Why Most Days Are “Unproductive”

A self-compassionate and highly practical guide to not hating your lack of productivity

WARNING: ⚠️Contains scatological language and crude references to body parts⚠️

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By the end of this post you’ll:

• Know how many productive days you can realistically expect every month

• Know 3 different traps that keep you from appreciating how much work you’re actually doing

• Know the real, long-term, driver of growth and why it’s so annoyingly easy to dismiss

• Have a borderline blasphemous mnemonic that helps you grow on days that would have otherwise been complete trainwrecks.

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I’ll admit to a serious (and sometimes funny) character flaw.

To illustrate, let me take you into my friend Kasper’s kitchen. I’m visiting and we’re talking about good vibes in the workplace. On why it’s so important that people are having fun and feeling good about going to work.

(Listen. I know if you’re an American this is the kookiest and most European shit you’ll read all day. Just roll with the concept of working somewhere that’s not abusive, alright?)

Kasper says something like:

“Of course people should feel good. Everybody deserves to feel good”.

I can’t help but chuckle and I add:

“I just realized something about myself. You want good vibes at work ‘cause you want people to feel good, I, on the other hand, want good vibes at work because IT’S MOST EFFICIENT!”

And we both share a socially acceptable laugh at my borderline antisocial work values.

(See, when I shout out my character flaws in casual conversation the contextual mismatch becomes funny. In most other circumstances this is TRULY a character flaw)

But first: I FUGGIN’ ❤️❤️❤️ BEING EFFICIENT!

I get HIGH from sitting down at my computer and just fuckin cranking out sales copy that makes stupid amounts of money, while customers send me excited fan mail telling me how much they love the product they bought and (even if they don’t know it) how much they love the way I sold them.

(For context I’m a direct response copywriter who is good at selling by building relationships and getting people to act in their own best interest, not a soulless, lying, urgency-pushing grifter like most everybody else in my profession. If you think that makes my life harder than it should be, then you’re 100% correct).

But I also realize that my love of efficiency is also making me freakin’ miserable because of a few mindset mishaps that YOU might be making, too.

And the next couple hundred words will reveal to you whether you’re stepping in the same productivity turds that I do.

But…

Since I’m not just a copywriter, but also a scientist, imma throw some “science” at this motherfucker.

I cooked up some simple code and generated a representative work year.

Which means:

• I assume that some days are good, some days are bad. Most days are mediocre.

• I randomly generated a bunch of work days equal to the number of working days in a single year.

• Performance ranges from 0 to 100% output per day.

Then I binned all those days and got THIS graph:

Every small orange box corresponds to 1 work day. The x-axis is a percentage of how much growth I’m capable of on a single day.

Just from looking at this graph, and counting up the number of days that fall in different bins, we can draw some conclusions about how us efficiency-loving monkeys trip ourselves up.

Which leads my to my next –somewhat crass– crosshead

Here’s how shitty your productivity can be, and still be bang on target!

How often should you expect Trainwreck days?

These are the days where output could easily have been 5X if something, or someone hadn’t gunked up your day.

And according to “The Science” we threw at this mofo there will be about 10 days per year where you FEEL like you get ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY NOTHING DONE!

(Those are the 3 stacks of orange blocks on the left)

So expect that at least once per month you’re having an absolute trainwreck of a day. Science says so.

If we define high productivity as +70% output then…

…you’ll have about 40 of those per year.

(The 6 right-most stacks in the graph above)

Expect ONLY about 3-4 days per month to feel like high productivity.

Lemme’ jus’ repeat this one out loud for the bros in the back:

YOU CAN EXPECT ONLY THREE TO FOUR HIGHLY PRODUCTIVE DAYS PER MONTH!

Sit with that sentence for a bit and take it in. You can only really expect one good and productive day per week. Science says so

Trap 1 of 3; The Trending Baseline Boo-Boo

This happens when every “best performance” becomes your new baseline. Your new norm.

A clever cookie like you might notice that those rare high-output days we just talked about are extremely rare and thus not a basis for setting a new, higher, and even more unreasonable standard for yourself.

(Science says so.)

And yet it happens.

Real Life Example From Someone I Used To Date:

It would usually take her 11 minutes to get to the bus, but there was ONE time where she made it in 7 minutes. From then on and until we broke up she would always be 4 minutes late because she left the apartment expecting it to take 7 minutes to get to the bus.

(We didn’t break up over her being late to the bus. We broke up because I was really good at playing board games)

(Yes, that was a super weird comment that will only make sense 20 seconds from now, but by then I think you’ll find it really funny.)

Anyways, here’s what that trending baseline looks like on our pre-generated productivity graph.

Anybody who’s been new at anything (hockey, programming, board games, cooking, sex) knows that you’re a mess in the beginning but you’ll learn eventually*.

But as you practice, you figure out what you’re supposed to do in order to get better. And so the rate of growth increases after the initial stages. Which means your baseline of growth gets more accurate in the beginning.

[*] Just kidding, if you get good at board games you’ll never get good at sex.

That’s the first trending baseline. From rookie to intermediate. From first baseline to second baseline in the graph above.

And it’s an accurate one because you’re getting a sense of how good you actually are.

The real problem starts when you move into intermediate territory. That time of growth where you still have exceptional days once in a while.

Those are the once that ‘get ya’, ‘cause that’s also the time where we’re likely to keep moving what feels like an acceptable outcome towards higher and higher standards, and so you end up with a reference point where only those 4 exceptional days every year feel like they were on the mark, and the other 361 days were duds.

Once you’ve moved your level of expectation up far enough, repeated feelings of underperformance start showing up, in spite of doing well in reality.

And so you end up feeling like most days are shite, when in fact you probably only have about 5-10 truly bad days in a year.

Just like you only have about 5-10 excellent days per year.

So most days aren’t shite; We’re just counting wrong.

Trap 2 of 3; Forgetting that shit happens and that sometimes other people are shit and their bullshit affects how much shit you get done

It’s one thing to wrongfully assess the value of your days. It’s another thing to experience those bad days and not let them derail you mentally.

You are not alone on the planet. And that means that some things happen because YOU made them happen, other things happen because OTHER people made them happen.

How to recognize those low-output days so you can frame them constructively

If you’re having a crap day, figure out whether it was something that simply happened because of several factors outside your control, or whether you’re in any kind of environment/system where this could be expected to happen repeatedly.

The cause determines what you tell yourself on a shitty day:

Fluke: “In spite of today’s bullshit, I’m still making progress in the long run.”

Circumstances: “Good, this gives me a point of improvement that I can work on in the future.”

(One improvement could be to raise the energy of your work mates, because good vibes at work are when you’re MOST EFFICIENT!)

If you want to recognize what shit days look like and you want to practice your reaction to them here are a few prompts to get you started. Imagine yourself in this situation and consider what the signs are that it’s a fluke, and what are the signs they’re systemic. Then practice reacting appropriately and constructively to either situation:

• Eating pizza while you’re on a weight loss diet

• Forgetting to eat when you’re on a weightlifting bulk

• Underfed and over-caffeinated at work oscillating between jittery and useless

• The defenseman accidentally tipping in a puck in his own net

• Refactoring code rather than adding to the code base

• Snapping at your kids during breakfast

• 20 minute meditation turned into a 20 minute rumination fustercluck

• Writing several first drafts and they’re all close to useless

• Political tensions are rising at work and no one is really being respectful in conversations

• Answering “quick questions” from clients/teammates that are never quick and somehow become your whole afternoon.

• A calendar stuffed with meetings that are mostly void of an actual agenda, but full of politics, and people doing Powerpoint Karaoke™

• “Clearing the inbox” all morning

• You can’t focus long enough in the gym to count reps without losing the thread.

• You keep rereading the same sentence/math formula and fuggin’ nothin’ makes sense

• A software library breaks and you spend the whole day working around it

• You’re waiting on approvals/assets/data, so your whole workday becomes a gridlock of “can’t do nothin’ until…”

• A personal situation (family, health, breakup, whatever) is taking up 80% of your RAM and the last 20% are mostly spent keeping track of time until your next break

• Some conflict threw a wrench in the works now your poor nervous system is busy running background processes that have FUCK ALL to do with your goals

• Fear of repercussions have kept you from sending that one important email/call all day

• Therapy sessions that ended up going in circles, rather than the ugly-cry breakthrough you really needed today

• 2 sets of 4 reps bookended by a failed set, rather than your planned 3 sets of 6.

• Fixing a small bug/edge case that only three users will ever notice.

• Dinner = bread. Because right now adulting and all the grocery shopping that entails requires too many spoons

• Dust bunnies. Everywhere. And you cannot be arsed to do anything about them.

Reminder: Every day that’s 50% or above is A BIG FUCKING DEAL

Seriously, just look at the graph below:

• Half your days are actually great.

• Many days you actually make some progress and as long as you find a way to keep it up, you’ll end up in a good spot.

• A few days are truly shite and those are excellent practice for mental reframing of setbacks and an invitation to clean up your life of recurring issues.

Proposed mindset for the 3 kinds of productivity you’ll experience.

Trap 3 of 3; The “Hidden Debt” Trap

This is the one that poor managers and greedy CEOs refuse to believe in:

Many of your highest productivity days drain the days/weeks after.

AKA: Why perpetual long-hours are destructive in the long term.

If you work yourself down to the bone Mon-Wed and can’t get anything done Thur-Sun, you’re likely on a losing path and about to burn yourself out.

The key here is to measure your growth over months, not days.

Finally; The Crass/Comedic Finale

Let’s return to our graph ONE final time to take a look at those uninteresting days we think don’t really matter.

In the graph below, notice how many days are above the trainwreck threshold and below your inflated performance baseline.

All those days that warrant no emotions, provocations or excitement…

The Zone Of Unremarkable Output…

All the gooch days.

I counted up the total productivity of this graph. And even if those gooch days FEEL like nothingburgers they are still where the overwhelming amount of progress is made.

In fact: 80% of the total output happens between your 20% and below your 70% days.

If you stripped off the +70% days and all the below-20% days and had only gooch days

(AKA gooch all the way down)

You’d still keep 80% of your total output.

…your progress would be almost unchanged.

In other words:

You don’t make long-term progress on your high-performing days, you make progress every single fucking unremarkable gooch day that you stack on top of another gooch day.

All those gooch days are where EVERYTHING happens.

It’s all those unremarkable sales emails, content pieces, math exercises, programming challenges, lacklustre game days at the rink, 10 minute chats with your spouse, ho-hum days in the gym, kind-of-sort-of-on-point diet days…

…That build muscle, skills, social connections and a valuable audience.

The gooch days are to be honored, cherished, noticed, celebrated and most importantly: nourished.

It’s the sheer volume of them that ends up making a difference.

Don’t sabotage your volume, feed it instead.

TWO take-home messages:

A mnemonic

1-4-1

Or if you say it out loud “one for one”.

(As if you were making a shitty deal at the supermarket: “Buy one, get one”)

1 day of absolute shit every month

4 days per month where you feel like you’re doing preeeeeetty well

1 day where you’re CRUSHING IT!

Anything outside these bounds and odds are that your attitude towards your productivity is mismatched (probably because you expect too much from yourself and your environment and/or you’ve moved your baseline like we covered above)

The 1-4-1 mnemonic helps you calibrate whether your attitude towards work is well-adjusted.

Progress comes from stacking milquetoast days

And finally, to bring yourself back to reality and to ground yourself in where progress ACTUALLY comes from, is a crude attitude.

The next time you’re facing what could be a trainwreck day simply ask yourself:

“What do I have to do, to simply make this a gooch day?”

Then go and simply make it a gooch day. 30% output is ENOUGH. As long as you just keep stacking those days.

Because:

“Blessed are those who honor the gooch days for they shall inherit the earth”

Q: So how many productive days can you actually expect every month?

See the 1-4-1 rule

Q: What are the 3 different traps that keep you from appreciating how much work you’re actually doing

1. Moving your baseline every time you do well.

2. Forgetting that shit happens and improper framing of your challenges

3. Highest productivity is associated with following energy crashes.

Q: What is the real, long-term, driver of growth?

Stacking lots of gooch days

Q: What is the reminder that helps you grow on days that would have otherwise been complete trainwrecks?

“What do I have to do, to simply make this a gooch day?”