Asian Efficiency: So, what separates real work from fake work? It’s simpler than you might think. Real work is any task that directly contributes to your goals, your priorities, or your organization’s objectives. It’s the stuff that, when completed, genuinely moves the needle forward. Fake work, on the other hand, is anything that doesn’t. It’s non-essential, often busywork, and if you didn’t do it, nobody would really notice… or at least, it wouldn’t have a significant impact on your core objectives.
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I had two thoughts in return for this article, the first being that while I agree with the principles in this article, the assertion that eliminating fake work as defined is important, and certain parts of the remediation, I often wonder about how effective the remediation is to readers and what people’s individual ability is to implement these changes in their life. There has to be a certain internal commitment to reflection and evaluation that I feel often is left out in conversations around productivity as we focus more on our environment and our external relationship to it as opposed to our internal relationship to work and how we determine our goals in the first place. This is not to say that the article is unhelpful, but moreso wondering where the work of the article truly begins if we are internally not aligned to accept these points? Second, for the items that are classified as fake work, does fake work have the capability of becoming work or is it always not lending towards productivity? Yes, organizing your inbox five times a day is fake work, but if one’s own internal perception of the importance of that item is flawed, how are they to know the correct frequency of particular tasks to prevent them from fake work?
I resonate with the articles opening of having a huge checklist that never ends and rolls into the next day for months. This semester I’ve been working 24/7. However, where the article lost me is the definition of fake work in specific comparison to my endless checklist. I do not have anything in my 20 task checklist that is not essential. Sure, there are tasks on there for things that aren’t directly required to graduate as I take on a lot of extracurricular activities. Nearly every task is a project/homework that is due, or it is a task that has many people relying on me to follow through. I do align with the idea that checklists should be organized by priority. I do shove certain tasks down the list depending on how urgent they are. No task for me lasts longer than two weeks as of being alert about it.
I've encountered this similar feeling of doing “fake work” a lot of the time, but it hits me months or a year later. I think it's because I inhabit a mindset that I don't know anything, because there is so much to learn, and experience and do. So I look back at past work and projects and end up feeling like the work I was putting into things wasn't fruitful, or didn't help me and put me at a current advantage. “Fake work” is a tricky thing because it's always important to work, stay busy, and become a powerhouse. But in order to get what you temporarily need to get done finished, I try to convince myself that it is important real work. It helps motivate me to get things done. I think real “fake work” (lol) occurs when you spend too much time doing something small that could've, and a lot of the time should've. It took less time.
I find this article to be very informative and looking back I find that I have a tendency towards “fake work”. I never do it with the intention of procrastinating or even consciously realize that what I’m doing shouldn’t be my top priority. I think for me it partially comes from what I want to do at the time rather than what it would be most productive for me to do at the time. For example taking on several less urgent quick tasks rather than focussing on a more daunting long term task that’s more urgent than the smaller tasks combined. I’ve heard the idea of using a todo list several times before but this is the first article that I’ve read that actually touches on how that todo list should be constructed. Every time I’ve made a todo list I’ve simply listed all of my tasks, occasionally breaking them up into subtasks but always find that having everything listed just makes the decision of what to do next more daunting. I will definitely try organizing my todo list using these priorities and see how that improves my productivity.
I don’t think I like the idea of fake work, especially since we’re given only one example, and it’s very oddly specific. I don’t think any work is fake, just lower priority. As a current college student, I’ve been putting my to-do lists together in a way that is continuous throughout a semester, but I do not think that’s inherently bad. Maybe it is bad if that overwhelms you, but if it’s overwhelming to have a to-do list for longer than one day, I have some bad news about any kind of long-term project… I had a teacher in high school give me a great structure for all of my to-do lists, and I swear by it.
Instead of structuring work by what’s most important, I will order it by when I can get it done. I start my process by listing all of the work I need to do. Personally, that means the assignments I’m actively working on for which classes, emails to send, personal tasks, etc. but I keep them separated by the different projects they’re related to. Then, I create a columb for deadlines, and one for how long it will take to complete the project. After this I’ll usually rank my list by what is due first, and keep an eye out for anything at the bottom of the list that has a noticeably larger amount of time necessary to complete the task. From there it’s much easier to work from a list; say I have 30 minutes to get something done. I can look at my list for something I put as a 30 minute task and boom it’s out of the way. I don’t think “fake work” is real, I think poor time management is.
This might be the first “self-help” / “improving productivity” article that I have actually enjoyed. I tend to struggle with articles like this because I have this weird mental block in my brain about accepting advice from strangers. I think one of the reasons this article spoke to me was because it connects to the book we are reading in Stage Management Seminar, Start With Why. The article focused a lot on goal setting and coming back to why your goals are the way that they are. In Start With Why the primary lesson is to evaluate why you are doing things and making sure that what you do always reflects your ‘why.’ I don’t believe I have heard of the Pareto Principle, but I absolutely love it. I think that coming at a project really finding the crucial 20% can make it so much less overwhelming when there are a million things that you feel you need to give 100% to.
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