One thing that so many of these productivity apps (and "productivity hacking" in general) seem to miss is that simply doing more "productive" things doesn't mak

One thing that so many of these productivity apps (and "productivity hacking" in general) seem to miss is that simply doing more "productive" things doesn't make you more effective, and can in fact have the opposite effect. Certain tasks that you undertake will have an impact that is 3 or 4 orders of magnitude more than lower-importance tasks, and when the scaling gets that extreme it's a completely valid approximation to bin a "productive" task such as "type polite email response to customer who clearly isn't interested in buying your product" in the "non-productive" category alongside "go for a walk" and "play video games". I've spent the last year optimising one of my businesses by simply avoiding tasks that I neither enjoy nor bring in a significant amount of value and the results have been stellar. We've grown enough to the point where we've hired our first employee, and the amount of hours my wife and I are putting in since a year ago has halved.