If you watched The Odyssey and came away thinking that spending 10 years to get back home is a shameful waste of time, it probably means you’ve been sucked into the productivity trap too.
We’re at that stage of evolution when we’re “quantifying every aspect of our lives,” says Preeti D’mello, 61, executive coach and founder of Mumbai-based leadership development organisation The Fulfillment Institute. “We’ve started believing that work, workouts, even leisure time has to produce some kind of improvement that you can track.”
Key Moments
Write or Die deletes your words if you stop typing after a set time. On Beeminder, the app charges your credit card (an amount of your choosing) if you don’t achieve your goals. You only get a refund if you can prove that something genuinely prevented you from finishing your tasks. Habitica turns your life into an adventure RPG: You set Habits (such as waking up to go to the gym), Dailies (repeat tasks), and To-Dos (one-off goals). The more goals you complete, the more battle armour, pets and magic skills your avatar unlocks. As you cross tasks off your list, your birb gets energised and gets to go on an adventure. Miss a goal, and its mood plummets. Surely you’re not so heartless? Pencil reset days into your schedule.
With Finch, the app assigns you a pet “birb”, whose wellbeing is tied to your goals. Or, “get a dedicated journal or a productivity planner and visualise your days on paper,” says Jasmine Chabria, 35, a motivational speaker and personality development coach from Mumbai. “The goal is to make your routine easier to tackle, not to let your calendar run your life.”
Performance that shaped the outcome
Best for: Minds that are on 71 side-quests at the same time Pending tasks have a way of piling up, and people often freeze when they’re overwhelmed. Motion, another AI, plans your day, schedules meetings for you, takes notes and prompts you with follow-up tasks. It also keeps track of colleagues’ workflows, so it can notify managers about who’s swamped and who has space in their schedule for a project. There’s Jace, which uses AI to manage your inbox, replies to emails in your tone of voice, and notifies you of what needs your intervention. It even sends updates to your team, depending on the contents of the mail, and downloads documents and attachments. Mornings for client calls, afternoons for admin work, evenings for clearing your inbox. Or the other way around, if it works for you.
Give Sai, a planning bot, a task (“Create a list of 20 events happening near me this weekend”) and it does the research, lists the prices, and saves a document to your folder with the details. “You plug in your to-do list and how long each task will take, and it maps them across your week around your meetings, sends alerts, and does the organising for you,” says Crompton. A simple hack: “Match tasks to your energy levels,” says Prarthana Shah, an integrative health coach. “Arrange tasks according to the time of day when your mental focus peaks and dips.
