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The person who started the local tire shop and the person who started Google probably worked about the same amount of hours.

I used to say this to CEOs all the time when I was a venture capitalist.

Your job isn't to work hard.

Your job is to have great ideas.

If you have one great idea, it could save this company two years.

Three years, four years. All right, everybody,

welcome back to the art of accomplishment. Today, Joe and I are going to talk about how your

obsession with productivity is killing your productivity. Early on as an entrepreneur, I found that there were always far more things to do than I possibly could do.

And like many people, my very first strategy was, how do I find out how to get more of the things done that could get done,

whether that is by making better lists or creating better structures or working harder or more

or finding ways to work smart, not hard. And it took a long time for me to recognize that,

you know, that phase of the journey eventually

expired. I started to realize it wasn't actually about getting more done. And in fact,

sometimes if I got more things done, that actually created a bigger to-do list, more technical

debt, more undone loose ends that ultimately could distract me from what I

really want and what really needed to be done.

I'd really like to talk a little bit about productivity today and how easy it is for

productivity itself to become sort of a hedonic treadmill or, you know, a chasing the dragon kind of obsession for productivity's own sake and how easy it is to lose the forest for the trees in what it is that really aligns with what we want

and how to really go after that and get that in a way that is efficient, effective, joyful.

...