺.

I can’t let any productivity special go by without mention of Cal Newport, computer scientist, author and New Yorker magazine contributor. If you don’t subscribe to his newsletter — you should. His productivity advice tends to be granular and there are lots of metrics and tracking tools. So it’s not for everyone — but Cal is the go-to if you like to measure what you do. As he says in his most recent newsletter: “Like many, you may be embracing the new year with a long list of ambitious resolutions. This is great. But perhaps before you dive into your big plans, you should spend a month or two tracking the small.”

Lastly, my own advice: somehow, things get done. You muddle through. I wrote a book in 2023, to be published in April this year. I work full-time so it had to be written at the weekend. My tip? Break enormous tasks (in this case, writing nearly 80,000 words) into manageable chunks. I set a target of 1,500 words per day.

I’d love to hear your productivity tips, ambitions for 2024, or just a foolproof idea that ensures you finish work on time — the Holy Grail of workplace motivation, I’d say. Send it all to [email protected]. I try to reply to everyone, but forgive me if I am slow. It’s down to my new ‘timeboxing’ system.

*Want more? On the Working It podcast this week we are rebroadcasting my 2023 chat with the FT’s own productivity master, the economics columnist Tim Harford, on how he gets everything done. He’s got some email tips that will revolutionise your inbox . . . 

Out-of-Office Therapy

There’s no real-life dilemma this week because I’ve been off and so have (nearly) all of you, but I have been thinking about what might help us get on better with co-workers in 2024. Is there a small change we could easily make? I’d love to hear your ideas.

Here’s my intention: don’t interrupt. I do it all the time, judging by the evidence of the raw audio for the Working It podcast and recorded interviews for this newsletter. A no-interrupt rule is a big step towards being a master of “active listening”, which is so important in workplaces. And which not nearly enough of us practise.

The no-interrupt rule will also require me to be saintly 😇 when the other person is a slow talker*. I once worked for a slow-talking manager and nearly gnawed my knuckles raw in a futile bid to stop myself from finishing their sentences.

*I also pledge to be Zen about close-talkers — those people who get right in your face. A concept first brought to us by Seinfeld.

Got a question, problem or dilemma for Office Therapy? Send it to me: [email protected] or via a voice note. We anonymise everything. Your boss, colleagues or underlings will never know.

Five top stories from the world of work

1. Can bureaucracy be refashioned as a force for good? A good news story from Leyla Boulton about how to improve the much-maligned public sector. It mentions the annual Creative Bureaucracy Festival, which sounds like a wonderful thing.

2. How to heal the UK’s great education divide. Over the past decade the ideological gulf has widened between graduates and non-graduates. Think-tanker Aveek Bhattacharya suggests focusing students on self-realisation as a way towards more cohesion.

3. Are you paying attention? Try these hacks to avoid distraction: One of my favourite academics, Grace Lordan at LSE, has an incredible work rate and here she unveils some of her secrets. She estimates she’s saved four hours a day by eliminating distractions.

4. The future of effective altruism: FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and many other wealthy tech types are followers of this “do good” philosophy that spread from Oxford university into the world. Martin Sandbu unpicks and explains its core tenets (and weaknesses).

5. Why I don’t miss alcohol: Inspiration for anyone doing Dry January from the FT’s Nathalie Thomas, on what she’s learned from four years without a drink (and she lives in Edinburgh, a drink-heavy city).

One more thing . . . 

Ann Patchett is a brilliant writer — Bel Canto is perhaps her best-known novel — but I can’t help thinking she’d be even more lauded if she were a man. So I was delighted to read in her book of essays, These Precious Days (2022), that Ann has in fact been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Only 300 people can be members at any one time — each death creates an opening. She writes about her induction ceremony, sitting next to a childhood hero, John Updike, so excited that “I could feel the strain in every seam of my composure”.

That’s just one of the delights in this “pick-and-mix” book of long and short essays, fragments of memoir and observations. It’s a perfect read for early January, when the fridge contents are still “mainly cheese” and you can’t face tackling that prize-winning dystopian novel you got for Christmas 😟.

And finally . . . 

💷 Get your finances in shape for 2024 with a six-part newsletter series from my wonderful colleague and personal finance expert, Claer Barrett. Sort Your Financial Life Out is free for FT subscribers* (including those who get FT.com through work) . . . so if you are reading this newsletter, you can get Claer’s, too. Each newsletter has action plans and tips, from investments to property and pay rises. Sign up here. (I’m already in 🙋‍♀️.)

*Not an FT subscriber? It’s just £19 to get the whole course.