Right now, there seem to be two, major tectonic plates grinding past each other in the football analytics world. One, which relies on metrics like expected goals and their various offshoots, is largely based on ‘event’ data such as shots, passes, dribbles etc.; the other, mostly confined to academics and specialists, holds the promise of analyzing player tracking data to give a far more accurate, if complex, picture of where talented players end and talented teams begin.

But what if both approaches are still leaving money on the table when it comes to understanding what makes good teams good (and bad teams bad)?

I’m not as avid a football watcher as I once was, but more and more, especially as I sit through more Championship games, I’ve come to appreciate that the difference between ‘good’ teams and ‘bad’ teams is indeed one of clubs being able to afford good players vs not being able to afford good players.

Stop the presses!

While it may seem obvious, if you believe this, you also have to accept that a team is really only as good as its individual players. If that’s true, we need to know what good players do that bad players don’t.

Part of football mythology holds that what separates the gods from the mortals in soccer is decision-making, sight beyond sight, a knack for premonition, an ability to read the game. This is a romantic idea to talk about, but I’m not sure how decisive it is in ranking a player in terms of pure skill.

Yes, the world’s best midfielders often come with highlight reels that show unbelievable, defense-splitting passes. But the more I watch football, the less I’m convinced it’s the choice of pass itself that marks an elite player, but the much more granular, and more boring, ability to more or less accurately weight that pass each and every time. Most footballers, in other words, would choose the most audacious, jaw-dropping passes — IF they believed they could complete them with something approaching regularity.

It’s not just passes either, but taking touches that manage to keep the ball in play, or making crosses that arc enough to reach the head of an attacking player as quickly as possible, without getting intercepted by a goalkeeper’s outstretched hands.

In other words, what separates the great players from the merely good is better technical ability, controlling the ball more accurately and to get the ball where you want it to go with more consistency, even as the action itself becomes more difficult.

To give you a better sense of what I mean, consider the routine action of ‘switching the play’ on an attack. A player, maybe a fullback, or a winger, will be in possession toward the right flank facing a 2 v 3 situation. They may see a teammate in a better, more open position on the opposite flank. So here, the task would be to make a pass that swiftly and accurately crosses the width of the pitch.

The payoff of this action is that if the pass reaches the intended target, it will have caught out the defense while they’re essentially lopsided, and perhaps lead to a goal as the defenders work to reorganize.

The risk comes in the difficulty of the pass itself. Raking passes across the width of the pitch might go into touch, or they may end up at the feet of an opposing player. However, they may also reach their intended target, but not exactly where the passer wanted, behind the receiver for example. Or they may reach their intended target, but take a fraction of a second longer than if the pass had been weighted slightly differently, giving the opposing defence just a little more time to adjust to the switch.

Nailing this kind of pass with something approaching regularity is the kind of elite technical skill that makes an okay team a little better. Knowing how to weight passes for maximum accuracy. Better ball control. Taking better and fewer touches. Being able to dribble past players more efficiently. The little things that add up to very, very good things. You add those skills up across eleven players and you have a top six club.

You can glean some of these elite technical skills from event data, but event data alone wouldn’t be the best way to measure it, because it might show a pass as ‘complete’ because it reached its target, even though it didn’t reach it in the most effective way (maybe half a yard ahead, at pace, for example).

But on the other hand, this kind of data is not so complicated that you would need a supercomputer to parse reams of tracking data to understand it. Because here, what matters isn’t where and how the team as a whole has ended up on the pitch, but whether in any given moment a particular player is able with consistency to put the ball where they intend to.

“But wait,” someone says. “You’ve said in the past that finishing is often down to random variation and that it’s the ability to get in good shooting positions that matter. Why wouldn’t passing be a matter of random variation, too?”

I would answer that, compared to meaningful shots on goal, passes, crosses and dribbles are a very frequent event. And unlike goals, which have to find their way into a comparatively large target but with LOTS of people working to prevent them, passes require players to put the ball where they want with more precision but under significantly less opposition pressure (in most cases). So you have a greater sample size and less pressure to follow through.

Are these kinds of distinguishing skills repeatable? I don’t know, I haven’t collected data or done any experiments, and most importantly, I’m not a data scientist. But I’m writing this because I think this is a worthy avenue of exploration.

I strongly suspect that

• these margins of technical excellence in rudimentary football skills separate elite players from replacement level players
• these margins aren’t ambiguous or hard to see but plain as day when you know what you’re looking for, and
• you can recruit on the basis of these margins, and even train to improve them in the players you have, IF you know which are the most meaningful (I suspect consistently accurate passes/crosses are among them).

It’s a hunch, but I really do think that what you see is what you get in this sport, you just have to know what you’re looking for.

This is not a dismissal of data in football. Clearly it is of use, in highlighting trends or anomalies, confirming or challenging what we think we have seen, alerting clubs to the likely strengths and weakness of potential signings. But Smith does highlight a limitation and perhaps a danger.

An alarming number of the blithe purveyors of xG stats and the like seem to regard their algorithmic reality as somehow more real than the actual flesh and blood game on the pitch with its players who have minds and personalities and emotions that fail frustratingly often to conform to the equation.

Wilson here is talking about the refreshing change at Manchester United since Jose Mourinho was sacked and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer appointed as his successor.

Though it’s only been a few games, United have been definitely more fun to watch. But I’m not certain what this change has to do with analytics. Wilson I think is saying that, despite how data has become more integral to how the game is run, more ineffable, qualitative factors like leadership are still important.

This is almost too boring and obvious to dismiss, but having known analytics people for years now, they all believe that personality matters in football.

In the article, Wilson quotes Justin EH Smith, whose work has touched on how reducing players to numbers dehumanizes them. But reducing players to numbers is hardly isolated to analytics work — clubs, managers, journalists and fans have viewed footballers as walking dollar signs stretching back before the Bosman ruling.

Moreover, there are all sorts of areas where analytics helps us be better people! Taking better shots, winning more games, recovering from injury faster — the bread and butter of decent analytics work — all of this has the knock-on effect of making human beings feel good about being human.

Then there are the ways analytics can help reduce human suffering. Think of the recent Sunderland Til I Die! documentary on Netflix. It is a portrait of what happens when a team that has no long-term strategy beyond “spend a lot of money to buy good players” suddenly has their funds cut off by a nervous owner.

Though not a panacea by any stretch, a data-driven approach focused on finding hidden value and earning marginal gains might not have won Sunderland glory, but it might have at least kept them in the Championship one more season, thus saving many hundreds of thousands of humans from heartache, both sporting and financial.

I’m not writing this to help the burgeoning field of analytics to flourish; there is plenty of evidence that most of the big clubs have gotten the message. But I think it shows a major lack of imagination to think that finding ways for clubs to win more football matches and avoid financial catastrophe is in some ways reducing players to ‘data.’

The end game, after all, is to win more football matches, about as banal as a human desire as one can think of.

It's worse than we thought. Maybe a lot worse. https://t.co/FkmAQq5qle

This won’t be a long post, but I’m writing it because I don’t feel like writing a twitter thread (ironically obviously as this is a post about Twitter).

So, there is a phenomenon that has become fairly commonplace on twitter these days. This is when someone, usually in the media (i.e. not a scientist) tweets out an alarming climate story.

These stories often appear on newspapers like the Washington Post and the Guardian, and they are often summaries, along with quotes from principle authors, of recent scientific papers reporting on the latest dire news. Often, it’s of the “[Climate change marker] is accelerating much faster than we think.”

The person sharing this story will often quote tweet it with something like, “Welp, we’re all gonna die,” or “It’s going to be even more terrible than you realize.”

I’m not sure what the point of this is, exactly, except to make people feel alarmed and hopeless in the face of what is already an extremely challenging situation.

But there is another drawback — tweeting newspaper summaries of individual scientific papers, which involves non-scientists making crib notes on scientific papers, is not really a great way to convey the complex entirety of the story at play here.

For one, peer-reviewed papers on climate change form one individual part of an entire ecosystem of papers on climate change-related studies, on everything from meta-analyses of climate models to studies on peak carbon to methane release in the arctic circle to a host of other complex and often inscrutable topics that relate to climate change.

To be clear, none of the news is very good, but there is rather a lot of it, and it’s not quite as cut-and-dried as you might think. Things are going to be very difficult over the next few decades, but the world will go on, and what matters now is having a sobering conversation that doesn’t rely on hype and alarmism, but faces head on the reality of the situation.

One of those realities is that governments are almost certainly not going to cut emissions to the degree necessary to prevent warming above 1.5 degrees. The other is that technology isn’t likely to save us either. The third is that civilization is not likely to end, but life is going to get far more complex and dangerous and many people are going to suffer immensely.

So rather than fueling pointless despair with drive-by “we’re all gonna die” tweets that do nothing good and cause active harm, we need to grow up and face the reality of the situation. That means taking the time to read on all the permutations of global warming and think about how they interact with one another. It means accepting that there is very little that we as individuals can do except make the best preparations we can.

Trying to scare people or governments into action doesn’t work, because the people who tend to win elections in electoral democracy are either useless and ineffective or outright evil — trying to act as if there is still time to stop the worst from happening if only we could convince those in power that things are really bad is pointless. And pushing the idea we are almost certainly headed to a world where life isn’t worth living isn’t helpful, or possibly even accurate, either.

Finally, Twitter isn’t a good medium for the kind of thinking I’m pushing here, so the best thing for everyone might be to quit it (and Facebook too). We’ve been going around and around in circles on this for long enough. Let’s stop the despair, let’s stop thinking we need to convince ‘skeptics’, and let’s stop abandoning hope and telling the next generation ‘good luck!’. Let’s try something new.

Welcome to the first post of Please Like My Music, an utterly self-indulgent series in which I talk about the albums I have come to know and love over the years. Though not strictly ordered by timeline, the first few installments in this series will focus on the very first cassettes/CDs that left a lasting impression.

Like most people, my parents played a formative role in my musical education. The problem is, however, is my parents barely had anything approaching a coherent ‘taste.’ My dad’s album collection (as far as I know, my mum didn’t really have her own section) included an odd grabbag of titles, from Seargent Pepper to Verdi’s Requiem to a giant compendium of Beethoven that neither he (nor my mum, brother or I) ever listened to. I cannot, in fact, ever recall my father playing a record on his own volition.

Mixed into his oddball collection were a few children’s albums, titles like Anne Murray’s There’s a Hippo in My Tub and a recording of Teddy Bear’s picnic, with the record literally in the shape of a bear. I have warm feelings about these albums but only because they remind me of feeling cozy at bedtime as a child.

But the first album that broke my brain was a kitschy novelty album featuring Ravel’s Bolero and the infamous Bizet fave, the Les Toréadors bit from “Carmen” all recorded on a Moog synthesizer.

I have no idea how my dad came into possession of it. A bad, last minute Christmas gift maybe? An inside joke? For me, it was simply there on a shelf in his smoky study, for me to take out and beg him to put on, in part because of the tantalizing and terrifying front cover of an orchestra of Moog cables performing for a conductor with a 6mm jack for a face.

The record is notable for introducing me to the facsimile of classical music before I even heard ‘the real thing,’ which is a common theme for many eighties babies, born into a culture where the parodies were far more numerous and visible than their subjects ( I like many others repeatedly watched and inexplicably laughed at the Simpsons’ and SCTV’s takes on great films long before I got around to seeing the originals, which were almost never shown on TV and weren’t available in suburban video stores).

Because of this, Bolero is for me, to this day, meant for the synthesizer. I cannot listen to actual orchestral recordings of this piece anymore; they sound thin, predictable, flat in comparison, which is odd because I’m not really a fan of the Moog. It reflects the problem of music first impressions.

While this not an album I really ever revisit or think about, it is the first one that I truly remember liking in some way, probably because I listened to it during a period of insane temporary synesthesia familiar to most four-year-olds, in which each odd Moog sound signature had an accompanying shape in my mind. This music was truly three-dimensional.

It is also an awkward fusion of the traditional and conservative with the progressive and modern, which is a kind of bland shorthand for what generally drives my taste in music today.

Everything You Always Wanted to Hear on the Moog — Andrew Kazdin, Thomas Z. Shepard (1972) was originally published in Please Like My Music on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

1. It opens with some sort of pleasant landscape photograph

The photograph is meant to symbolize freedom maybe? Or limitless possibilities? Or getting back to nature? I’m not sure.

2. It is constantly broken up by a mish-mash of inspiring quotes taken out of context, which the author will then needlessly ‘explain’ to the reader

“We have become a civilization based on work — not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself.”
― David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

The revolutionary concept Dave Graeber is relaying here is that we as a society are truly obsessed with work, but not work that actually makes anything, but work as its own reward, a goal in and of itself.

3. It includes casual swearing to let readers know the author is an irreverent iconoclast who can see really through all the B.S.

It’s time to stop giving all the fucks in life! Enough with all that BULLSHIT, ya hear me, bitches?

4. It includes the copious and excessive use of the term ‘mental model’

Because if you want to change your life, you can’t just rely on one mental model, but several taken from a host of contexts — behavioural psych, basket weaving, nuclear physics, manga.

5. It includes reference to either Charlie Munger, John Boyd or Marcus Aurelius

The VP of Berkshire Hathaway, a military strategist and a Roman emperor walk into a bar…

6. It posits that the key to happiness and success in life involves reading books

You think becoming a billionaire is a combination of luck, cultural privilege, and the power law at work? Wrong. It’s books. Read more books.

7. It makes ironic mention of cognitive biases while committing them constantly.

Every single successful person in life is successful because they are aware of and avoid common cognitive errors like the survivorship bias.

8. It includes a CTA to subscribe to a newsletter.

Surprise! I don’t have one.

This isn’t a pity post, so please don’t bother saying nice things (not that I would presume you would, gross). I don’t actually believe these things (most of the time), but my brain sure does. Yours maybe does too. If so, that’s okay.

Write anyway!

Anyway, here’s the not-comprehensive list.

1. You’re not a good writer.
2. You’ll never meet deadline.
3. This story isn’t interesting.
4. The thing you’re writing right now is bad.
5. Other writers, they’re better than you.
6. This is cliched nonsense.
7. You got a lot of edits back, this is a bad piece.
8. No one will read this.
9. The other people in the room are better at you than this. Everyone is better at this, in fact.
10. You’re not a good proofreader.
11. Writing isn’t a real job, anyone can do it basically. You’re getting paid to do something anyone can essentially do.
12. Your tone is so whiny.
13. This piece isn’t what I envisioned when I came up with it (happening right now, by the way).
14. Your by-lines were a result of nice referrals from nice people trying to be nice, not because your writing is any good.
15. You have no new ideas.
16. You don’t read enough books to be a proper writer.
17. You were better a long time ago. You’ve lost it.
18. You only get work because you’re a passable writer in a very niche subject.
19. The people who like your writing aren’t good judges of what constitutes good writing.
20. Books are basically impossible to write, and no one reads them anyway. They certainly won’t read yours.
21. You’re only as good as your editor (this one might be true).
22. This is self-indulgent (it really is).
23. You like to think you have a good ear for what reads well, but you’re just bullshitting, feeling around in the dark. Always.
24. You’re not an expert in this topic, you’re a fraud.
25. You get ten typos in published work in your career. After that, you’re a bad writer. You’re now at something like 50 plus typos, probably.
26. There’s no real objective standard by which to judge ‘good’ writing, so essentially you’re running on fumes from past accomplishments that were built on a hill of lies.
27. *reads something amazing* I could never write like that because I’m a bad writer.
28. Why bother doing this? It’s going to be bad.
29. You will never be able to do enough research to do this topic justice, because you’re a fake journalist on top of being a bad writer.
30. Miguel Delaney will share this on his slack channel.

And it makes sense; a bunch of kids died in a school because of a politically motivated 3 per cent of the US population that owns half its guns, which is reason to get pretty angry.

But as a means of forcing lasting political change, angry tweets are as ineffective as ‘thoughts and prayers’ when it comes to gun control.

In fact, yelling at your political opponents, no matter the political issue or the medium, is almost always a waste of time. For one, you’re never going to convince anyone to join your side. Despite the fantasy of a few centrist Sorkinist liberal idealists in America, the idea that ‘a healthy debate of ideas’ will produce synthesis is a political myth.

Of course, some might argue that the point of angry tweets is to push people to take action. Angrily quote tweeting the massive human chud that is Marco Rubio can help shore up your base of supporters, and twitter does that well. But, save for a few exceptions, it hasn’t led to lasting political change.

That’s not to say that it couldn’t.

One way is to reframe the way we see political conflict. We need to move away from the idea that politics is about arguing or debate; that’s best left to politicians. When it comes to ordinary people seeking change, it’s best to ignore altogether your political enemies and instead push for collective action on your side.

For that you need a clear goal, and a clear path of action. One goal might be to see a nationwide ban on the sale of AR-15s. The path of action could be to stage national school walkouts, maybe once a week to start.

Then you escalate from there.

All of this could be relatively quickly organized. It might help if a lot of the Chapo irony wing of leftist twitter used their power for good, as with the #deleteuber campaign.

The point is that politics is not a game of winning hearts and minds. It’s not about teams of rivals or grand bargains. It’s about a neverending battle between conflicting interests, between the powerful and the powerless. Forget arguing with idiots. Fight to the end instead.

“A…silent assumption that leads to anxiety and depression is ‘My worth as a human being is proportional to what I have achieved in my life.’ This attitude is at the core of Western culture and the Protestant work ethic. It sounds innocent enough. In fact, it is self-defeating, grossly inaccurate, and misleading.” -from Feeling Good by David D. Burns, MD

One of the many sad ironies of the appropriation of Stoicism on the part of legions of Silicon Valley tech bros is that it fundamentally trips over the core ideal at the heart of the Greco-Roman school of philosophy.

It is this: virtue — ie our ability to be fundamentally good, decent human beings — is the sole good in life, and everything that is outside of our control — including our wealth, our social status, and ultimately our work itself — is as ‘nothing’ to us.

At first, this sounds absurd. After all, while our wealth, social status and job may not be entirely under our control, the odds are that if we work hard, find ways to be more productive, and take pride in our efforts, we will be rewarded with more money and better jobs.

Moreover, every productivity writer on the market today buys into the idea that being a productive worker is an intrinsic good that gives meaning to our lives. You hear this now in almost every podcast or blog discussing startup culture. Business is no longer something we do to make money, but part of humanity’s great search for meaning. They couldn’t possibly be wrong.

And yet the relationship between productivity and happiness, when you look at, murky at best. Worse still, the belief there is a direct, causal relationship between the two can lead to psychological disaster.

To better understand why, consider Mike. He is very good at his job, is handsomely rewarded for it, and has held a position at his company for a long time. He is always reminded in performance evaluations and from his bosses about how valuable he is to the company. His family looks to him as a source of strength and security.

Eventually, through no fault of its own, market forces fundamentally disrupt the company’s industry. Soon, they are forced to downsize. Though it pains Mike’s bosses, they must let go of some of their most talented employees, and this includes Mike.

Mike, however, has spent his life accruing skills specifically for his industry, part of what made him so great at his job. What is worse, he is in his 50s, not the easiest time to learn a new set of abilities or get a job with comparable pay. So Mike, now out of work, has to take some less glamorous work for significantly less money.

Of course, none of this is in any way Mike’s fault. The disruption to Mike’s industry was quick and unexpected, along with its consequences. Because Mike had for so long attached a sense of worth and self-esteem to being good at his job, he is devastated, and later suffers significant bouts of depression, anxiety and feelings of worthlessness.

This, as you know, is not an uncommon story. While we’ve all heard or seen or even experienced it before, we refuse to accept its message: your worth as a human being does not derive from your work which, while fulfilling, is often beyond our control. In fact, the entire concept of “worth” itself is dangerous and unhelpful, as Dr. Burns hammers home in the cognitive behavioural therapy bible, Feeling Good:

Realize that “worthy” and “worthless” are just empty concepts when applied to a human being. Like the concept of your “true self,” your “personal worth” is just meaningless hot air. Dump your “worth” in the garbage can! (You can put your “true self” in there too if you like.) You’ll find you’ve got nothing to lose! Then you can focus on living in the here and now instead. What problems do you face in life? How will you deal with them? That’s where the action is, not in the elusive mirage of “worth.”

We can’t always control whether we lose our job or how quickly we can find a new one, but we can control how we choose to respond to these kinds of obstacles — and that’s where real purpose and meaning resides.

But we don’t want to hear that because accepting this truth means asking a lot of complicated questions about our society, in which work is glorified as the pinnacle of self-expression, and personal earnings are viewed as a measure of merit and esteem.

Instead, we would instead read about buy into the idea that success in our work life is a merely a matter of being more productive. If you just follow the ‘right’ set of algorithms or rules, you too can achieve ‘success’ in your work life, along with fame and recognition and a fat bank account.

This is why the personal productivity industry is booming today, and why a small army of snake oil salespeople are successfully pushing the idea that individual fulfilment is only a seminar, book, or set of lifehacks away.

We can even go bigger here: the idea that our work is our worth is the fundamental lie that drives most of us in the West, a useful lie which lets obscenely wealthy executives peddle the idea of starving millennials sleep-depriving their way through a hard-hustling gig economy as the route to personal fulfillment.

Your work is not your worth was originally published in Against Productivity on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For a table to exist, we need wood, a carpenter, time, skillfulness, and many other causes. And each of these causes needs other causes to be. The wood needs the forest, the sunshine, the rain, and so on. The carpenter needs his parents, breakfast, fresh air, and so on. And each of those things, in turn, has to be brought about by other causes and conditions. If we continue to look in this way, we’ll see that nothing has been left out. Everything in the cosmos has come together to bring us this table. Looking deeply at the sunshine, the leaves of the tree, and the clouds, we can see the table.

Mainstream productivity culture, however, sees the world differently. For productivity hucksters, your success, usually defined by what you accomplish in life, depends wholly on you and you alone. Are you distracted? Are you focused? Are you living your life to the fullest? Then try doing X, Y, Z and success will follow. Nothing is impossible. You can make your wildest dreams of success come true.

The role of other people in your productivity, when it is mentioned at all, is usually either to ‘boost your social happiness’ or to take work off your hands in the form of delegation.

In the language of most productivity literature, success — even the unreal, 1000x success of the unicorn tech startup — happens in a kind of social vacuum.

But this negates the fact your ‘success,’ even defined along the crass, self-interested lines of productivity culture, is still socially determined. To be exceptional in your field by definition requires others to be mediocre. It also needs others to recognize you as extraordinary.

Similarly, to be wealthy beyond imagination requires millions of others to be much less well off, and requires millions to want to purchase your product.

On a smaller scale, higher productivity means being more efficient at achieving some end, which is almost always socially determined. Maybe you want to be better at your job, which involves impressing your boss, and making your CV more attractive to employers, on whom your financial security relies. The social is inescapable.

It is also rarely an obedient servant to your success, for reasons I pointed out last week. You might be the most productive person at your work, which doesn’t lead to recognition or higher wages but — surprise! — more work. Or you might be extremely productive in an industry that suddenly finds itself obsolete. Or your brilliant service to a company may be, as is often the case, rewarded by finding out your position has been made redundant.

Nor is your success an intrinsic moral good, despite some of the pablum that accompanies tech startup pitch decks. Surprisingly, that millions may suddenly demand your product does not necessarily mean your product is improving lives, something true for potato chips and smartphones, Twitter and Uber.

The idea that popular demand for a product is a vote of moral confidence in a company’s ‘mission’ is one of the more dangerous delusions of our age, and one that traces its roots, in my opinion, directly to a lot of the productivity bullshit Silicon Valley bros ingest every day.

Success, whether that means untold wealth, or winning the Booker Prize, doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It requires a social whole with failed business people, unpublished authors, and perfectly ordinary people who are not visionaries, who are not leaders in their field, who are not surgeons or scientists, who don’t read 100 books a year or follow the tried and true advice of Charlie Munger. Before you denigrate these so-called ‘mediocre people’ in your latest productivity post on Medium, realize that your chimeric success would be impossible without them.

Why there is no such thing as ‘personal’ productivity was originally published in Against Productivity on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On the face of it, the concept of productivity should be simple: how to do consistently high quality work as efficiently as possible.

Despite the variety of productivity systems on offer such as GTD, the Pomodoro Technique, Kanban etc., the ingredients are all pretty much the same across the board.

When you work, just work. Turn off notifications and use a timer. Keep to-do lists and break down big projects into smaller, easily executed steps. Take regular breaks. Do harder work when you’re more alert.

In theory, then, you should just pick a relatively sound system and make tweaks until you get into a good rhythm, and then voila! You’re more productive.

And yet in practice, what tends to happen is people will try one approach for a while and then discard it when they read about something new, only to repeat this process a few months or even weeks later. And every day there is someone with a new blog or list on how you can be even more productive.

To understand why this happens, we need to first look at the concept in behavioural psychology known as the Hedonic Treadmill. Wiki defines it as “the observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes.”

For example, if you suddenly start to make a lot more money than you used to, you’ll feel happier for a little while, but that happiness will dissipate as your expectations of what you can do with that money rise as well. Sure, you can suddenly afford to buy your own house for the first time in your adult life, but it doesn’t take long after that before you’re pining for a detached unit right in the heart of downtown instead of your duplex in the suburbs.

Productivity operates along similar lines. Maybe you decide to start keeping a daily to-do list, setting a timer and taking regular breaks. You suddenly feel like you’re getting a lot more done in a shorter period than you used to. Great!

But no long after you begin to wonder: how do you know for sure you couldn’t be even more productive? And what if you’re not as productive as you think you are? Maybe your co-workers, who never seem to web surf as much as you, are more efficient (it doesn’t cross your mind that the reason they don’t slack off is because they need a lot more time to do the same amount of work).

And what about those days when your productivity system breaks down completely, and you end up refreshing Tweetdeck for two and a half hours instead of writing that outline you’re supposed to finish? Surely there’s a system out there somewhere that will also prevent you from ever straying off track?

The problem I think is that for most of us who are not in the widget-making business, where productivity is literally about producing more things faster, productivity is extremely difficult to measure. For example, you may already be extremely productive relative to the average worker but not know it. Meanwhile, your productivity means you are given more work to do, causing you to fall behind, making you further question your productivity!

Or maybe you have managed to get a lot of work done in a shorter period, but believe your work could be of higher quality (which is true for nearly everyone on earth). Or perhaps you think you have gaps on your CV that you want to fill, or maybe you question why you don’t go home every single day glowing with a sense of mission and accomplishment and happiness and yadda yadda yadda.

Today’s productivity hucksters cleverly take advantage of this inbuilt uncertainty surrounding the concept of productivity by tying it to incredibly wealthy and successful CEOs and investors, such as those on the list I talked about last week — Ray Dalio, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk etc. The idea here is that there is some system that will literally make you as successful as one of these insanely wealthy outliers.

Shitty listicles with titles like “The 5 Things Elon Musk Does Before Every Meeting” propagate the idea that Musk’s success comes from his finely tuned and expertly executed productivity system, and not something murkier like, say, winning a random variation lottery that stretches back to the success of PayPal.

This will, of course, encourage you to keep consuming productivity systems/hacks/tricks garbage until you feel you are one day reasonably close that same, impossible-to-reach ballpark, a day that will almost certainly never arrive. Along the way, you will constantly agonize whether you’re working hard enough and seek out as many productivity hacks as possible to convince yourself you are.

The reality is you’re far better off just finding a system that works for you, adjusting it as you go along, and accepting that it may bear little outcome on the future of your career once you separate out myriad other factors like your industry, your boss, your geographical location etc. More on this some other time…

Time to get off the Productivity Treadmill was originally published in Against Productivity on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.