When Productivity Becomes Part of Your Self-Worth

There’s a particular kind of problem I see in highly capable women.  They’re very good at getting things done. They have a huge capacity for work. They’re reliable. They notice what needs doing and take care of it. Give them a full day and somehow they can fit one more thing into it.

And this ability has often served them extremely well.

It helped them build successful careers. It earned them trust, responsibility and recognition. 

But when they start running a business - or want to - that same strength can create a problem.  Because running a business isn’t really about getting everything done.  There will always be more to do.

It requires you to decide what matters, what doesn’t, and what you are willing to leave unfinished.
And that can be surprisingly difficult when productivity has become about more than productivity. 

When getting things done means you’re doing a good job:

I was talking to a client recently who wants to transition out of her current career and into her own business.  She knows she wants to make the change. She’s already doing plenty of work towards it.

She’s studying. She’s thinking about her offer and pricing. She’s working on her website and getting everything organised.

But the website isn’t live.  She isn’t offering to help people yet.  She hasn’t quite crossed the line from preparing to have a business to saying:  My doors are open.

Her explanation was completely reasonable.  She couldn’t find the time.  Her day job took so much out of her that by the time she came home, she was exhausted. There was little energy left for her business in the evenings or at weekends.

And she really was busy.

She took work home. She hated leaving things unfinished. Inbox zero was the goal. Her expectations of what she should accomplish each day were incredibly high.

So I asked her to imagine the perfect workday.

Everything was finished. Her inbox was at zero. There were no loose ends waiting for her tomorrow.
Then I asked her why that day felt so good and her answer was essentially this: she could go home knowing she had done a great job.

That’s where the conversation became interesting.

Because getting everything done wasn’t only helping her complete her work.  It was helping her decide whether she had done a good enough job.

Leaving something unfinished felt uncomfortable. She described it like having an open tab on your computer. You know it’s there. You want to close it.

And doing less than she was capable of doing felt like giving her employer a second-rate version of herself.

This is where a problem that looks like time management can become something else entirely.

Productivity can become a source of reassurance

Most of us are rewarded for productivity from a young age.

Think about it.  You do well at school and people notice.  You work hard and you're praised.  You become reliable and people give you more responsibility. You achieve something and it feels good.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of this.  But over time, the relationship can become more complicated.

Getting things done doesn’t just feel satisfying because you’ve accomplished something.  It can also feel reassuring.

When you’re being productive, you have evidence that you’re doing enough.

You’re useful. You’re making progress. You’re not wasting time. You’re not falling behind. You can look at everything you completed and think: See? Today counted.

And when you’ve spent years being rewarded for what you can do, it’s easy for productivity to become one of the ways you decide how you feel about yourself.

That distinction matters.

Because if productivity is doing that job for you, leaving work unfinished is no longer a simple question of prioritisation.

It can feel like you’re not doing a good enough job.

Why this becomes a business problem:

The qualities that make someone an exceptional employee don’t always translate neatly into running a business.

If you’ve built your career around being the person who gets everything done, you can take exactly the same definition of success into your business.  And a business will happily accommodate it.

There is always another open tab.  Another email to answer. Another page of your website to improve. Another piece of research to do. Another system to organise. Another client task. Another course you could take. Another thing you could learn before you feel ready.

You can work extraordinarily hard and remain extraordinarily busy without necessarily working on the things that matter most.

My client is a good example.

She isn't doing nothing towards her business. Quite the opposite. She’s doing a lot.

But there’s a difference between work that prepares you to have a business and work that creates one.

At some point, someone needs to know you exist. You need to make an offer. You need to give someone the opportunity to work with you.

Those actions can be harder to fit neatly onto a checklist because they can also create uncertainty. You can make an offer and nobody buys. You can publish a website that isn't perfect. You can spend an afternoon thinking about the direction of the business and finish with more questions than you started with.

You may have worked on the most important thing in your business and still not get the satisfying feeling of having cleared the decks.

This is one of the reasons becoming a CEO requires more than learning how to manage your time.

You have to become increasingly comfortable deciding what deserves your attention - and what you are deliberately going to leave undone.

Why better productivity advice doesn’t necessarily help:

When someone tells me they’re overwhelmed or don't have enough time, it would be easy to start with their calendar.

Could they organise their week differently? Could they batch their work? Could they become more efficient?  And sometimes those things help.

But if productivity itself is part of what’s creating the problem, becoming more productive isn't necessarily the answer.

If getting things done helps you feel that you’ve done a good job, the space created by becoming more efficient can simply become space for more work.

You finish ten things instead of eight.  Then twelve instead of ten.

The underlying question remains unanswered: How do you decide when you've done enough?

This is why I’m interested in what sits underneath overworking.

Not because every busy person has some deep hidden problem.  And not because wanting to achieve things is unhealthy.  But because sometimes working isn't only about making progress.
Sometimes it’s also giving us something we’ve come to rely on: reassurance that we're doing enough.

No time-management system can decide when enough is enough if your definition of “enough” keeps moving.

The shift from productivity to leadership:

As your responsibilities grow, the question has to change.  Instead of:  How can I get everything done?  It becomes:  What actually needs to be done?

Those sound similar, but they require very different ways of working.

The first assumes everything on the list deserves your attention and your job is to find enough capacity to complete it.  The second requires judgement. 

It asks you to distinguish between work that is available and work that is important.  Between something you could do and something the business genuinely needs from you.  Between the satisfaction of completing a task and the value of doing something that moves the business forward.

And sometimes leadership means deliberately leaving an open tab open.

Not because you’re careless.  Not because your standards have fallen.  But because something else matters more.

For someone who has spent years equating doing a good job with getting everything done, that can feel deeply uncomfortable.  It is also part of learning to lead.

What are you asking achievement to do for you?

I’ve had to rethink my own relationship with productivity too.  For a long time, my definition was essentially:  Success = productive.

If I’d had a productive day, I felt good about the day.

Eventually, I shifted towards achievement. But I realised that wasn't actually such a significant change. I was still looking at what I had done to decide whether I’d been successful.  Sometimes to decide how I felt about myself.

I don't want to do that anymore.  My definition these days is closer to:  Success = fulfilled.

I can have one coaching conversation and finish the day feeling deeply fulfilled because I know this is work I want to be doing in the world.  I can also get through an enormous amount of work and feel very little fulfilment at all.

But I don't think you should borrow my answer.

Fulfilment isn't a new, improved definition of success that everyone should adopt.  The more important question is whether you have consciously chosen your definition at all.

Maybe productivity was exactly what you needed at one stage of your life.  Maybe achievement mattered enormously.  Maybe those definitions helped you create the career, reputation or business you have today.

But definitions of success can outlive their usefulness.

And if yours has, you don't necessarily need to become less ambitious.  You may need to ask something different of your ambition. 

You can still want big things:

Separating your worth from your productivity doesn't require you to stop caring about your work.
It doesn't mean lowering your standards, giving up your goals or pretending achievement doesn't matter.

I still have big goals.

There are things I want to create, contribute and achieve. I want to do meaningful work. I want to keep growing and see what I'm capable of.

What's changed is the job I'm asking those goals to do.  I don't need an achievement to prove that I'm good enough.  My worth isn't waiting for me at the other end of a goal.

And taking that job away from my goals hasn't made me want less.  It has changed the place I'm pursuing those goals from.  That's an important distinction for anyone building a business.

Because if the business becomes another place where you prove your value by how much you can carry, there is no natural endpoint.  There will always be another target.  Another client. Another revenue milestone.  Another thing to improve or do.  Another open tab.

Building a sustainable business requires more than knowing how to work hard.

It requires knowing what work is for. 

A different question to end the day with:

When you focus on what you've done, you naturally zoom in.

What did I get done today?
How much did I achieve?
Was I productive enough?

But leadership periodically requires you to zoom out.

What actually matters here?
What does this business need from me now?
What am I building?
How do I want to work while I build it?

And perhaps the more uncomfortable question underneath all of them:    Who am I when I'm not using how much I get done as evidence of my value?

You don't need an immediate answer.

You don't even need to replace productivity with another perfect definition of success.  But it may be worth noticing what happens when you ask yourself:  If you couldn't use how much you got done to decide whether today was successful, what would you use instead?

Don't borrow my answer.

The point isn't to find the right definition.  It's to make sure the one you're living by still belongs to you.