I spent four hours on Tuesday, October 14th, 2022, color-coding a database in Notion. I was in a coffee shop in Chicago, paying five dollars for a lukewarm oat milk latte, feeling like an absolute titan of industry. I had custom icons for ‘Deep Work’ and a progress bar that turned green when I finished a task. It was beautiful. It was sleek. It was the most organized I had ever been in my life.
By 5:00 PM, I realized I hadn’t actually written a single word of the report I was supposed to finish. I had spent the entire day building the environment for work without doing any of the actual work. I call this the efficiency trap, and if you’re reading this, you’re probably stuck in it too. Most of these systems aren’t designed to help you finish things; they’re designed to make you feel like you’re finishing things while you’re actually just moving digital piles of dirt from one corner of your screen to the other.
The Tuesday I realized I was a fraud
That realization in the coffee shop wasn’t a slow burn. It was a sudden, sickening drop in my stomach. I looked at my ‘Master Task List’ and saw thirty-two items perfectly categorized by ‘Energy Level’ and ‘Context.’ It looked like a NASA control room. But the output? Zero. I had spent 240 minutes on ‘meta-work.’ What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently. I was playing office. I was a thirty-year-old man playing pretend like a kid in a cardboard box, except my cardboard box cost me a $15-a-month subscription fee.
I think we do this because real work is hard. Real work involves the terrifying possibility of failure. If I write the report and it sucks, that’s on me. But if I spend the day ‘optimizing my workflow,’ I can’t fail. I’m just ‘preparing.’ It’s a defense mechanism. We build these elaborate systems as a fence to keep the actual scary work at bay. I know people will disagree with this, and they’ll point to their ‘Second Brain’ as proof of their genius, but I’ve met those people. They have 5,000 notes in Obsidian and haven’t published a single original thought in three years. It’s digital hoarding with a better UI.
The ‘Click-to-Work’ ratio is the only metric that matters
I decided to run a little experiment on myself after the Chicago disaster. For two weeks, I tracked every single click I made during my work hours. I used a simple tally counter on my desk. I wanted to see how many clicks were ‘productive’ (writing, coding, emailing a client) versus ‘structural’ (moving a Trello card, changing a tag, checking a dashboard). I tracked 14 days of data, and the results were embarrassing.
- Total clicks per day (average): 1,142
- Structural clicks: 710
- Productive clicks: 432
That is a 1.6:1 ratio of maintenance to output. I was spending 62% of my energy just maintaining the system that was supposed to save me time. If a factory had a machine that required 6 hours of maintenance for every 4 hours of production, they’d scrap it. But we don’t scrap our systems. We just download a new plugin to make the maintenance ‘faster.’
The more time you spend ‘managing’ your work, the less time you have to actually do it. Productivity is a subtractive process, not an additive one.
Anyway, I’m getting off track. The point is that these systems create a friction that we mistake for progress. We think that because we’re tired at the end of the day, we must have been productive. But you can get tired from walking in circles, too. You don’t need a more ‘seamless’ integration between your calendar and your task manager. You need to close the tab and do the thing you’re afraid of doing.
Notion is a dollhouse for adults
I’m going to say something that might get me some hate mail, but I genuinely believe it: Notion is the worst thing to happen to productivity since the invention of the ‘Reply All’ button. I hate it. I hate the way it invites you to spend three hours choosing a cover photo for a page that only contains a grocery list. It’s a dollhouse. It’s for people who want to feel like they’re ‘building a system’ instead of actually producing value. I refuse to use it, and I tell my friends to stay away from it. It’s too flexible. Flexibility is just another word for ‘more ways to procrastinate.’
I used to think that the tool didn’t matter, that it was all about the mindset. I was completely wrong. The tool absolutely matters because the tool dictates the path of least resistance. If your tool makes it easier to reorganize your tags than to write a paragraph, you will reorganize your tags. It’s human nature. We are lazy creatures looking for the biggest dopamine hit for the least amount of effort. Moving a task from ‘In Progress’ to ‘Done’ gives you a hit. Writing a difficult sentence doesn’t. So we focus on the movement, not the substance.
I might be wrong about this, but I think the whole ‘productivity influencer’ industry is just a giant circle-jerk of people selling templates to other people who are also looking for an excuse not to work. It’s a multi-million dollar industry built on the fact that we’d rather watch a 20-minute video on ‘The Ultimate Morning Routine’ than actually wake up and start working.
What I do now (and why you’ll probably hate it)
I threw it all away. I deleted Notion. I stopped using Obsidian. I canceled my subscription to Monday.com—which, by the way, has the most annoying, bright UI I’ve ever seen; it feels like working inside a box of Crayola markers designed by a sociopath.
Here is my current ‘system’:
- A physical notebook (the $5 kind, not the $30 ‘special’ ones).
- A black pen.
- A Google Calendar with only meetings on it.
- One single text file on my desktop called ‘TODAY.txt’.
That’s it. If it’s not in the notebook or the text file, it doesn’t exist. There are no tags. There are no folders. There are no ‘energy levels.’ If I need to do something, I write it down. When I do it, I cross it out with the pen. The physical act of scratching ink across paper is more satisfying than any digital animation. And the best part? I can’t ‘optimize’ a piece of paper. It just sits there, staring at me, reminding me of what I haven’t done.
It’s ugly. It’s messy. It’s not ‘scalable.’ But for the first time in years, I’m actually getting my work done by 3:00 PM. I’m not ‘efficient,’ but I am finished. And ‘finished’ is the only metric that pays the bills.
I wonder sometimes if we’re all just terrified of the silence that comes when the system is gone. When you don’t have a dashboard to check or a database to prune, you’re just left with the work. And the work is often boring, or hard, or lonely. Maybe the ‘Efficiency Trap’ isn’t a mistake at all. Maybe it’s exactly what we wanted: a way to stay busy without ever having to face the possibility that what we’re doing doesn’t actually matter. I don’t know the answer to that. I just know that my notebook is almost full, and for the first time, the pages are filled with things I actually built, rather than plans for things I never started.
Stop clicking. Start doing.