Seven Productivity Myths, Debunked by Science (and Common Sense)S

The end goal of "productivity" is to spend less time doing the things you have to do so you have more time for the things you want to do. Of course, if you follow every morsel of productivity advice out there, you probably spend more time moving papers and emails around than actually getting anything done. Need to simplify your routine? Let's put an end to some common productivity tropes once and for all.

Myth #1: You Have to Get Up Early To Accomplish Anything


The myth that you can miraculously solve all your productivity problems by forcing yourself to be a morning person is a long-standing one. It all started when Biologist Christopher Randler published a study that pointed out early risers are indeed more productive. He subsequently defended the study in the Harvard Business Review. A lot of the "early riser = more productive" talk came from this, but in reality he only concludes that people who wake up earlier are in a more proactive mindset, and thus willing to tackle more throughout the day. His results can easily be accounted for by considering how most of us are socialized to believe that waking up early equates having a whole day to get a lot of things done. Photo by David Dávila Vilanova.

A 2011 study published in the journal Thinking & Reasoning points out what we should really remember: That the key to being productive and creative (which the study breaks into two different types of activity) is to work the hours that are best for you. If you're an early bird (or someone forced into an early schedule because of your job), get your difficult and most troublesome tasks out of the way first thing, when you're most productive. Then in the afternoon, when you start to wane, it's time to throttle back and spend time brainstorming and being creative instead. The inverse applies to late risers or people who work best in the afternoon or evening. Put simply, you'll have more time if you get up early or work late when no one's around to distract you, but that doesn't necessarily make you more productive.

Myth #2: Power Through Your Slumps


Another popular productivity myth (that's thankfully waned in recent years) is that the best way to get through a slump is to power through it. Put your nose to the grindstone and try and press through your creative or productive blocks and you'll be okay—or so the myth goes. The truth is quite contrary: an old study (1972, in fact) published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology debunked this idea a long time ago, and asserted that your willpower is limited, so use it wisely. Photo by stuartpilbrow.

To use an analogy, whipping a horse gets you less speed and distance every time you do it. Trying to push yourself forward gets diminishing returns after a certain point. Instead, you should switch gears and do something else, or take real breaks where you disengage completely and give yourself an opportunity to recharge. Unfortunately, most work environments aren't terribly conducive to this, but it's not impossible to work on a side project for a while, or just get out of the office and take a walk before coming back to what you were doing. A 2009 study by the Society for Human Resource Management published in the Harvard Business Review took the idea a step further, and proposed making time off and away from the office mandatory for employees because of the productivity gains it nets.

Myth #3: Multiple Monitors Increase/Decrease Productivity


We're cheating here because we're playing both sides of this myth, but here's the truth: whether multiple displays enhances your productivity depends entirely on what you do and how you work. It's not an up/down answer. A number of the articles several years ago pushed the idea that multiple displays make us more productive, but the studies they were based on concluded something very different. Here's what they actually said:

In many of these studies, the marketing push was to multiple displays instead of a larger display because larger screens either didn't exist or were prohibitively expensive. It was simply more realistic to suggest to people they get two 24" displays instead of try and find a 30" display, when Apple was the only one selling one and it was ridiculously expensive at the time. We've even covered both sides of this debate in great detail before, and while the issue has simmered, it's not going away anytime soon. Photo by Sean MacEntee.

So what's the truth? Simple: for most people who do heavy text or spreadsheet-based tasks in relatively few open applications, real estate matters more than number of displays. For people who need delineation between running applications, windows, or workspaces, number of displays matters more than real estate. Figure out what that means for you, find a great deal, and buy accordingly.

Myth #4: The Internet/Information Overload Is Making Us Stupid, So Disconnect to Get Things Done


You'll hear this refrain from a number of people, most commonly in order to sell books. Nicholas Carr and Clay Johnson both propose that the internet is changing the way we think and absorb information, with the consequences being that we learn little, turn to the internet for any research instead of learning to think critically, and are subsequently bombarded with more data than is useful. Photo by BuzzFarmers.

There's some truth to the theory, and we took a closer look to separate fact from fiction earlier this year. However, it isn't the internet that's making us stupid, and information overload is a failure to filter the firehose of data we all drink from. This 2011 Columbia University study, published in the journal Science, examined Google's effects on memory and concluded that yes, many of us choose to research information we need instead of commit it to memory. What the study didn't do is draw doom-and-gloom conclusions about what that means for human intelligence.

The real myth here lies in the interpretation of scientific data, not the data itself. When asked to recall the speed of sound offhand, Albert Einstein explained that, roughly "[I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books." The internet is much the same way—we learn to be careful about the information we memorize because we know we can access more at any time. The downside is that when we do, we get more than we need. Again, it's up to us to manage, instead of throwing out a valuable tool because of a productivity prescription written for us by someone else.

Myth #5: It's Impossible to Get Real Work Done at Home/a Coffee Shop/Library/Away from the Office


If you've been reading Lifehacker for a while, you know we're huge advocates of remote work, but this myth still persists, especially in the minds of managers and HR staff who still believe that "if I can't see them, they're not working." Luckily, science is on our side. Researchers at Stanford University examined 500 employees at a travel agency in China with over 12,000 employees total, and even after a few weeks, the employees who were working from home were showing definitive signs of increased productivity. Their study results are freely available to read, for anyone doubting the methodology. Photo by antony_mayfield.

Another study, published in the December edition of Journal of Consumer Research takes a different approach, and notes that mild, ambient noise—like the din of a coffee shop, makes us more productive. Too much noise—like the furor at a busy office, for example, (especially one with open-air cubicles) can be a productivity killer, but working from home or a mildly buzzing public space can do wonders for our work. Of course, anecdotal evidence also abounds. Working from home or from a coffee shop have their own challenges, but the benefits often outweigh the drawbacks. As with Myth #1, you should do what works best for you. If you work best in an office, head in every day. If you work best at home, convince your boss to let you try it.

Myth #6: Sorting and Organizing Is the Solution to Email Overload


If you're looking to get to Inbox Zero, spending all day sorting and organizing your email into folders may be one way to do it, but that's not really being productive, is it? Remember: the goal of any productivity method or tip is to give you more time to do the things you need to do, not to whittle hours away in the name of productivity. One University of California Santa Cruz study (comissioned by IBM) concluded that email technologies have gotten to the point where filing messages may actually make them harder to find, and more importantly, wastes your precious time. Photo by Jason Rogers.

We touched on this topic before, and suggested that you should just search for messages when you want to find them instead. The study didn't conclude this, mind you—the study noted that it was simply more efficient to search when a message was needed than it is to scroll through folders, and then scroll through messages in a folder. So what should you really do? The study notes that opportunistic access methods are the best for retrieving emails you need. Boiled down, that means the method that gives you the most opportunity to find the exact item you're looking for.

Put simply: reduce your email volume by unsubscribing from crap, automate and filter everything possible (services like and Boomerang help), manually organize little things that need a personal touch, and archive/delete everything else. Then leave the rest to search. That way you get the best of both worlds: a clean, organized inbox that can take care of itself, and you can skip through your inbox and get rid of anything else very quickly. If you need to find something, it's a quick search away, and sorting can make those searches a bit easier. A few filters can go a long way, and don't take much time to set up.

Myth #7: [Insert Productivity Technique] Will Fix Everything and Make You a Happy, Productive Person with More Free Time


This one's about logic, not necessarily hard science, but we can't stress it enough. First of all, there is a productivity technique that works for everyone. The myth, however, is that it's the same productivity technique. Some productivity methods are favored by specific professions (many coders and creatives prefer The Pomodoro Technique, but I've known project managers and directors that prefer GTD, and sysadmins and technicians who prefer Personal Kanban.) Even if you can't find one that works on its own, we've shown you how to remix productivity methods to build one that works for you. Photo by Dennis Hamilton.

At the end of the day, the productivity method that works for you is the one you'll actually use. Don't try to shoehorn a method into your workflow because someone else thinks it's the way to go. If you're a project manager and you think GTD is too cumbersome, try Kanban on for size. If you want to take elements from both and mash them together so they work for you, you can do that too. If your system is out of control, go back to basics and give yourself a fresh start. The important thing to remember is that your productivity method should save you time and energy so you can focus on the task at hand. If you spend more time organizing than you do doing the thing you're organizing, you're wasting time. Productivity is about getting to work so you can stop working and do the things you want to do, not about spending all day moving papers from one box to another.

Again, these productivity myths only scratch the surface of the ones we see and read posted by productivity blogs around the web every day. We're even guilty of some of them. Regardless, all it takes to debunk many of these is a little digging into the research behind each of these assertions, and looking at the actual conclusions of the studies instead of what others concluded based on the study. Like many things, productivity isn't a one-size-fits-all approach. It's highly individual, and every bit of advice you read—including ours—should be considered as such.

Title photo made using lafotografica (Shutterstock).