The Productivity Myth

The productivity claim is one of the most consistent features of remote work content.

People are more productive working remotely. They get more done. They have eliminated the commute, the open plan office noise, the pointless meetings, the performative presence of being seen to be working by a manager who equates visibility with output. Liberated from all of this, they are operating at peak efficiency.

Some of this is true. The commute elimination is real. Some meetings genuinely should not exist. Being judged on output rather than presence can unlock genuine performance in people who were previously spending enormous energy performing busyness for an audience.

But the claim, as it is usually made, glosses over something important.

Let me tell you what a productive day actually looks like after several years of working this way.

9am. Laptop open. Intention: begin the main piece of work for the day.

Actual activity: check email. There are four emails. Three of them can wait. One of them generates a thought that leads to opening a browser tab that leads to reading two articles that are interesting but not relevant to the work that was supposed to begin at 9am.

It is now 10:15.

Open the document. Read what was written yesterday. Change a sentence. Consider a different approach to the structure. Open a new document to outline the different approach. Decide the original structure was fine. Close the new document.

It is now 10:45. Forty-five minutes have passed. The work has not materially advanced.

This is not laziness. This is the brain doing what brains do when there is no external structure imposing focus. The office — whatever its flaws — imposed a structure. Arrival time, departure time, the presence of colleagues who were also working, the visible accountability of being in a place designated for work. Remote work removes all of this and replaces it with nothing, then expects the output to be the same or better.

You go to a café to work because working alone in your apartment is either too comfortable or too isolated depending on the day.

The café introduces its own variables. Someone sits next to you with a phone call. The music changes to something that requires active effort to ignore. The wifi slows down. The table wobbles. The air conditioning is angled directly at the back of your neck in a way that is not quite uncomfortable enough to move but not comfortable enough to forget.

You have headphones. The headphones help. The headphones cannot help with the table wobbling.

You get some work done. How much is difficult to measure honestly.

I have tracked my actual focused work hours on various occasions over the years. By focused I mean: working on the primary task, making genuine progress, not switching tabs, not drifting.

The number is consistently between two and four hours on a typical day. Three is a good day. Four is an excellent day and usually follows a deadline.

The rest of the time is occupied by: email, administrative tasks that feel like work, research that is sometimes necessary and sometimes the brain finding a sophisticated reason to avoid the hard thing, eating, logistics, the specific kind of staring that precedes actual work but is not itself work.

This is roughly consistent with what research suggests about sustained cognitive focus. The human brain is not designed for eight hours of concentrated output. The office context created the illusion of eight hour productivity partly by counting presence as productivity and partly by filling the gaps with meetings, which are technically being at work while not doing the actual work.

Remote work does not fix this. It just makes the gaps more visible because there is no meeting to fill them.

The productivity claim is also a comparison problem.

Remote workers compare themselves to their office selves and conclude they are more productive because they are not in pointless meetings and they eliminated the commute. This is a real gain.

What they do not compare is focused output hours. Because tracking focused output hours honestly is uncomfortable. It reveals that three hours of real work plus five hours of adjacent activity is the reality — and that this was probably also the reality in the office, just differently distributed and better disguised.

The remote worker is not less productive than the office worker. They are probably roughly as productive and significantly happier about it. The commute elimination and the autonomy are genuine quality of life improvements.

But more productive is doing a lot of work for the claim. Different productive would be more accurate. Still good. Just different.

Time blocking with genuine commitment to the block. Not a calendar entry that you override when something feels more urgent — an actual protected period where the email is closed and the phone is face down and the one thing gets done before the tab switching begins.

Working with deadlines even when the deadline is self-imposed. The brain responds to deadlines in ways it does not respond to open-ended intentions. A task that "needs to be done this week" will expand to fill the week. The same task due at 3pm today gets done by 3pm.

Knowing your hours. Most people have a three to four hour window where their cognitive performance is significantly better than the rest of the day. Finding that window and protecting it for the hardest work is more valuable than any productivity system, app, or morning routine.

And honesty about the numbers. Three focused hours is not a failure. Three focused hours of genuinely good work is a productive day. Accepting this without guilt is, paradoxically, one of the most productive things you can do.

There are days — good days, days where the work went well and the wifi held and the café was quiet — where I close the laptop at 6pm and calculate the actual focused hours and the number is two and a half.

I do not post about this.

I post the mornings when it worked. I post the view from the desk when the light was good. I do not post the Tuesday afternoon where I spent forty minutes reorganising a folder structure that did not need reorganising because my brain had decided the hard thing was not happening today.

Nobody does.

This is why the productivity myth persists. The two and a half hour days are invisible. The good days are documented. The algorithm rewards the documentation of good days. The result is a feed full of productivity and a private reality that is somewhat more complicated.

You are not broken if your focused hours are fewer than the content suggests. You are human.

The content is not counting the same thing you are counting.

Andrew — No Refunds •••

andrewnorefunds.beehiiv.com