This is Steveer Robbins. This is my 10th anniversary show, and we thought it would be fun to recap some of what I've learned about productivity in the 10 years that I've been hosting. The Get It Done Guys, quick and dirty tips to work less and do more. My day job when all of this started was executive coaching and public speaking. Productivity was just a personal

interest and it was something that the clients needed in order to make time to follow up on the

coaching work that we actually did together. The podcast was just a fun creative outlet, and as it grew,

I actually had to stop and reflect and really understand productivity in a lot more depth.

Here are some of my reflections from the last 10 years of productivity.

One, technology is a seductive siren, often not a solution.

I believe for many of us, the biggest obstacle to personal productivity is now technology.

Now, this wasn't always true, but Silicon Valley has discovered that addicting users is a far better business model than serving users. They're essentially

making toys, not tools. Take, for example, the new iPhone X. It can unlock my phone with my

face. Great. typing a six-digit passcode was really the number one source of productivity loss in my life.

Well, at least he can take beautiful selfies more easily, but I'm not a narcissist. I don't care.

I just want to be able to, I don't know, delete my completed reminders, which you can't do, or search for a street name,

and have it find that street in the city that my GPS

says that I'm in, rather than finding the same named street in Bangladesh. They aren't even

pretending to develop anything useful anymore. And it's you and I who pay the cost. Our conversations

are dumbed down. Our creativity time is replaced with interruptions and cat pictures. Oh, cat pictures. I just

love cat pictures, especially tabby cats. Oh, they're so cute. Oh, wait, where was I? Right,

distraction. Yes, right. And the very nature of multitasking tools is that they provide a single

context for very different activities, which muddies those things together in our brains and makes it

very hard to focus on any one

thing for long enough to get into flow.

Number two, it isn't always personal.

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