Most Of Productivity Is Just Managing Your Environment

Oct 2

Takeaway Points:

Productivity is more about removing barriers to focus rather than having the most ideal setup, brilliant strategies, or the newest tools and accessories.
Managing your environment by minimizing distractions naturally creates better work flow, which means getting more done. Having a space where you’re away from interruptions, turning off notifications or putting your phone away where you can’t readily check it, or wearing headphones to block out noise are all methods to keep focus on your work.
Everyone’s environments are different and have different obstacles to productivity. What works for some people won’t work for everyone. Figure out what methods work for you and how you can best control the amount of distractions around you.

I’ve been writing a bit more about the topic of productivity lately - including things like why I don’t believe in hard work, why I hate productivity gurus, how you can use flow state and deep work to enhance your productivity, how laziness as most people think of it isn’t really real, and how distractions can even, many times, be a good thing.

I’ve also written quite a lot about my own workaholic tendencies, which I’ve been fighting in some form or another for years. I’m someone who naturally likes to work hard, and has gotten a lot out of it - but at the same time, I don’t think that hard work should be a requirement or even a goal for many people, and I don’t think that hard work is generally healthy after a certain point. Especially as you age, it makes sense to scale down your effort and try to find ways to make your lifestyle sustainable - I certainly don’t expect to be able to work at the same pace that I currently am when I’m fifty, for example.

However, I wanted to talk today about what productivity really is, anyway. Here’s the reality: most of productivity is not about having the perfect setup, strategies, tools, methods, or any of the other things that most productivity gurus rattle on about on a regular basis. Instead, it’s simply about removing barriers to focus - for the most part, distractions.

Flow

When people don’t have distractions, they tend to naturally fall into the flow state. This is, essentially, the primary thesis behind Deep Work - that when you remove distractions, focus becomes natural and normal. Many of us can think of days where we wanted to be productive, but we weren’t able to do so - distractions in the home or office, endless meetings where nothing is decided, lots of interrupting phone calls, and so on.

What can we do when distractions are a huge problem? Find ways to minimize them.

For example, I used to have my desk in the living room - this was awful, because people were constantly moving through the living room, and the fact that I was there made it easy for family members to come to me when they needed something. I had to keep in headphones at all times with music going to drown out disrupting noises even when nobody needed my attention. The end result was that I was always feeling distracted, and my work suffered.

The solution was to move to a dedicated space - first that meant a cramped corner in my bedroom, and then later a dedicated office room when I had the opportunity to upgrade. My office room is on a different floor than the living room and kitchen now, which means that I’ve got all the privacy I need - a closed door shuts out noise, and people are less likely to interact with me unless they absolutely need to.

Likewise, many people will find that their productivity suffers because of other digital distractions. Social media, youtube videos, push notifications, and more - our modern digital environment is absolutely designed to constantly try to steal your attention from wherever it is, and that can make it hard to focus.

Regular housekeeping on this front goes a long way. Delete phone games that you’re not having fun with, or turn off notifications from those apps so that you only use the app when you actually intend to do so. You can use apps and programs to block social media either during set hours, or on an as-needed basis whenever you need to focus on something.

Managing Your Environment

As I’ve argued before, and as is explored a lot in James Clear’s Atomic Habits, is that your environment has a lot more powerful influence on your behaviors than you tend to think. Your behaviors are always conditioned by your surroundings, whether you recognize it or not, and this has huge influences on the actual outcomes.

Let’s imagine an example where you want to go to the grocery store - and let’s say that there’s a cheap grocery store, and an expensive one. In a vacuum, you’d obviously say that you prefer to go to the store that’s cheaper. Now, if the time it takes to get to both stores is similar, that’s basically what would happen. If the cheaper and the more expensive grocery store are right next to each other, you’d always choose the cheaper one. This would be a pretty terrible deal for the expensive grocery store - knowing that their next door neighbor is cheaper, they’d probably quickly go out of business, unless for example they either moved to a better location (fewer competitors in the neighborhood) or improved their offerings by finding a better niche (offering foods that aren’t available at the cheaper store).

Now let’s say that it’s NOT a vacuum. Let’s say that the expensive grocery store is closer, while the cheap one is further away. As the distance increases, the less desirable the cheaper grocery store becomes, because this means more travel time, and that means more time wasted and more resources expended to get there. At a certain distance, the cost of gas and the time it takes to get there could make the cheap grocery store no longer worth it - at which point, you choose the more expensive store because of the convenience.

This is the essential business model of every corner store, convenience store, and bodega in every major city, all over the world - smaller corner stores cannot offer the same cheap prices that larger grocery stores can, but they offer commonly needed goods, and they’re intensely local, often within walking distance. This better positioning enables them to survive anyway, because they make use of this inverse relationship between distance and value.

The same principle can be applied in all kinds of other ways. When I’m sitting on the couch and watching tv, I certainly don’t want to frequently get up to walk across the room and get something - naturally, I’ll often ask someone who’s already standing if they can do the task, because they don’t have the added task-switching cost of stopping what they’re doing and starting on something else. Naturally, we can all relate to this, and we all consider it polite to handle that task as requested when we’re asked, because we feel similarly and recognize the value.

Managing your environment is often as simple as “making it easy to do the things you want to do,” while “making it harder to do the things you don’t want to do”.

For example, if I want my phone to not be a distraction, I can simply pick it up and put it in a drawer on the opposite side of my office. This isn’t a hard barrier - it only takes a few seconds to stand up, cross the room, and pick it back up - but this makes it infinitely less likely to actually happen, because when I’m seated at my desk, that work-inertia means that I think of that process as way more annoying than it actually is. The end result, is that I will quite naturally use my phone less.

Likewise, I have a locking cabinet drawer in the filing cabinet next to my desk. I keep the keys in my desk or pocket at all times, so reaching over and unlocking that cabinet isn’t a huge deal - yet somehow that makes it a lot more annoying to do than if the drawer were to be unlocked. I can take advantage of this effect by storing distractions (snacks, my phone, etc.) so that I’m less likely to be distracted.

Managing your environment is about setting yourself up for success - keep the things that you need close on hand, put the things you don’t need further away or harder to access, and you’ll find yourself much more naturally focused and productive.

Doohickeys and Strategies

I find that productivity doohickeys, accessories, and strategies are the least important part of the equation, compared to all the environment managing above - and when they are useful, it’s usually because they rely on methods for managing your environment.

Deep Work and flow, for example, are just strategies for reducing distractions. Buying a nice new computer may mean that you can work a bit faster and with less lag or loading times when running powerful programs or doing a lot of things at once, but that’s not going to matter much if your current computer runs just fine. Note taking implements and strategies can work well if you find that you need them in order to keep yourself on task, but that doesn’t mean that you need to spend a ton of money on a fancy notebook when a normal sheet of power could do. A sit-stand desk is fun if it means you can get in some exercise while you’re working (and thus not need to do a separate workout during the day which would distract you from your work), but doesn’t mean much otherwise.

In short, all these office accessories, doohickeys, and strategies work well only to the extent that they solve concrete issues and barriers to focus that naturally exist in your environment - and may not have any benefit at all if you’re not someone who has those concerns.

It’s Not For Everyone

The reality is also that every person thinks about something entirely different when they think about “work” and “productivity”. In my criticism of the concept of the productivity guru, I talked about how in many careers, productivity is not actually meaningful or useful - working harder isn’t necessarily good for either the worker or the company. The way many businesses are structured, “working harder” doesn’t actually produce anything, and simply burns the worker out pointlessly.

It’s also important to recognize that everyone has a different situation. I’ve worked from home for a few years, so a lot of my advice about managing your environment may work well for folks like me who work from home, but not so well for folks who work in offices and don’t have much control over their environments.

Some people are dealing (like me) with children who are distracting and need a lot of attention and support on a regular basis, and you can’t just ignore your kids when they need help. Some people live in small apartments where they don’t have the luxury or space for a dedicated office setup. Some folks deal with conditions like ADHD which can make it harder to focus consistently.

The above recommendations are far from a one-size-fits-all guide. Every person’s situation is different, and they may need to figure out for themselves how to take control of their own situation as much as possible. In many cases, barriers are harder or even possible to remove, meaning that some amount of learning to cope with existing distractions becomes a necessity.

In these instances, the goal may not be absolute removal, but instead harm reduction. A good instance can be seen in the example above where I kept my desk in the living room. I wasn’t willing or able to move the positioning of my desk to a better room at the time, so I worked instead to minimize distractions by wearing headphones and listening to music. This didn’t work completely, but it did help - likewise, in your situation, wherever you find a specific barrier insurmountable, the goal there becomes how you can tolerate, manage, or reduce the barrier instead.

About Adam Fisher

Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging and coaching since 2012, and lifting since 2006. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.

During that time he has coached hundreds of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around bodybuilding and powerlifting, in which he’s competed.

Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cats or feeding his video game addiction.

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