What's next for personal productivity

I also have mixed feelings about it. It feels nice at a surface level, but I'm not sure if the details follow. Are our brains really that bad at interpreting signals from the body? When I scrape my leg, I just feel that my leg hurts - but if I have lower but more persistent pain, my brain doesn't flag it as a leg issue, but instead starts telling me I hate my job?

More than that, I don't like how this view is typically used to peddle what I dubbed as "fuck off" advice. Take e.g. the "Body" list you've attached: essentially "sleep, diet, exercise". Aka. things that are often given as generic advice to solve one's mental problems. My personal experience (both of applying the advice on myself, as well as observing people) tells me that these do not work beyond fixing some extreme deficiencies - but they're the perfect thing to tell someone so they go away. They waste a year trying and failing to fix their problem, constantly blaming themselves for failing to stick to good sleep schedule / diet / exercise regime, but through that year they don't bother you anymore.

Even if these interventions did work like that - which I doubt they do - they're usually impractical. Getting into a perfect shape and sleep schedule is a years-long effort requiring sacrifices few people can make without throwing most of the nice things in their life away (it's not like they can cut out their job, so it's the personal time that gets sacrificed), and results are high-maintenance. So it isn't a good answer for the modern lifestyle, unless it brings order-of-magnitude improvements. Which we know it doesn't (otherwise everyone even moderately successful would be also fit and sleeping well).

We somehow accept that the average office worker is constantly dealing with information overload and distractions, and never wonder why or make a serious attempt to fix it. We find systems to cope with it, but don't address the root cause.

Likewise, we stretch people to the point where they are often near a burn-out and then offer meditation as a solution. How about not stretching people out in the first place?

I'd like to offer an interesting contrast by means of my background. I'm born into the lower working class. My family, the town I live in, it's almost all blue collar workers.

Strangely, these people never have meetings. Or at most one per week. They may have a few spontaneous 5 minute phone calls per day to calibrate, and that's it. They seem to mostly just work, as they know what to do, how to do it, and when to do it.

The immediate excuse we might come up with is that the nature of the work is different. More repetitive, less complex, less dependencies. Sometimes, but not always true. But it's still not an excuse in any case.

We quite simply don't have things in order. If for the coming week you don't know what the 1-3 things are you should be working on, that's a planning/priority problem. Which is to be addressed centrally.

If you are under siege by 20 other things not part of those 1-3 things, you shouldn't "deal with it", you should aim to eradicate them. Because clearly there's a planning/responsibility misalignment going on.

If your planning/priority situation changes by the day or even hour, your team has shit planning. Fix it.

If you spend half of each day not working, instead figuring out what to do, stop accepting this reality. Something is fishy upstream.

If you are bombarded with status meetings and messages, you have a systems problem.

Is there a single silver bullet? No. All I'm saying is that a huge part of these problems are solvable, and shouldn't be accepted as a fact of life for you to cope with. Demand clear tasks and planning. Demand uninterrupted time to do the tasks. It's not anti-business, it's pro-business. The worker AND the business benefits.

Fulfillment has nothing to do with it. Of course work-life balance matters, as well as chasing the luxury of doing work you like. But the lack of fulfillment in office work likely does not come from the tasks itself being dreadful.

Example 1. A manager draws a line on a patch of sand and tells me to dig into the ground 2 inches deep along this line. It needs to be ready before tomorrow.

Whilst not a fun task, it is clear. It is fulfilling in the sense that you would get paid for it, plus at the end of the day you have a feeling of accomplishment. You may feel tired, but not burned out.

Example 2. The dysfunctional office version of the above would be something like this...

Yeah so we need you to dig that line, but please check with our design department as they may have some changes in the line's design. The Kentucky office said that the line might need to be dug into another location entirely. Please also look plan a meeting with legal as our shovels may not be compliant. By the way, today you also urgently need to paint the fence, renovate the shed and design a new pond but we're not really sure when what needs to happen or how much time you have so figure it out. By the way, did you take the mandatory HR and IT security training that is due this week. Sorry, whilst I was typing it turns out the digging needs to be 1 inch deep, not 2 inch, so please put the sand back. But do it after the painting. I think. As per latest policy, please declare your commute expenses en route to the digging site, I've attached a PDF with instructions, required reading. By the way, are you reading your email? 7 people asked about the status of the digging, yet you haven't replied? Please reply urgently as to prevent further escalations. Which reminds me, please skip lunch at the site as one of our investors may drop by. Further, as you know, we're working on new recruit diggers, can you do an interview with them around 7PM? We need to move quickly as there's many digging opportunities.

I'm sure I could go on. The point is that example 2 creates burn-out, a lack of fulfillment, meditation as a requirement, and so on. It has absolutely nothing to do with the actual task of digging. It's garbage planning and incompetence. This is why you'll never find a blue collar worker in a meditation center, only stressed out white collar workers.

The point is to feel better. Thats the start of everything. Not "I have accomplished all tasks, now I can feel good".

Notice how I didnt even define what a "good" sleep pattern is and what you made of it, then proclaiming that to be unreachable, feeling worse. Maybe a good sleep schedule for you is to sleep during the day? Who cares. Its whatever makes you feel good. The second you judge yourself, you lose.

Hire competent people with common sense. Given them a clear goal on the horizon and leave them alone. The end.