How losing all my free time forced me to rethink productivity

Unconsidered productivity might leave you moving efficiently in the entirely wrong direction.

Credit: rizalvector / Adobe Stock / Pavle Matic / Vecteezy / Sarah Soryal

This essay was adapted with permission from Danny Kenny's Substack, Seeking Wisdom, which you can read here.

The day I accomplished more in 6 hours than I had in entire weeks of work was the day I realized everything I knew about productivity was wrong.

During my PhD, I found myself working one full-time job plus five part-time gigs (bartending, TA for two classes, assistant for the HDR office, and, only in Australia, delivering the school’s tea service for longer classes) while studying full-time in order to raise $22,000 for one semester’s tuition. And I had two semesters left to go.

My schedule, unsurprisingly, was compressed to a breaking point. I would wake up early, work late after finishing one or more of my jobs, and weekend breaks were a myth.

The surprising part? In the mere 15 to 20 hours I had left for my PhD work each week, I was accomplishing twice as much as when I had 40+ hours available in the years prior.

Scarcity had created clarity. With so little time available, I became ruthlessly focused on what would move the needle. Everything else was stripped away. There was no time for second-guessing or procrastination — only the essential remained.

Saturdays became my heavy work day: Wake up at 7 a.m., meet my friend at the gym at 7:30, sit down for coffee, breakfast, and work at 9, knock out a few 120-minute focused sessions, change locations (I am a notorious café hopper) to keep it fresh, and usually end my day around 5 p.m. with an insane amount of articles read, notes written, and next steps laid out.

In contrast, when I first started the PhD and had all the time in the world to focus, I tracked my progress by counting deep work sessions — tallying each 25-minute focused block. At first, this input-focused approach helped build the focus muscle, slowly building to 90 minutes of pure, focused flow time.

But eventually, I had to ask: What was all this productivity actually producing? Sure, I was putting time on the calendar, but was I moving the needle? Was I actually getting closer to producing a written thesis?

The answers were all a resounding no. And it took adding 60 hours of real job(s) to my calendar to finally do something about it.

This is the hollow chase that traps so many of us: We optimize our systems, track our metrics, implement the latest productivity hack to pursue recognition — all while avoiding the harder question of whether we’re moving efficiently in the entirely wrong direction.

Now that I work in consulting, I find this focus even harder to maintain. Work, social life, identity, building my own business, and sales all blur together. The clear boundaries have disappeared, and with them, the clarity of purpose that had made those limited PhD hours so productive.

It’s not something that can just be fixed by “WORK HARDER!” As a former athlete, and since my earliest days of soccer, I knew how to push through pain and work. I knew how to grind. I can white-knuckle and throw long hours at a problem. But hours worked can’t solve everything.

This struggle illuminates something essential about real productivity: It’s not about doing more. It’s about doing what matters.

Real vs. shallow productivity

“Being busy is a form of laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.” — Tim Ferriss

Busyness as a badge of honor is bullshit. There’s a lot of work we can do simply to make people leave us alone. Work that looks impressive but doesn’t move the needle. Work that creates the appearance of productivity without the substance.

This was me early on in my PhD, attending workshops that had very little direct value to writing my thesis. This is every time you open your inbox, pretending to check emails in order to make it look like you’re doing something while at the office. In fact, part of why virtual work is effective is that it removes the need for this fake productivity virtue signaling.

That’s not fulfilling. That’s not energizing. That’s shallow, unnecessary shenanigans. Real productivity, by contrast, tries to tick as many of these boxes as possible:

• It’s aligned with our meaning and purpose

• It helps us grow and improve

• It allows us to reach deep levels of concentration (flow)

Sometimes you only get one. The holy trinity is when you can reach all three — what I call “Value-Aligned Productivity.” These are the supercharged hours where you accomplish in 60 minutes what used to take four hours, working at the intersection of flow, purpose, and mastery.

Value-Aligned Productivity means aligning your work with your core values at a time when you do your best work, creating a virtuous cycle where your actions reinforce what matters most to you, rather than depleting your energy on tasks that feel meaningless. Having just two hours of this type of work in your week can transform your experience from good to great. Having one hour of this every day can absolutely change your life — creating momentum that ripples into all aspects of your work and personal development.

This is where our values enter the equation. When I approach sitting down to write as something I have to do rather than a direct practice of my value of growth, in getting better at writing and documenting my own journey in order to better serve others, my relationship with the work transforms entirely. It becomes something I look forward to, not dread.

When the work aligns with what you truly value, the approach, the energy, and ultimately the output are fundamentally different.

Think about the last time you were so locked in on a task that time seemed to disappear. Maybe it was writing a report on a topic you found fascinating, perfecting a slide deck just so, or solving a complex problem about trying to sell to a specific client. That flow state didn’t stem from just “productivity” — it came from alignment.

The awareness connection

Awareness — that muscle we build through meditation, journaling, and mindful practice — is crucial to distinguishing real from shallow productivity. It gives us the “catch” for interrupting patterns that don’t serve us. We either:

1. Notice and choose our intention before approaching a task (“Even though this is a chore I dislike, I’m going to make it as enjoyable as possible,” or, “I’ll approach this meeting by dialing up my warmth and playfulness.”)

2. Notice what we’re bringing to the table during the task and choose a reframe (“I hate this; it’s pointless” becomes, “This is about integrity — I said I would do this, so I must.”)

One of the simplest practices is setting an intention before beginning work. “I’m going to do this as fast as possible.” “I’m going to approach this with humor.” “I’m going to pretend this is fun.” You find what you look for, so use intention to create a nudge back toward who you wish to be and how you wish to move through the world.

Without this awareness, you’ll find yourself grinding through tasks that drain your energy while wondering why you’re exhausted at the end of each day. Building that awareness not only helps you avoid shallow work — it also opens the door to deeper, more energized states of focus.

The flow-state checklist

Flow states are powerful indicators that you’re engaged in Value-Aligned Productivity. Research from psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (I dare you to try and pronounce his name) shows that people in flow states are up to five times more productive than when working under normal conditions, with neuroimaging studies revealing distinctive brain activity patterns during these peak-performance states.

Here’s what to look out for:

Typical work:

• You check the clock constantly

• Your phone becomes incredibly interesting

• You find excuses to take breaks

• Ideas come slowly, if at all

• You feel drained afterward

• You dread returning to it

Flow state work:

• Time seems to disappear

• You forget to check your phone

• You have to remind yourself to eat or take breaks

• Ideas come more easily than usual

• You feel energized after, even if physically tired

• You look forward to returning to it

The challenge in modern workplaces is that they’re often designed to inhibit flow. Open offices; constant notifications from email and messaging platforms, back-to-back-to-back meetings, and the expectation of immediate responses. It’s all a deep, full-fledged conspiracy against deep work. The enemy is inside the gates. The call is coming from inside the house.

The countermeasure? Establishing boundaries and rituals that create protected space for deep, meaningful work — and keep the noise of everything else at bay. Boundaries, like setting clear work hours or blocking uninterrupted focus time on your calendar, put the right choices on autopilot and remove daily friction. Rituals, like starting a deep-work block at the same time every morning, turn those choices into habit and build momentum over time.

It’s not about doing more. It’s also not about creating an overly rigid schedule that prevents you from shifting your time and focus toward move-the-needle tasks when necessary. It’s about doing the right work, at the right times, for the right reasons.

Because you can do and accomplish just about anything you want. But you cannot do everything you want.

Systems as servants

So, how do you get there? After years of experimenting with productivity approaches from authors like Oliver Burkeman, Cal Newport, James Clear, Charles Duhigg, Ali Abdaal, David Allen, and others (you name it, I’ve probably read it), I’ve distilled a set of principles that actually serve meaning rather than just efficiency.

These are systems designed to be servants to your purpose, not masters of your time:

• Single-task. Multitasking is the enemy of depth. Choose one thing and give it your full attention. This isn’t just intuitive advice — it’s backed by science. Heavy multitaskers pay a “focus tax” for constantly switching between tasks compared to those who focus on one thing at a time. Put simply, people who believe they are “good multitaskers” are lying to you and themselves.

• Aim for deep work and flow. Structure your environment and time to minimize distractions and maximize your chance of entering a flow state. Turn off notifications, look at a blank screen, and lock the door to your office.

• Find your prime time. Figure out when you work best. We can’t always perfectly control our schedules, but we often have more influence than we realize. Wield it wisely.

• Track incoming tasks. Write it down. This gets things out of your head, and by seeing everything in one place, priorities often become clearer.

• Use the Pomodoro Technique. Start with shorter, focused sessions (the standard time is 25 minutes) and increase the length as you strengthen your focus.

• Work around people. This isn’t for everyone, but I thrive when working around others who are also working. Focusmate is a great online tool for this, where you jump on a virtual call and both work on your own thing. During my PhD, we did something called “shut up and write” that was incredibly effective. You can also ask a friend to jump on a Zoom call or meet at a café (my girlfriend and I call this “parallel play.”)

• Prioritize results over effort. Early on, progress is about volume: how many focused sessions you can complete each day or week. Reps build capacity. But over time, quantity isn’t enough. You have to focus on your output — what you’re actually producing that moves the needle. Without that shift, it’s easy to stay busy without making real progress.

• Start small and be consistent. Some people can jump in and go all-out right away. That might work for you, but it’s rarely sustainable. What works better is the ramp-up. With Pomodoros, for example, set a goal for your ideal duration and total number of time blocks, and gradually build up to that.

The path forward

I still think about that period during my PhD — when financial pressure forced me to compress 40 hours of work into 15, and somehow doubled my output in the process.

The scarcity that once forced clarity can be recreated by choice. The boundaries that once felt like limitations can become the very structure that liberates you to do your best work. What initially felt like a crisis became my greatest teacher for what work actually matters.

These systems aren’t just productivity tricks. They are unique, personal expressions of a deeper philosophy that prioritizes your alignment over sheer volume of ‘production’. When we step back from both the hustle culture and the work-less movement, a more nuanced approach emerges.

In the productivity conversation, most voices fall into one of two camps: the hustle-harder crowd promising that sleeping four hours a night is the secret to success, or the work-life balance advocates suggesting that the key is doing less.

Value-Aligned Productivity offers a third path — one that focuses not on how much you do, but on the alignment between what you do and who you are, and holding you to account for doing work on what you decide matters.

Where will you start?

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