Though I am guilty of using it from time to time, I’ve never particularly cared for the word “productivity,” which is defined as (1) the “quality of being productive,” and (2) the “rate of output per unit.” While it’s easy to imagine how to control for output in certain contexts — say, turning out 100 widgets of equal quality from your factory each day — it’s much more difficult to guarantee that you’ll write 10 pages of exactly equal quality for your novel each day.
In other words, all work is not created equal. Willing yourself to suck it up and make that client call or do that distasteful admin task is one kind of work (very controllable), while pushing through a creative block to give something new to the world is another entirely (less controllable). [read]

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