The Power of Productivity: Why Most Business Advice Gets It Wrong

Read More Here:
Spaceteam Blog | Learning Network Posts

Here's something that'll ruffle feathers: productivity isn't about cramming more tasks into your day.

After seventeen years of consulting with businesses across Melbourne, Perth, and Sydney, I've watched countless professionals burn themselves out chasing the wrong metrics. They're obsessed with being busy rather than being effective. And frankly, most productivity gurus are selling snake oil.

The real productivity secret? It's about saying no to 73% of what crosses your desk. Not because you're lazy, but because you understand leverage.

I learnt this the hard way back in 2009 when I was running a mid-sized consultancy in Adelaide. We were taking on every project that walked through the door. Revenue was up, but profits were down. Staff were stressed. Clients were getting subpar service. I was working 70-hour weeks and wondering where it all went wrong.

Then David, my business mentor at the time, asked me one question that changed everything: "What would happen if you only did the work that only you could do?"

The Uncomfortable Truth About Modern Productivity

Most productivity advice assumes you're an assembly line worker. Do this, then that, follow these seven steps, use this app, track these metrics. It's mechanical thinking applied to knowledge work.

But knowledge work isn't mechanical. It's creative, unpredictable, and deeply personal.

When I work with executives in Brisbane, the first thing I notice is how they've turned themselves into human to-do list processors. They're incredibly efficient at being ineffective. They can tell you exactly how many emails they sent yesterday (usually around 47) but can't tell you what meaningful progress they made on their quarterly objectives.

This is where emotional intelligence training becomes crucial. You can't optimise what you don't understand, and most people don't understand their own work patterns.

The productivity industry wants you to believe that if you just had the right system, the perfect app, the optimal morning routine, you'd unlock some superhuman version of yourself. Bollocks.

Real productivity starts with brutal honesty about what actually matters. And here's the kicker – most of what we do doesn't matter. At all.

Why Your Current System Is Probably Wrong

Let me share something controversial: time blocking doesn't work for most people. Neither does Getting Things Done. Or the Pomodoro Technique.

These systems work brilliantly for their creators and a small subset of people with very specific personality types and work contexts. For everyone else, they're elaborate procrastination techniques dressed up as productivity methods.

I've seen marketing directors in Perth spend three hours a week maintaining their productivity system. That's 156 hours a year – nearly a month of full-time work – spent on the meta-work of organising work instead of actually doing work.

The problem isn't the system. The problem is assuming there's a universal solution to a fundamentally personal challenge.

Your brain isn't my brain. Your work isn't my work. Your life circumstances aren't mine. Yet we keep buying productivity courses that promise one-size-fits-all solutions.

Here's what actually works: understanding your natural rhythms, identifying your highest-leverage activities, and ruthlessly eliminating everything else.

The Three Types of Work (And Why You're Doing Too Much of Two of Them)

In my experience, all work falls into three categories:

Strategic work: The stuff that moves the needle. Big decisions, relationship building, innovation, long-term planning. This is usually 10-20% of what crosses your desk but generates 80% of your results.

Operational work: The day-to-day tasks that keep things running. Important but not necessarily high-leverage. This should be 30-40% of your time if you're doing it right.

Busy work: Everything else. Email ping-pong, unnecessary meetings, administrative overhead, perfectionism disguised as quality control. This is typically 60-70% of most people's time, and it's killing their effectiveness.

The mathematics are brutal but simple: if you can eliminate half your busy work and redirect that time to strategic work, you'll roughly double your impact.

I remember working with Sarah, a financial advisor in Sydney who was drowning in client paperwork. She was spending 6 hours a day on administrative tasks and 2 hours on actual client interaction and business development. We automated 60% of her admin, delegated another 25%, and suddenly she had 4 extra hours daily for high-value activities. Her revenue increased by 180% within 18 months.

The Energy Management Revolution

Time management is dead. Energy management is the future.

You have four types of energy: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. Traditional productivity thinking only considers time, which is why it fails so spectacularly.

I can have eight hours available but if I'm emotionally drained from a difficult conversation with a team member, mentally fatigued from three hours of financial analysis, and spiritually disconnected from work that doesn't align with my values, those eight hours are essentially worthless.

Smart professionals in Melbourne are starting to understand this. They're asking different questions:

• When is my mental energy highest?
• What activities drain my emotional reserves?
• How do I maintain spiritual connection to my work?
• What physical practices support sustained performance?

The stress management training I deliver now focuses heavily on energy auditing. We track energy levels alongside time usage and the insights are remarkable.

Most people discover they're scheduling their most important work during their lowest-energy periods. They're making critical decisions when they're mentally depleted. They're having important conversations when they're emotionally reactive.

The Meetings Problem Nobody Talks About

Let's address the elephant in every office: meetings are productivity cancer.

The average Australian professional spends 37% of their time in meetings. Research suggests 50% of those meetings are unnecessary and another 30% could be handled more efficiently.

But here's what really gets me fired up: we treat meetings like they're free. They're not free. A one-hour meeting with eight people doesn't cost one hour – it costs eight hours plus the preparation time, plus the context switching overhead, plus the follow-up actions.

I've calculated that many mid-level managers are spending $15,000-25,000 per month of their organisation's money just sitting in meetings. And most of those meetings don't produce decisions, just more meetings.

The solution isn't better meeting practices (though those help). The solution is recognising that most coordination can happen asynchronously, most updates can be written, and most decisions can be made by one or two people rather than a committee.

When I work with leadership teams on this, I usually recommend the "meeting fast" experiment. For one month, cancel 80% of recurring meetings and see what breaks. In my experience, about 10% of what you expected to break actually breaks. Everything else just... continues working.

Why Perfectionism Is The Enemy of Productivity

Perfectionists are terrible at productivity. They spend hours polishing work that was already good enough, agonise over decisions that don't matter, and delay shipping while they fiddle with details.

I used to be one of them. In my early consulting days, I'd spend three days crafting the perfect proposal when a good proposal sent today beats a perfect proposal sent next week.

The 80/20 rule isn't just about identifying high-leverage activities. It's also about recognising when something is 80% done and calling it finished.

Perfect is the enemy of done. And done is the enemy of perfect.

Most work doesn't need to be perfect. It needs to be good enough to achieve its purpose. That presentation doesn't need to be a masterpiece – it needs to communicate your key points clearly. That email doesn't need to be Shakespearean – it needs to convey the necessary information. That strategy document doesn't need to consider every possible scenario – it needs to provide clear direction for the next quarter.

This doesn't mean lowering your standards. It means applying your standards intelligently. Save perfectionism for the 5% of work where it actually matters.

The Technology Trap

Productivity apps are a $58 billion industry. And most of them make you less productive.

Every new app is a promise: this one will finally solve your productivity problems. This one has the feature that all the others were missing. This one integrates with everything and will become your single source of truth.

Except it doesn't work that way. You end up spending time learning the app, configuring the app, maintaining the app, and eventually abandoning the app for the next shiny solution.

I've watched executives in Perth toggle between twelve different productivity apps during a single conversation. They're not being productive – they're being busy with tools instead of doing actual work.

The best productivity system is usually the simplest one you'll actually use consistently. For most people, that's a notebook and a calendar. Maybe a simple task manager. That's it.

Technology should disappear into the background and amplify your natural work patterns. If you're thinking about the tool more than the work, the tool is wrong.

Building Your Personal Productivity Philosophy

Instead of adopting someone else's system, build your own philosophy based on your unique context, energy patterns, and objectives.

Start with these questions:

• What outcomes am I trying to create?
• When do I do my best thinking?
• What activities energise me versus drain me?
• Where do I add unique value that others can't?
• What would I eliminate if I could only work 4 hours a day?

Your answers will be different from mine, and that's exactly the point.

The real power of productivity isn't in doing more things. It's in doing the right things with focused energy at the right time in service of meaningful outcomes.

And once you understand that, everything else becomes much simpler.

---

This article draws from seventeen years of workplace consulting across Australia. For more insights on workplace effectiveness and professional development, visit our resources on handling difficult conversations and workplace dynamics.