Put Your Tools Back Where They Belong
Imagine you’re putting up a curtain rod in your house. For this, you’ll need a drill and a level unless you’re really good at eyeballing straight lines. Hopefully, you have a place where you keep your tools so you can quickly access your drill and level. After you’ve finished putting up the rod, you put them back where they came from.
But what if you carried the level around with you to make sure that everything you see is straight? You check everything in your house with the level, including your bed after you make it in the morning. Pretty soon, you start feeling worried if you haven’t used the level and you still have the urge to straighten everything.
What if you start using the drill all the time? You need to put a hook on the wall to hang pictures, but instead of using a hammer, you use the drill. You start using the body of the drill to close the refrigerator door or the cabinet doors in the kitchen instead of just using your hand.
Sounds ridiculous! In these scenarios the level and the drill are both tools, but you’re overusing them and becoming dependent on them in ways that don’t make sense.
How much of your business’s culture and day-to-day life revolve around tools you’re not using properly? It might be more than you think.
Improving productivity isn’t about using tech indiscriminately
Your business starts in your brain. If you’re going to optimize for productivity, that’s the first place to start. And when you recall that our brains developed over hundreds of thousands of years in nature, you might see that what brains need isn’t tech. In fact, what brains need isn’t sold to us by anyone.
Human brains require:
Regular human to human social interaction (less for introverts, more for extroverts)
Regular body movement/exercise (not just on the weekends or a couple of times a week)
Nutritious food
Seven to eight hours of sleep every night
Regular exposure to nature (if you live in a city, a neighborhood park qualifies)
Regular time for fun, whether that’s board games, crafting, playing an instrument, playing a sport in a rec league, whatever you enjoy
You can’t get any of that from technology, except maybe videogames if you enjoy playing them. All the above necessities (no, they’re not options or luxuries) make sure your brain is ready for peak performance. If your brain isn’t ready, there’s a hard cap on how productive you can be. Even if you surround yourself with tech that’s supposed to make you more productive.
Which isn’t to say that tech can’t help you be more productive! But it’s critical to be thoughtful about how you use it. In theory, a small business owner could get away with spreadsheets for CRM, bookkeeping, and other tasks. But CRM and bookkeeping software will make your life a lot easier and reduce the chances of making a mistake.
There’s no software that’s absolutely required for your business, except maybe email. You don’t have to have Slack if you don’t want to. And if you are the type of person who feels compelled to read all the threads that happened while you were on a call or away, you probably shouldn’t have it.
Smartphones can actively decrease your productivity
I see so many people, and not just Gen Z who grew up with phones, weaving down the sidewalk with their heads in their phones. Not looking to see if they’re taking up the whole sidewalk so that people can’t get by them (as a fast walker, I have to say this really grinds my gears.)
But I also live in a city that can be absolutely lovely, with great weather most of the time. There’s a lot of jasmine, so sometimes you’ll come around a corner and catch a whiff – it’s a really nice scent. When you don’t remove your face from your phone, you're missing out on the things that nourish you. We talk about FOMO, but when you spend too much time on your phone you’re actually missing out.
Hopefully, you know by now (and you do if you read my stuff!) that “social” media apps are designed to be addicting, hijacking the same variable reward system that casinos use to keep you playing. (And a reminder here that the house always wins.)
If you have notifications of any kind enabled, you automatically look at your phone when you get one. Your phone is now the driver of your schedule, not you. Your phone is in charge of what problems you solve, who you talk to, your mood, and whether or not you’re able to focus on your own important work that day.
Productivity, at least sustainable productivity that won’t cause burnout, means you need to be intentional about doing the work that’s important to you and your business. If you use your phone as entertainment or to "keep busy”, it’s no longer a productivity tool.
Studies have also shown that even having your phone in sight is distracting, so put it away when you’re working. You can put it in a desk drawer, or if you have furniture behind your desk like I do, you can set it back there. Out of sight = out of mind = less distraction.
AI is not the productivity game-changer you might think
I changed my search engine a few months ago, once Google shoved Gemini into every single search instead of allowing it to be (easily) optional. I use Duck Duck Go, which also cuts down on the ads and has better privacy protection, FYI.
I think a lot of business owners don’t really know what AI is, at least the way that we use it. Chat GPT, Claude, Gemini, etc. are Large Language Models (LLMs), which are a form of AI. There are other uses for AI that aren’t LLMs, like the ones being used to look at protein folding (which is a big topic in Alzheimer's and Parkinson’s disease research) and other medical uses. Those may be extremely helpful to researchers and scientists, but that’s not what you’re using to draft your LinkedIn posts.
LLMs are basically roided-up predictive text bots. Existing intellectual property like books and articles were hoovered up into a giant dataset to “train” the models, which is why a lot of writers accuse the companies of theft. (The same thing goes for image generators like Nano Banana – tons of artworks whether they’re in the public domain or not.)
When you use an LLM, you are using a service based on theft. If you are trademarking or patenting something in your business, know that the copyrights and IP protections were completely ignored by the companies building LLMs.
That also means that what comes out of the LLM is based on masses of content that is already out in the world. So if you’re expecting to be a thought leader with AI-generated content, think again. You’ll be saying the exact same thing that’s already been said for years, because that’s what the model was trained on. If you want to be a thought leader, AI will force you to be a follower instead.
You may have heard the term “hallucinations”. It refers to the things that AI makes up. The LLMs are known to make up sources for lawyers, citing cases that never happened, and it also gets things just plain wrong.
The important thing about hallucinations is that the LLM companies themselves have said that they will never go away. It’s not a bug in the system, it’s a feature of the algorithm. It doesn’t matter whether or not you have the latest version of any of the LLMs, you will get hallucinations. No matter how many times they train the models or release a new version, there will be hallucinations.
Which means that you should never, ever use an LLM without checking the results for accuracy. If it gives you sources, you’ll need to look them up to make sure they actually exist. If it states facts, you have to check that they’re real and not made up.
This is where (I think) LLMs actually bog down your productivity. You can’t just let the results loose, you have to check them. I’m not sure a lot of business owners currently using an LLM realize that part of the process has to be checking the results.
Many entrepreneurs also lose productivity if they don’t get the prompts right the first time. I was talking to someone who said, “It took me so long to get the prompt right and then check the results that it would have been faster for me to write the post myself!”
Another major issue with AI is that it uses a ton of energy. If you care at all about the world your kids and grandkids will inherit, or that anyone’s kids and grandkids will inherit, it’s important to consider how much damage AI does to the environment.
Data centers, which require a lot of land and water, also suck up a ton of power. When water is scarce as the planet warms, who do you think is going to get the clean water: you or the data center? Many proposed data centers haven’t even been built yet because the power stations have to be built first, and these can’t just be magicked into existence.
I’ve seen some use cases for AI that we already have tools for. Especially around email. I haven’t used Outlook in a while, but Gmail takes care of a lot of email issues that are now touted as being made easier by AI. But Gmail itself (without the Gemini add-in) does a lot in your inbox and doesn’t take up enormous amounts of power.
Performance metrics may also decrease productivity
Fun fact about me: years ago when I worked for DuPont Safety Resources, I used to run the performance metrics teams for our clients. We were there to tackle safety issues, which would then reduce the amount of OSHA recordables and workers’ comp claims. Having those metrics were very important, so we could make sure the client was headed in the right direction!
So I’m not telling you not to use performance metrics. Or that these metrics are bad. They’re a tool, and when used properly as a tool, you can see if you’re on the right path to whatever goal your metrics are tracking.
It’s when they’re taken too far, when they’re no longer a tool but something you rely on day in and day out, that they can hinder you. You can find research about how many people start over exercising because they have a ring or a watch that calculates steps, measures heart rate, and so on. People get anxiety if they only took 9,999 steps instead of 10,000, or freak out if their heart rate is 50 beats a minute instead of 49, and so forth.
Another metric, of course, is money. Our culture encourages us to think rich people are somehow better and harder working because they’re richer, and that’s obviously not true. The guys who lined up at the Home Depot (before paramilitary things started kidnapping them off our streets) at 6 or 7 every morning to work outside in terrible jobs like construction, agriculture, or moving are working very hard to afford to feed their families.
OK, off the soapbox. But focusing too much on money, especially if you believe that the more hours you work the more you’ll earn, can be detrimental. That’s how you end up with burnout, because supposedly there’s no ROI ($) in, say, talking a half hour walk in the middle of the day. Or going out with a friend for lunch.
Of course, since you’ve been reading all my stuff :-) you know that things like lunch and a quick walk are some of the best ways to let your brain recharge so you can be effective when you get back to work.
Recap (tl;dr):
Too many business owners don’t use their tools properly, and as a result may feel overwhelmed, distracted, and unproductive. But the good news is you don’t have to keep working that way!
If you need help putting your tools back where they belong, I can help you develop a toolbox that works for you and your business. Click here to schedule your free consultation.
Photo by Zoe Richardson on Unsplash.