Doing More vs. Doing What Matters: The Productivity Shift You Need

The Hollow Chase

The day I accomplished more in 6 hours than I had in previous weeks of 40+ was the day I realized everything I knew about productivity was wrong.

During my PhD, I found myself working one full-time job plus five part-time gigs (bartending, TA for two classes, assistant for the HDR office, and, only in Australia, delivering the school’s tea service for longer classes) while studying full-time in order to raise $22,000 for one semester’s tuition. And I had two semesters left to go.

My schedule, unsurprisingly was compressed to breaking point. I would wake up early, work late after one or more of my jobs had finished, and weekend breaks were a myth.

The surprising part? In the mere 15-20 hours I had left for my PhD work each week, I was accomplishing twice as much as when I had 40+ hours available in the years prior.

Scarcity had created clarity.

With so little time available, I became ruthlessly focused on what would move the needle. Everything else was stripped away. There was no time for second-guessing or procrastination—only the essential remained.

Saturdays became my heavy work day. Wake up at 7am, meet my friend at the gym at 730, sit down for coffee, breakfast, and work at 9am and knock out 3-4 sessions of focused 120 minute working time, changing location (I am a notorious café hopper) to keep it fresh, and usually ending my day around 5pm with an insane amount of articles read, notes written, and next steps laid out.

In contrast, when I first started the PhD with all the time in the world to focus, I tracked my progress by counting deep work sessions—tallying each 25-minute focused block. At first, this input-focused approach helped build the focus muscle, slowly building to 90 minutes of pure, focused flow time.

But eventually, I had to ask: What was all this productivity actually producing? Sure I was putting time on the calendar, but was I moving the needle? Was I actually getting closer to producing a written thesis?

The answers were all a resounding no. And it took adding 60 hours of real job(s) to my calendar to finally do something about it.

This is the hollow chase that traps so many of us: we optimize our systems, track our metrics, implement the latest productivity hack to pursue recognition—all while avoiding the harder question of whether we're moving efficiently in the entirely wrong direction.

Now that I work in consulting, I find this focus even harder to maintain. Work, social life, identity, building my own business, and sales all blur together. The clear boundaries have disappeared, and with them, the clarity of purpose that had made those limited PhD hours so productive.

And it’s not something that can just be fixed by “WORK HARDER!” As a former athlete, and since my earliest days of soccer, I knew how to push through pain and work. I knew how to grind. I can white knuckle and throw long hours at a problem.

But hours worked can’t solve everything. It’s a good starting point, but it’s probably not enough on it’s own to get you to the finish line you need.

This struggle illuminates something essential about real productivity: it's not about doing more. It's about doing what matters.

Real vs. Shallow Productivity

Busyness as a badge of honor is bullshit.

"Being busy is a form of laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action." — Tim Ferriss

There's lots of work we can do simply to make people leave us alone. Work that looks impressive but doesn't move the needle. Work that creates the appearance of productivity without the substance.

This was me early on the PhD attending workshops that had very little direct value to writing my thesis. This is everytime you open your inbox pretending to check emails in order to make it look like you’re doing something while at the office. In fact, part of why virtual work is effective is because it removed the need for this fake productivity virtue-signalling.

That's not fulfilling. That's not energizing. That's shallow, unecessary shenanigans.

Real productivity, by contrast, tries to tick as many of these boxes as possible:

• It's aligned with our meaning and purpose

• It helps us grow and improve

• It allows us to reach deep levels of concentration (flow)

Sometimes you only get one. The holy trinity is when you can reach all three—what I call "Value-Aligned Productivity." These are the supercharged hours where you accomplish in 60 minutes what used to take four hours, working at the intersection of flow, purpose, and mastery.

Value-Aligned Productivity means aligning your work with your core values at a time when you do your best work, creating a virtuous cycle where your actions reinforce what matters most to you, rather than depleting your energy on tasks that feel meaningless. Having just two hours of this type of work in your week can transform your experience from good to great. Having one hour of this every day can absolutely change your life—creating momentum that carries into all aspects of your work and personal development.

This is where our values enter the equation. When I approach sitting down to write as something I have to do versus this is a practice of my value of growth, in getting better at writing and documenting my own journey in order to better serve others, my relationship with the work transforms entirely. It becomes something I look forward to as opposed to dread.

The approach, the energy, and ultimately the output are fundamentally different when the work connects to what we truly value.

Think about the last time you were so locked in on a task that time seemed to disappear. Maybe it was writing a report on a topic you found fascinating, perfecting a slide deck just so, or solving a complex problem about trying to sell to a specific client. That flow state wasn't just about pRoDuCtIvItY—it was about alignment.

The Awareness Connection

Awareness—that muscle we build through meditation, journaling, and mindful practice—is crucial to distinguishing real from shallow productivity. It gives us the "catch" for interrupting patterns that don’t serve us. We either:

1. Notice and choose our intention before approaching a task ("Even though this is a chore I dislike, I'm going to make it as enjoyable as possible" or "I'll approach this meeting by dialing up my warmth and playfulness.")

2. Notice what we're bringing to the table during the task and choose a reframe ("I hate this, it's pointless" becomes "This is about integrity—I said I would do this, so I must.")

One of the simplest practices is setting an intention before beginning work. "I'm going to do this as fast as possible." "I'm going to approach this with humor." "I'm going to pretend this is fun." You find what you look for, so use intention to create a nudge back toward who you wish to be and how you wish to move through the world.

Without this awareness, you'll find yourself grinding through tasks that drain your energy while wondering why you're exhausted at the end of each day.

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The Flow State Checklist

Flow states serve as powerful signposts that you're engaged in Value-Aligned Productivity. Research from psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (I dare you to try and pronounce his name) shows that people in flow states are up to five times more productive than when working under normal conditions, with neuroimaging studies revealing distinctive brain activity patterns during these peak performance states.

Here's what to look out for:

Typical Work:

• You check the clock constantly

• Your phone becomes incredibly interesting

• You find excuses to take breaks

• Ideas come slowly if at all

• You feel drained afterward

• You dread returning to it

Flow State Work:

• Time seems to disappear

• You forget to check your phone

• You have to remind yourself to eat or take breaks

• Ideas come more easily than usual

• You feel energized after, even if physically tired

• You look forward to returning to it

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The challenge in modern workplaces is that they're often designed to inhibit flow. Open offices, constant notifications via email, slack, teams and whatever other messaging platform is out there now, back-to-back-to-back meetings, and the expectation of immediate responses… all of this is in a deep, full-fledged conspiracy against deep work. The enemy is inside the gates. The call is coming from inside the house.

The countermeasure?

Boundaries.

The Liberation of Limits

The hardest thing about boundaries is keeping them.

It's easy to say, "I want more time for things I care about—the gym, writing, going for a walk." But that requires sacrifice. It requires trading and choosing your opportunity cost.

Because you can do and accomplish just about anything you want.

But you cannot do everything you want.

To choose to go for a walk without your phone is to choose not to respond to emails or plan your work week. And you have to be okay with paying that cost.

This is what Oliver Burkeman in his best-selling book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals reminds us. Because we have a limited time on this earth with an infinite list of things to do, it means we have to choose, and we have to be ok with the price of those choices. That it’s not about more work, it’s about choosing the right work more often.

For me, it was so easy, for so long, to choose my job. Long hours and a lot of mental energy were dedicated to showing up and performing well as an exceptional learning designer and strategic consultant. For me, being good at my job guaranteed respect and safety. But eventually, that ran out.

Consistently choosing more work over the right work, especially the work that involved taking care of myself, is not sustainable. And it's not actually my job's responsibility to prioritize for me.

That's my job.

If I can, with a straight face and a genuine heart, tell work that I'm doing good work and that shutting my phone off at 6pm is going to help me sustainably produce great outcomes for them, then I have an obligation to protect that time.

Work is often the first place I have clients start to set boundaries, which can sound scary. Work takes up (usually) 8 hours of your day, 5 days a week. Work adds up to a third of your life, a third of the 4000 weeks you have on this planet. But at work, unlike in personal relationships, you have a job description and a contract that makes some expectations explicit about what needs to happen for "good work."

Because if you don't protect yourself and what you need to do your best work, no one will.

As long as your requests and boundaries are couched in clarity—"Here's my role, here's what I need to do my best work, and here's what I'm doing about it"—the conversation becomes much more productive. At best, they never cared in the first place. At worst, they push back strongly, and then you have every signal you need to know you're in the wrong environment.

"Daring to set boundaries is about having the courage to love ourselves even when we risk disappointing others." — Brené Brown

Where I am still a work in progress is setting boundaries with myself to protect my important-but-not-urgent time. Writing my morning pages, time for workouts—I don't treat these as sacred as I should. I get caught in immediate feelings ("I'm tired," "I want to meet friends," "I just have 30 mins of work left"). These occasional slips might be okay sometimes, but for me, they happen far more often than they should.

There's also an anxiety cost—the price you pay for not having done them in your day yet, reaching 5pm knowing you still need to workout, write a new post, and meditate. When you knock these things out early, it gives you freedom later.

This is why ritual and consistency—doing specific activities at specific times that you don't miss—are so important. They create room that you and others can plan around.

As scary bald man Jocko Willink says, "Discipline equals freedom."

Common Objections and Realistic Solutions

When discussing these approaches to productivity, I frequently hear three main objections specific to work (but hint, hint, it applies to life in general):

• "My job doesn't allow for this kind of flexibility." Even in highly structured environments, you often have more agency than you realize. Start with small boundaries—like taking a proper lunch break or blocking 30 minutes for deep work—before attempting larger changes. Research shows that even micro-breaks of 5-10 minutes can improve focus and sustainability. The key is to begin with changes so small they don't require permission, then gradually expand your autonomy.

• "I can't afford to work less in my competitive industry." This approach isn't about working less—it's about working differently. You have to be doing the work that only you can be doing. Your work, your team, your organization does not benefit from the time you spend on low-level tasks. We may not be able to cut out admin tasks entirely, but what and how are you working on the things that directly benefit the business? Outside of work, the same question remains. If you think you don’t have enough time, check your screen time on your phone and then re-evaluate that answer. The question isn't whether you can afford to change your approach; it's whether you can afford not to.

• "What about urgent demands and unexpected crises?" Value-Aligned Productivity doesn't mean ignoring genuine urgencies. It means having the awareness to distinguish between true emergencies and manufactured ones. Build what author and researcher Cal Newport calls "slack" into your system—buffer time that absorbs the unexpected without derailing your most important work. When emergencies do arise, having clear values actually makes triage decisions easier because you know exactly what matters most.

The Productive Pendulum

While boundaries protect your time and energy, they're only part of the equation. The question remains: how intensely should you work within those boundaries?

This is where finding your rhythm becomes essential.

There's a tension between the David Goggins endorsed "grind" mentality and a more ‘let’s just wing it’ approach to productivity. I've found that neither extreme works perfectly.

Grind is good to have on call. You want that capacity in your engine for the days you really need it, so if this is missing, it is certifiably the place to start.

My problem, and the problem of so many high-performers I see, is learning how to shut the engine off.

Currently, I’m suffering from a little of both extremes. Between having started a new full-time job 5 months ago, just added a sales target to the role which is totally new, and launching the substack, there is a lot on my plate, and I feel like I’m doing ok on some of it, excelling at none of it.

To address this, my current approach looks like entering seasons of "push" to step up to my line of capacity, possibly a little bit over it. I’m trying to increase my capacity to work because I know I’m selling myself short in that domain. So this looks like adding an hour before work on the Substack, sometimes 2 hours after work, and usually 5-6 hours across the weekend. Between the job and this extra work, it can end up at a 60 hour work week. One week of 60 hours is doable, 6 months of that could be a superhighway to burnout.

So after these intentional push periods, I flip the focus: Where and how can I concentrate only on the highest leverage activities?

The goal becomes sustainable effort on move-the-needle tasks rather than sheer volume of hours.

It's similar to how I approach training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. If I am always rolling at max intensity with competition-level rolls five times weekly, injury becomes inevitable. I’m 100% going to hurt myself (or be hurt by all the scary people engaging in death cuddles). And those months I would have take off injured, could have still counted if I had just dialed it back. Strategic intensity is key.

There's a rhythm and a balance to this work. Some weeks you push to your edge. Other weeks you recover. The goal isn't constant intensity, but rather a sustainable pattern and tempo that builds your capacity over time.

This approach aligns with what sports scientists call 'strategic overreaching'—temporary, planned training intensification followed by adequate recovery. Like a muscle under progressive overload, you stress your capacity, allow time to recover, and go-again, maybe just a little bit longer or harder this time. The same principles apply to cognitive work.

What's crucial here is setting a time limit for these "push" experiments. We don't want to grind indefinitely. So I might say: three weeks of doing two hours of focused work after my regular workday.

This is an experiment with a clear endpoint and evaluation: How's my energy at the end? When was I drained? What did I learn about my best times to work and how to do it sustainably?

Recognizing these patterns is half the battle. Correcting it is the other half.

Systems as Servants

After years of experimenting with productivity approaches from authors like Oliver Burkemann, Cal Newport, James Clear, Charles Duhigg, Ali Abdaal, David Allen, and others (you name it, I’ve probably read it), I've distilled a set of principles that actually serve meaning rather than just efficiency.

These are systems designed to be servants to your purpose, not masters of your time:

• Single-task. Multitasking is the enemy of depth. Choose one thing and give it your full attention. This isn't just intuitive advice—it's backed by science. Heavy multitaskers pay a ‘focus tax’ for constantly switching between tasks compared to those who focused on one thing at a time. Put simply, people who believe they are 'good multitaskers' are lying to you, to me, and to themselves.

• Aim for deep work and flow. Structure your environment and time to minimize distractions and maximize your chance of entering a flow state. Turn off notifications, look at a blank screen, lock the door to your office.

• Know your prime time. Figure out when you work best. We can't always perfectly control our schedules, but we often have more influence than we give ourselves credit for. I'm not doing creative work in the afternoons—it has to be mornings, so I block that time out. I can meet and chat with people all day in the afternoons. This is a negotiation, not a dictatorship, but start moving your schedule toward the times and types of work that suit you best.

• Have a place to track incoming tasks. Write it down. This gets things out of your head, and by seeing everything in one place, priorities often become clear.

• Use the Pomodoro Technique. Start with shorter focused sessions (the standard time is 25 minutes) and increase the length as you strengthen your focus muscle.

• Work around people. This isn't for everyone, but I thrive when working around others who are also working. Focusmate is a great online tool for this, where you jump on a virtual call and both work on your own thing. During my PhD, we did something called "shut up and write" that was incredibly effective. You can also ask a friend to jump on a Zoom call or meet at a café (my girlfriend and I call this "parallel play.")

• Balance inputs with outputs. At the start, it's about revs and reps—how many can you do in a day/week and how do you increase those over time? Eventually, you need to shift to "What are you producing that moves the needle?" For example in sales, this means asking, "How is your activity helping to generate revenue?" This is your ultimate check against useless spinning or productivity for its own sake.

• Small and consistent beats perfect and nonexistent. Some people can jump in and go all-out right away. That might work for you—I've had moments like that, usually with impending deadlines. But it's rarely sustainable. What works better is the ramp-up. With Pomodoros, my goal was always 4 hours (or 8 sessions of 25 minutes)—3 hours was not great, 5+ was exceptional. I increased session length by 5 minutes every week until eventually I was doing 90-minute blocks, consistently hitting 4-5 of those daily (6-7.5 hours of deep work). But that took about 4 months to build up to, and then I maintained that pattern for nearly 4 years.

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Homework: Start by identifying one activity in your current schedule that energizes rather than depletes you. Schedule an additional 30 minutes for this activity next week, protecting this time as if it were your most important meeting. Small shifts in how you allocate your attention often trigger the biggest transformations in productivity and fulfillment.

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Reimagining Productivity: The Path Forward

I still think about that period during my PhD—when financial pressure forced me to compress 40 hours of work into 15, and somehow doubled my output in the process.

The scarcity that once forced clarity can be recreated by choice. The boundaries that once felt like limitations can become the very structure that liberates your best work. What initially felt like a crisis became my greatest teacher.

These systems aren't just productivity tricks—they're unique, personal expressions of a deeper philosophy that prioritizes your alignment over sheer volume. When we step back from both the hustle culture and the work-less movement, a more nuanced approach emerges.

In the productivity conversation, most voices fall into one of two camps: the hustle-harder crowd promising that sleeping four hours a night is the secret to success, or the work-life balance advocates suggesting that the key is doing less.

Value-Aligned Productivity offers a third path—one that focuses not on how much you do, but on the alignment between what you do and who you are, and holding you to account for doing work on what you decide matters.

When I was tracking 25-minute Pomodoro sessions at the start of the PhD, I thought productivity was about showing up and putting in time. When I was juggling six jobs, I learned it was about focus and elimination. Now I understand it's about something deeper—the intersection of values, flow, and impact.

Working on this Substack has been a great example so far. It is deeply tied to my vision, mission, and values of who I wish to become in the world. It allows me to work on and improve the craft of writing. And I am able to enter deep states of flow when I set aside concentrated blocks of time - the 90-120 minutes spent writing on a Saturday morning, coffee in hand, is consistently some of my favorite and most productive time of the weekend.

For those of us who've experienced excellence in other domains—whether on the field, in academics, or early career wins—this approach offers a way to recapture that sense of purpose and mastery without sacrificing sustainability. The game has changed, but the fundamentals of meaningful achievement remain.

The path starts with awareness—noticing when you're caught in the hollow chase and choosing a different way. It continues with the courage to set boundaries, even when that means disappointing others or going against cultural norms. And it's sustained through systems that work with your natural rhythms and strengths rather than against them.

The question isn't whether you can squeeze more into each day. It's whether what you're doing matters deeply enough to warrant your limited time and precious energy.

The most productive day of your life won't be measured by tasks completed or hours logged, but by how aligned your efforts were with what truly matters to you.

What would it look like if your productivity served your purpose rather than replaced it?

What's one boundary you could set tomorrow to create space for what truly matters?