Remote Work for Humans

The To-Do List and Pseudo-Productivity

The illusion of productivity that our to-do lists provide is incredibly enticing. The list, grows endlessly, but it also provides us a never ending dopamine hit because we can cross items off of it. It lives, without context, on our personal drives. Tasks on the list come from any and everywhere. All are high priority.

I never questioned the never-ending to-do list at the start of my career. I wanted to be a good worker. At the time, I thought a good worker was someone who took care of everything that was thrown their way. I understood delegation to be a one-way street and I would be the one on the receiving end of all tasks.

Now that I’m a little older, wiser, and more well read, I realize that I was falling for the allure of pseudo-productivity. Pseudo-productivity is a term that I first encountered in Cal Newport’s book Slow Productivity. Pseudo-productivity is the result of mistaking visible activity for progress or “true work”.

When office work started to become more common in the mid-twentieth century, pseudo-productivity was managers seeing people at desks. Now that our work is increasingly online, we scramble for ways to appear productive – perpetually green Teams statuses, status update meetings ticking off tasks collectively, and checking emails at all hours of the night.

To quote Newport: “We toil long days, every day, to satisfy the demands of pseudo-productivity, not because skilled cognitive efforts actually require such unwavering attention. If anything, we have evidence to believe that industrial-style work rhythms make us less effective.”

I hope by now it’s clear that it’s not the to-do list in and of itself, it’s how we use it. Let’s look at how remote work best practices can shape how we think about our tasks and help us get radically intentional with our time and energy.

Overcoming Pseudo-Productivity with Remote Work Best Practices

Last week, I shared GitLab’s remote manifesto. I want to highlight a few of the items from that list and talk about how they connect to getting radically intentional about our own work. It requires creativity, but it is possible.

Public sharing of information (over need to know access)

Ok, public sector workers are not strangers to sharing our work with the public. But that’s not exactly what this point is about for our remote work.

How I’ve come to translate this for our context is centralizing our team’s efforts.

We want to create a clear team ecosystem that helps us to maintain awareness of our team’s needs and priorities. In order to get radically intentional with your time, you need to be aware of how what’s being asked of you fits into your team’s context. When considering what to prioritize, you need to consider the interdependence of your work and your team’s needs.

When our team communication is fragmented across various Teams chats, meeting chats, email, channels it can feel impossible to understand the landscape of your team’s work. In this scenario, I’ve noticed that we all default to “everyone is super busy”. It’s not necessarily true, but it does keep you from reaching out for help because you don’t want to be the one adding to an already full plate.

Formal communication channels (over informal communication channels)

Our fragmented communication is more a lack of communication strategy than an inherent flaw in the software provided to us (except of course when the network goes down and we can’t communicate at all).

Has your team ever defined when chat should be used? Email? Meetings?

Simply getting on one page about what communication channel to use and when, can reduce a lot of notification overwhelm. For one of my previous teams, we worked to define how we would use Teams chat, Teams channels, SharePoint and Email.

It’s important to note that this type of guidance is not meant to be overly restrictive, but rather to provide guidance on all of the tech tools at our disposal. It works best as a living document that evolves as the needs and demands of the team evolve.

The results of impact (over the activity put in)

This part of the remote manifesto directly calls out pseudo-productivity. Running through a task list simply isn’t going to cut it. We are going for quality work. Luckily for us, quality work is a side effect of working like a human.

Making “Productivity” Work for Us

This space has never been about being more productive. It has always been about centering and honoring our humanity in the ways that we work. I’ll end with another quote from Slow Productivity that sums this idea up well:

Slow productivity emphatically rejects the performative rewards of unwavering urgency. There will always be more work to do. You should give your efforts the breathing room and respect required to make them part of a life well lived, not an obstacle to it.

Work like a human.