The Real Secret Behind Increasing Your Productivity and Work Ethic

Everyone wants to be known as the guy who has a strong, insane, sickening work ethic.

Pushing into challenges and overcoming them will help you in your personal, social, and of course – your work and financial life.

Many people think that developing a good work ethic is something that you need to fight and grit your teeth about, when in actuality, it’s not as difficult as it seems.

By the end of this article, you’ll learn:

• The relationship between production and working “smart”
• Why “old school” metrics of production don’t cut it today
• The “passive” side of working hard
• Things to think about doing to become someone who has a strong work ethic

This article is intended to be a mindset shift, not a step-by-step guide. It will get you to start looking at your own productivity in a new way in all areas of your life.

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Understanding the Relationship Between Productivity and Your Work Ethic

To bring this more into focus, it helps to understand what productivity is:

the effectiveness of productive effort, especially in industry, as measured in terms of the rate of output per unit of input.

An old school definition of productivity: quantity of things produced x quality of things produced.

If I make 10 widgets per hour with a quality score of 10/10, then my productivity score is higher than someone who makes 8 widgets per hour with a quality score of 10/10.

That metric may have held water in the old economy and it does work in many cases (like crank work). But we live in an information-based society.

Your productivity is more determined by your ability to synthesize and innovate. This mainly relies on being solutions-oriented. The biggest rewards go to people who solve problems, not patch them.

So that’s one of the key factors of work ethic – focusing on results (the Pareto Principle will help you do this).

The Truth About Productivity, Life, and Task Completion

At this point, it should be obvious that your success in your personal and professional life will be determined by how many quality results you can produce over time. This is because at its core, life is about task completion. You will rarely rise higher than your ability to complete tasks effectively.

Everything you want to do is a task. Reading a book is a task. Sleeping is a task. Going on a date is a task. Going out with your friends is a task. Traveling to another location is a task. These are all tasks. However, some of these tasks obviously have higher consequences for completion than others.

I would argue that going on a date and possibly meeting your eventual life partner takes higher priority than reading a book (or maybe not, you may be reading about valuable career advice). However, these are both things that you want to do and they both take up specific amounts of time.

Now, it may be strange to look at life through this clinical lens, but it will do you a world of good, especially in the realm of time management. If you whittle this down to a finer point, you start to get to the discussion of tradeoffs and behavioral economics which is beyond the scope of this article.

For now, just know that allocating time and energy are two ways you develop your work ethic, to work on things that have the highest return on energy (ROE) and impact for you and your life.

The Secret to Maxing Out Your Work Ethic

So now, we’ve established that time and energy management are required for the completion of tasks AKA “living your life”. Now, here comes the big clincher.

Do things while you do them.

That may seem mundane or even surprising to you, but it’s just quintessential work ethic.

You can only really focus on one thing at a time and that thing takes up a certain amount of time to focus on. Likewise, that thing will only be completed if someone does it and it doesn’t get completed if someone doesn’t do it. Therefore, the logical solution is to take up tasks and work on them until they’re complete often times without distractions.

This is known as “deep work” and it’s something few people can do well.

For example: I just wrote this entire article in one go.

Why?

Because I will be able to concentrate my effort and compress the time needed to complete it because of the intensity of my focus.

If I stop and start, stop and start, this article will be spread out over the course of several days (which can be the case for some articles) instead of it being completed in a certain (often shorter) chunk.

Think about this with anything else you want to do. How many times have you dropped something and then picked it up over and over again only for it to take longer than it was supposed to?

By doing this over and over again throughout the course of days, weeks, even years – you decrease the amount of work/tasks you can get done and increase the amount of stress you encounter.

All because of procrastination. But you can fix that.

Putting Your Work Ethic to Work

You now know what is required to develop a strong work ethic…here’s where the rubber meets the road.

1. Be Solution Oriented

The reason why you’re hired at a place of employment or as a contractor is because you provide value. At work, you’ve been hired to solve a problem or specific set of problems on a continual basis. The day you stop solving problems is the day you start looking for a new job.

The key to focusing on achieving quality results is asking the question(s):

What results are expected of me? How can I exceed those expectations?

This is how you focus your efforts and eventually get promoted and make more money so you can live a better life.

Everyone has problems. Not everyone has solutions or results.

Key takeaway: See solutions where others only see problems.

2. Reduce Friction and Become a Master at Prioritization

Friction is exactly what it sounds like. Anything that prevents something from moving along a smoothly defined path. Some levels of friction are unavoidable (especially in large projects and systems) but a good amount of it can be reduced by working from a list.

Improvisation is good when it comes to jazz, but your life is not jazz.

Every day, you should have a clearly defined list of things that need to be done that day. It’s good if you have one for the week, but having a daily “to do” list helps keep you mentally on track. Write down every thing you have to do that day then organize it in terms of sequence and priority. Your work ethic will be defined by how well you can execute on things that have major consequences for yourself and others.

Things will “come up”, but then you can slot that into the objectives on the list or deal with it and use the list as a way to get back on track.

Key takeaway: A list with defined objectives helps prevent chaos throughout any given amount of time.

3. “Silo” Your Life

Alongside traditional work and productivity, you have “life:” Within every aspect of your life, you will have things that you want to achieve and things that you need to do that are external to other areas.

For example, your financial, work, and social life all have different priorities. Sometimes they may overlap, but most times they won’t. Clearly establishing “silos” will help you identify the priorities, problems, and eventual solutions for every area of your life.

I don’t necessarily agree with complete compartmentalization (because it’s ALL your life and you’re the one living it after all) but it helps to mentally separate all of the different things you have to do into separate areas so you can easily keep track of your progress in those areas. I talk more about this in the episode on productivity:

Key takeaway: Clearly mark off specific areas of your life and define what success means in all those areas.

4. Work Harder and Smarter Over Time

Over the course of your life, you should be increasing your capacity to produce quality and quantity results over time. A person who’s been out of college for a decade should be much more productive than someone who just graduated. If this isn’t happening, then something is wrong.

Your end goal should be to be someone who is able to create at a vastly higher level than they consume. You do this by being able to learn and then do to the point where it becomes second nature.

You do this by continuously expecting more and greater things from yourself. Anders Ericsson describes this process in Peak.

Key takeaway: Increase your capacity for “load” over time.

5. Develop Stamina

Following from the point above, if you want to become more productive, you will have to increase the amount of “load” you can tolerate over a specific period of time. There’s no way around it. Your brain and psychology will need to be accustomed to high volumes of work if you want to really become productive. I touch on this in the article Man on Fire: Insights from a Decade of High Octane Productivity, but if you want a starting point: think about your baseline.

We all have a baseline point of how much work you can do without “breaking rank” (AKA taking a break). For some people it’s 15 minutes, others it’s an hour, others it’s 2 hours.

What is yours? How far can you go before you call it quits?

This is where you take your baseline and improve it from there. If you can only work 15 minutes, try 20. If you can go an hour, try an hour and 10. Time yourself and see how far you can continue to push yourself. That’s the only way you’ll really get better.

6. Recharge and Regenerate

If you are going to keep squeezing out productivity, you need to take a break.

If you don’t step back from “doing”, you will break and burn out. The most successful people in society get the most sleep. They take the most vacations.

They take the most time away to decompress and regenerate because they know that the body and brain need time to restore themselves. This allows them to bounce back and be 2x as effective.

Many people are in a reactive mode because of a molotov cocktail of sleep deprivation, screen addiction, and not taking time off.

When you exhale, you have to inhale.

Make it a point of duty to rest and recover after long periods of productivity.

Key takeaway: Make a powerful ritual to recharge your batteries, whether that’s getting good sleep or time off.

Conclusion + Wrapping Up

In this article, we examined how to develop a strong work ethic. If we use the definition of productivity as “quantity x quality”, then our goals should be to produce more quantity at higher quality.

This may require seeing your life as a series of tasks to complete and focusing solely on accomplishing those tasks. You do that by being solution oriented, reducing friction, siloing your life, working harder/smarter, increasing your stamina, and recovery.

All of these will make you “the hardest worker in the room” and take you one step closer to your dream life.

And if you want to learn more about how to be incredibly productive and a start-to-finish blueprint for productivity that you can use; check out the course Cornerstone. Productivity is a central module in the course and it’s chock full of strategies, tactics, and mindsets I haven’t shared here.

If you want more information on it, hit the jump below.