Hey friends,
This week, I’ve been revisiting some of the concepts in Feel-Good Productivity because we’re working on turning it into a sort-of visual guide.
If you’ve read the book, firstly, thank you. And secondly, I’d love it if you could please spare 5 minutes to fill out this Feel-Good Productivity readers survey so that I can learn more about what you liked and what you didn’t like – would be really helpful for book #2 👀
If you haven’t read the book, this email might be good introduction. And if you never plan to, well, here’s a summary anyway 🙂
I was recapping the book’s core argument, and it got me thinking about how we approach work and energy. Lots of advice basically says “just do what you enjoy!” which, let’s be honest, is about as helpful as telling someone who’s feeling nervous about a date/presentation/something high stakes to “just be yourself”.
The reality is that most of us can’t simply choose to do what we enjoy. If we could, many of us might be professional Netflix watchers, guitar players, or World of Warcraft streamers. We live in a world where, for better or worse, most of us need to make money to survive.
So rather than the unrealistic advice of “just do what you enjoy,” we need to figure out how to enjoy what we do. Or at the very least, how to make our work energising – even the bits we don’t particularly like.
This is where the three P’s in Feel-Good Productivity come in:
- Play: Most people’s instinct when they’re not enjoying work is to treat it with more seriousness. “It’s called work for a reason!” they say, adding extra heaviness to already heavy tasks. But counterintuitively, treating your work with lightness and ease makes you far more likely to enjoy it AND perform better at it.
- Power: When people don’t enjoy their work, they often try to disengage. “If I care less, it’ll hurt less” etc. But here’s the weird thing – disengagement actually sucks more energy than engagement. It’s like trying to save fuel by driving with one foot on the brake. Taking responsibility and fully engaging with your work, even the boring bits, actually generates energy.
- People: I’ve never been a big fan of the classic productivity advice – “lock yourself in a room and focus” etc. We’re social creatures. Somewhat counterintuitively, the way to turn work into a source of energy is often to do it with others around you. Making someone a coffee might seem like a distraction from your “really important work,” but the energy boost you get from that human connection more than makes up for the five minutes you “lost.”
The key insight here isn’t that you should magically enjoy your work. If I had a job I didn’t enjoy, I’d hate it if someone rocked up to my office cubicle and said “just make your work more fun”. It’s that you can turn almost any work – even the stuff you don’t particularly enjoy – into a source of energy using these strategic energisers.
Think of these strategies as energy generators rather than happiness creators. They won’t necessarily make you love filing your taxes or attending that weekly meeting that could definitely have been a slack message. But they can help you get a bit more energy from these tasks, rather than having them drain you completely.
And when you have more energy, that’s when the good stuff happens – more creativity, better problem-solving, less stress, and yeah, probably more feel-good productivity too.
Have a great week!
Ali xx
