Particularly attentive readers may have noticed that I do not tend to use the word “productivity” but instead write about “working effectively” — as in yesterday’s note on A Structure for Personal Reviews. Likewise, I do not have a productivity topic on my site, but I do have one for working effectively.¹

I made this change in my speech and writing a few years ago. I have grown troubled by the notion of “productivity”. My value and yours is not in what we produce, but in what we are: people with intrinsic value because we are made in the image of God. Thus, productivity per se is not my main goal for the work I do. Of course I want to “produce” something in the sense of actually doing work that matters to other people. That is not the same as treating production — output — as the primary measure of my work, though.

I have found it helpful to think instead in terms of faithfulness: How well do I do the work in front of me, whatever that work may be?² And thus, when I am thinking about how to improve the way I do my work, I want to think of being effective in the work I do. That work may or may not be generative or creative (words I like much better than “productive” anyway), but in the interest of faithfulness, I want to do that work as effectively as I can.

One key difference between working effectively and productivity, to my mind, is that working more effectively may in fact result in producing less! Now, my notion of effective work certainly overlaps with a good deal of what you will find in the productivity space — but the distinction in orientation has been quite fruitful for me, even while a lot of the practices are the same: noting what I want to do, what I have done, and reflecting on why I want to do those things and how and why I succeed or fail at them.