The Addictive Nature of False Productivity

I appreciate putting in the minimum effort required for a given situation.  Some high-minded busybodies might call such a thing laziness, and I take offense to that.  They’re right, but I’m still offended. My preferences, however, have allowed me to discover something.  I know why as organizations grow, meetings explode exponentially.  There is an addictive nature to false productivity, and meetings provide the purest hit of it.

What is false productivity and why is it addictive?  False productivity is achieving a sense of progress without actually moving anywhere.  Have you reworked the same plan of action five times without accomplishing step one?  Congratulations, you are a purveyor of the finest sort of false productivity!  One finds this in any sort of endeavor.  The lifter who constantly changes his routine and never builds muscle is kin to the manager who rewrites her mission statement every quarter.

This behavior scratches an itch deep inside us all—full emotional payoff with minimal effort.  I love painting with problematically broad brushes, so I feel comfortable saying every human being knows the satisfaction that comes with accomplishing something.  The only difference in climbing Everest versus not throat punching an obnoxious customer is scale, but the reward is the same: our brains release some sweet, sweet dopamine.  We ride that natural high with a conquered task under one foot as our voice raises to the sky shouting “Who’s next?!”  Obviously, we crave more of this.

Thus, the issue.  Like any addiction, the body adjusts to the stimulus.  We need more input to get the same output.  A kid gets a rush the first time he climbs a ten-foot artificial rock wall, and a few years later he’s free soloing El Cap.  The thing is, accomplishing tasks gets hard.  It takes effort some of us would much rather put towards reading books or daydreaming about throat punching customers.  To further complicate it, you know deep down that your laziness should not be rewarded by any hormonal cocktail.  What is a lazy person to do?

Enter the useless meeting.  I make a distinction between a productive working group (PWG) and a useless meeting (UM).  The PWG has a clear agenda leading to a tangible product at its conclusion that will advance one or more organizational goals.  Unless you are an expert at skating, avoid these at all costs (more on that later).  UMs, however, accomplish nothing apart from the appearance of productivity.  One emerges from an UM with a false feeling of progress and all the accompanying dopamine, but having spent no actual effort.  This is the dream for the lazy person willing to grab it.

As organizations grow, so too do their UMs.  Why is this?  If we consider the axiom that only 10% of personnel provide the majority of value to be even remotely accurate, that leaves a lot of time to fill for the 90% who don’t accomplish much.  Enter the UM.  Nothing gives the appearance of productivity more than a schedule chock full of them.  If anyone tries to question a lazy person on what they actually do, there is no better defense than to take an aggrieved stance while pointing towards a day full of meetings.  “I have to attend so many meetings, I can barely get anything done!” one can say with a straight face.  Amazingly, all but the most discerning of managers readily accept this excuse (likely because they, too, are lazy). 

Lazy people should worm themselves into as many UMs as possible—maximum returns for little to no effort.  It can be difficult to do so, as many guard these opportunities like dragons crouching over their hoards.  The last thing any UM host wants is for a 10 percenter to show up and announce that the meeting is useless.  Doing so disrupts the communal hallucination lazy people need to guarantee the dopamine hit, and thus is a threat.  This is why as organizations grow, the meetings taking place within it grow at a rate beyond that of the organization itself.  Few organizations put up safeguards against UMs, so all it takes is a group of like-minded lazy people to set up in a conference room and talk in circles on a routine basis.

Now, I mentioned earlier that only the most advanced skaters should attempt to join a PWG.  The trick is to find a way into the PWG without accepting a defined role.  You are wallpaper, noticed but never commented on unless looking awful or emitting an odd odor.  No one expects anything of you, but by being a part of it, you share in the outcome.  This is the Elysium: the satisfaction of real results with no effort.  Think back to any group project you ever had to work on in school.  The one kid that did nothing but still got the high grade earned by the others’ hard work?  That is your spirit animal. 

The risk here cannot be overstated.  By attending a PWG, the peril of actual work hovers over you like the Sword of Damocles.  Make the wrong productive comment and you will find yourself with a list of due outs faster than you can fake a bout of food poisoning.  Provide nothing, though, and the high performers running the PWG will sniff you out and banish you, the equivalent of a dealer cutting you off.  For once you have tasted those highs, you can never go back to a steady diet of UMs. 

It has never been easier to be a lazy person.  In olden times, laziness meant death by starvation because your fields remained fallow.  The modern knowledge work environment oozes opportunities to skate, as offloading the real work onto actual producers still results in a group grade that management thinks of as organizational success.  Ride that wave, my friend.  Ride it until artificial intelligence replaces us all and forces us back into subsistence farming while the 10 percenters rule the world.