All Fuzzy

Productivity Posts Are Bullshit.

There are many productivity gurus on Hacker News and proggit. Every week or so, we come across people’s personal account of how they’ve improved their productivity by 45.67%. It’s a bit like watching Oprah. On some lucky days, we get to hear about how using a web app, X, has minimized employee cigarette breaks by using agile methods from no other than the makers of X. And did you hear about how Vim changes lives?

Let’s get the facts straight. Reading productivity posts in itself is a highly unproductive exercise. Our time probably would have been better spent by looking at cats on Reddit instead. Also consider the fact that all those productivity posts you read all these years have done nothing to improve your productivity. It’s about time your rational mind conclude that productivity posts are bullshit.

Now you might interject and say, “but Jason, I know someone who now writes 2 kloc per day by taking advice from {namedrop some prominent programmer here} on Twitter.” Sure, I know that guy too. I also heard that some people got killed getting struck by lightning as well.

Isn’t this post itself a productivity post. Perhaps, it is. This particular post might actually increase your productivity by discouraging you from reading any more productivity posts. If this is a productivity post, I hope that this is the last productivity post you ever read.