That moment at a coworking space in Chiang Mai when I finally realized my 'productivity system' was just busywork.

I sat down with my laptop, opened my fancy Notion dashboard with 15 different views and color coded tags. Spent 20 minutes moving tasks around. Then my mate Tom walked over and asked what I actually shipped that week. I couldn't name a single thing. Dude was using a plain text file and had done more client work than me in 3 days. Made me wonder - has anyone else caught themselves building elaborate systems that just eat up time instead of getting real work done?

2 comments

2 Comments

anderson.piper1mo agoMost Upvoted

Wait, you had 15 different views in Notion and still couldn't name a single thing you shipped? That's like building a custom dashboard for your car's speedometer and forgetting to actually drive anywhere. I've totally been there with my own systems though, spent a whole week setting up tags and filters in my task manager just to realize I was just organizing my to-do list instead of doing anything on it.

patricia_gonzalez1mo ago

Gotta call you out a bit on the speedometer analogy though. A dashboard shows you your speed in real time, it doesn't make you drive. But having 15 views in Notion is more like building 15 different types of racing simulators in your garage and then never firing up the actual car. At least with the dashboard you're getting real feedback on your driving, lol. Those tags and filters you set up for a week though, that hits way too close to home. I did the same thing with Trello once, color coded everything by priority level and then spent the next month moving cards around instead of checking anything off.