I’ve had one conversation more times than I can count, and it almost always begins the same way.
Someone tells me they want to become more productive.
Then, as we keep talking, something shifts. They are not really describing a desire to do more. They are not asking how to fit more meetings into their diary or respond to emails faster. When I ask what they are actually hoping for, they describe something that sounds much more like a different kind of life.
They want to finish work without feeling hollowed out by it. They want to sit down for dinner without half their attention still at their desk. They want to have enough of themselves left at the end of the day to be present with the people they love, not just physically there, but genuinely there.
I have been thinking about those conversations for a long time. And the more I reflect on them, the more I wonder whether we have been measuring productivity against the wrong thing entirely.
The question we rarely ask
There is no shortage of productivity advice. Every week brings another article about morning routines, another app promising to organise everything, another system designed to help us do more with less.
Most of it is well intentioned. I have found useful ideas in books and conversations over the years. But I have noticed something about the vast majority of this advice that feels worth naming.
It is almost always about adding something.
A new habit. A better method. A different planning tool. More reflection. More tracking. More structure.
Individually, none of those suggestions is unreasonable. But taken together, they can turn becoming more productive into another project to manage. Instead of reducing the weight we’re carrying, we simply organise it better.
Usually in a more colour-coded way.
The question I rarely hear in any of these conversations is a much simpler one.
What can I stop doing?
What I have noticed in the people who feel most at ease
I worked with a client a few years ago, a senior leader in a growing business, who came to me convinced that her problem was time. She was working long hours, missing family dinners and running on what she described as fumes by Friday.
We didn’t begin by introducing a new planning system or asking her to wake up earlier. Instead, we looked at everything she was still carrying that no longer needed to belong to her.
She had become the default person for countless decisions her team were perfectly capable of making themselves. She was attending meetings she no longer needed to attend. She was holding onto responsibilities she’d outgrown simply because no one had stopped to question them.
Within a month she’d reclaimed several hours each week. But what she talked about most wasn’t the time she’d gained. It was walking through her front door and realising she could actually switch off. She wasn’t arriving home, still mentally sitting in the office.
That experience shaped the S.O.U.L. System. Rather than starting with ways to do more, it starts by simplifying what you’re carrying, organising what remains, understanding where your time is really going and then learning how to leverage it more intentionally.
The people who feel most in control are not always the ones with the most sophisticated systems. They are the ones who have become very clear about what they no longer need to think about. They protect their mental energy the same way they protect their time because they have understood that attention is a finite resource, and most of us spend far too little of it consciously.
When the problem is not time
When someone tells me they do not have enough time, I understand exactly what they mean.
But what feels like a time problem is sometimes something a little different. It is the feeling of carrying too much at once.
Every email is waiting for a response. Every notification asks for a moment of attention. Every decision that has not yet been made is sitting somewhere in the background, taking up room that might otherwise be used for something that matters.
None of those things is particularly significant on its own. But together they create a constant low-level activity that follows us through the day. Final :None of those things feels particularly significant on its own. The problem is what happens when they accumulate. Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that sustained decision-making measurably depletes our cognitive resources, affecting the quality of our judgement regardless of how experienced or capable we are.
(Source: Danziger, S., Levav, J., & Avnaim-Pesso, L. (2011). Extraneous factors in judicial decisions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.)
By evening, it is not exactly that we are short of hours. We are full.
That distinction matters, because the answer is not always another hour in the day. Sometimes it is reducing what is competing for our attention within the hours we already have. I explored this idea in more depth in a recent piece on how decision fatigue affects productivity, and the responses it generated suggested it resonates far more widely than most people expect.
What breathing room actually feels like
Headspace is hard to measure, which is probably why we do not talk about it enough. We often only notice it once it has disappeared. It is drinking a cup of coffee without mentally writing tomorrow’s to-do list. It is reading a few pages of a book without reaching for your phone before you have finished the paragraph. It is sitting with someone you love and actually listening to them, rather than nodding while your mind is somewhere else entirely.
Those moments seem ordinary, but they are not. Those moments are not a luxury. They are the thing that makes everything else sustainable.
Without them, we can keep producing. But we gradually lose the clarity, the creativity and the enjoyment that made the work feel worth doing in the first place. And at that point, what exactly are we being productive for?
A different starting point
My understanding of productivity has shifted considerably over the years.
I used to think of it as a measure of how much could be fitted into a day. I no longer see it that way.
I see it now as the ability to direct our energy towards what genuinely matters — and to let go, as gracefully as possible, of what does not.
That shift changes the questions we ask. Instead of how can I get more done, we start asking what deserves my attention today. Which decisions can I simplify? What am I still carrying that does not need to belong to me?
Those questions do not produce dramatic results overnight. But over time, they create something that no system I have ever come across can quite replicate.
They create room.
A word on ambition
I want to be clear about something, because I think it is sometimes misunderstood.
Creating breathing space is not about becoming less ambitious. The people I work with are leading organisations, building businesses, raising families and doing work they care about deeply. They are not looking to care less. They are looking to stop spending their best energy on things that do not deserve it.
When we stop asking our minds to manage everything at once, we tend to think more clearly and make better decisions. The work does not diminish. In many cases it improves. And we get to actually enjoy it, which should perhaps be the point.
The measure I keep coming back to
Maybe productivity has never really been about doing more.
Maybe it has always been about something far quieter — making enough room for the moments that actually constitute a life. The conversation you were fully present for. The decision you made with a clear head rather than a depleted one. The evening you arrived home and felt like yourself.
Those moments do not show up on a productivity tracker. They do not make a calendar look impressive. But in my experience, those are the moments people are really describing when they tell me they want to be more productive.
They aren’t asking for a fuller day.
They’re asking for a life that still has room in it for them.
Perhaps that’s what productivity was meant to give us all along.
