The problem may not be your motivation, your discipline, or your task list. It may be that you’re trying to work in a way that doesn’t fit you.

Please step away from that task list.

I have a complicated relationship with productivity advice.

On the one hand, I’m a project management professional. I make a living figuring out how to get complicated things done. I believe in planning, prioritization, schedules, and the occasional spreadsheet of truly magnificent proportions.

On the other hand, I’m a novelist. I’ve spent years creating imaginary people who refuse to behave according to plan, even when I’m the one who invented them.

Somehow, these two occupations coexist quite happily in my head.

My relationship with the productivity industry is another matter.

Over the years, I’ve made my habits atomic, eaten my frogs, organized my priorities into quadrants, and experimented with enough productivity systems to qualify as a minor research institution.

Some of them worked. Some didn’t. A few were spectacularly incompatible with how I actually function.

And now, apparently, artificial intelligence is going to do it all for us.

Excellent. I can finally retire my task list and devote myself to supervising the machines.

Except I don’t think that’s quite how this is going to work.

If you’ve ever downloaded the app, bought the planner, organized your priorities, blocked your calendar, and followed the instructions—only to discover that you’re spending more time managing your work than actually doing it—I have a question.

What if the problem isn’t you?

What if the system you’re trying so hard to master was never designed for the way you work?

I’ve spent decades studying how people and organizations get things done. I’m a project management professional, an entrepreneur, and an award-winning novelist. I know a thing or two about plans, deadlines, and turning complicated ideas into finished work.

And I’ve become convinced that much of what we’re told about productivity misses something fundamental.

The problem isn’t necessarily the advice. Some of it is excellent.

The problem is assuming that because a strategy works, it ought to work for you.

It might not.

And understanding why could change the way you approach everything on that task list.

The Quest for Productivity Started With a Romance

Well, a romance novel, anyway.

Years ago, I was working as a content editor with a novelist who was struggling to finish the third book in her series.

And by struggling, I don’t mean she’d missed a self-imposed deadline and felt a little guilty about it.

Her marketing team was waiting. Her audiobook narrator was waiting. Her readers were waiting. Her bank account was waiting rather impatiently.

Meanwhile, her family was getting whatever was left of her attention after she’d spent another exhausting day trying to get words onto the page.

She was close to tears when we spoke.

“I just can’t keep going like this,” she told me. Her son was angry. Things with her husband were strained. She was exhausted from trying to balance her family, her business, and the demands of a growing writing career.

She knew her business could be successful. But something had to give.

When I asked what she’d already tried, she told me she’d hired a well-known productivity coach.

She’d followed his program. She’d organized her tasks, entered everything into his recommended system, and meticulously followed the plan the software produced.

She was doing exactly what she was supposed to do.

Except she wasn’t finishing her novel.

In fact, she was spending more time managing the work and revising the chapters she did complete. The system that was supposed to make her more productive was interfering with the very creativity she needed to finish the book.

When she went back to the coach for help, he encouraged her to keep going. Building new habits takes time, he explained. She needed to stay consistent and give the system a chance to work.

And he wasn’t wrong about that. Habits do take time to develop.

But there was a problem.

She was never going to get there.

Not because she lacked discipline or wasn’t willing to put in the work. She was doing exactly what the program asked of her.

The problem was that the system was addressing something other than what was actually getting in her way.

She didn’t need to become better at managing her task list. She needed to understand why she was struggling to finish the book.

And those are two very different problems.

That One Time My Car Had a Productivity Problem

Around that time, I took my car to the mechanic because the headlights were flickering.

I’m not the world’s most mechanical person, but I felt reasonably confident about this one.

Flickering headlights. Bad headlight. Replace the bulb.

Simple.

Not so fast, said my mechanic.

It could be the bulb. It could also be the battery, the alternator, or another problem somewhere in the electrical system.

The flickering headlight was telling us something was wrong. It wasn’t telling us what.

Now imagine my mechanic had approached the problem the way we often approach productivity.

He could have handed me a new bulb, congratulated me on taking responsibility for my automotive performance, and sent me on my way.

When the headlights started flickering again, perhaps he could have suggested that I wasn’t committed enough to keeping them illuminated.

Ridiculous?

Of course.

Yet that’s essentially what happens when someone struggling to finish a project is automatically handed a time management system.

Or someone who can’t concentrate is told to eliminate distractions.

Or someone who keeps putting off an important task is instructed to develop more discipline.

Those might be useful interventions.

But they aren’t diagnoses.

A symptom tells you something is wrong. It doesn’t necessarily tell you what.

My novelist didn’t need another task management system. She needed someone to figure out why the one she was using wasn’t helping.

And as it turned out, the answer was considerably more complicated than a lack of discipline.

Productivity Isn’t a Single Thing

Here’s where I part company with much of the conventional productivity industry.

We tend to approach productivity through a single lens.

Time management is one. Habit formation is another. Focus, motivation, discipline, organization, and energy management each have their own advocates, systems, books, and enthusiastic followers.

There’s useful thinking in all of them.

But none of these approaches, on its own, explains why we accomplish some things easily and struggle mightily with others.

After decades of managing projects, leading teams, building businesses, and creating my own work, I’ve come to see productivity as the interaction of three things.

The person doing the work. The work itself. And the context in which it happens.

Sounds straightforward, doesn’t it?

Let’s see what happens when we actually apply it.

First, there’s you.

You have natural tendencies in how you approach work.

Maybe you like to think things through before you begin. Maybe you need to start moving before you can figure out what you’re thinking.

Perhaps you work best with one substantial project demanding your full attention. Or perhaps having several projects in motion gives you the variety you need to stay engaged.

You may love detailed plans. You may prefer a destination and enough room to improvise along the way.

And we all know that person who wants every detail settled before anyone takes the first step.

You know the one. They’ve got a spreadsheet, a checklist, three contingency plans, and a question about what happens if the vendor goes out of business.

Meanwhile, someone else on the team is halfway through building the thing and wondering why everyone is still talking about it.

Both approaches have value.

Put them together without understanding their differences, though, and you may have two perfectly capable people driving each other absolutely crazy.

One thinks the other is reckless. The other thinks the first is obstructive.

Neither is necessarily right.

They simply approach the work differently.

Second, there’s the work.

Writing the first draft of a novel is not the same cognitive undertaking as editing it.

Developing a business strategy is not the same as implementing one.

And developing a project plan is not the same as coordinating all the people, decisions, dependencies, and unexpected problems involved in delivering it.

I know. I’ve done all of those things.

Some work asks us to explore possibilities. Some requires us to make decisions, build something, refine details, coordinate people, or keep an operation running.

And here’s the catch.

You can be exceptionally good at one kind of work and struggle with another, even when both belong to the same project.

The writer who can produce thousands of words when she’s exploring a new story may grind to a halt when she’s trying to perfect every sentence.

The entrepreneur who can imagine a dozen promising products before breakfast may struggle to complete the detailed steps required to launch even one.

The work has changed. The demands on the person have changed with it.

Third, there’s the context.

The conditions surrounding the work matter.

Your environment. Your tools. Your available time. Your obligations. Your physical and mental energy. The people you depend on. The interruptions you can’t control.

The very same person doing the very same task may have an entirely different experience depending on those conditions.

Think about how differently you approach a complicated problem when you have a quiet afternoon to yourself versus when you’re juggling six competing demands and someone needs an answer in twenty minutes.

The work hasn’t necessarily changed.

You haven’t become a different person.

But the context has changed the equation.

And that’s the point.

Productivity doesn’t live in any one of these three things. It emerges from how they interact.

Back to Our Novelist

When we looked more closely at what was happening with my client, we found several things.

She was struggling with perfectionism that made it difficult to move forward with her writing. Her research process was creating additional obstacles. And the task management system she’d adopted was contributing to an already serious depletion of energy.

What looked like procrastination was actually a combination of problems.

The coach had encouraged her to keep practicing a new habit.

But she was already working incredibly hard.

She needed a different approach to the work, one that accounted for how she created, what was getting in her way, and the circumstances in which she was trying to finish the book.

No amount of additional frog-eating was going to solve that.

What the Science Says

Here’s something I find fascinating: we’ve spent decades studying how human beings think, learn, create, make decisions, and get things done. And we’ve approached those questions from an extraordinary number of directions.

Neuroscientists study what happens in our brains when we focus, remember, make decisions, or switch between different kinds of thinking.

Cognitive psychologists investigate attention, working memory, problem-solving, and the mental effort different activities require.

Behavioral psychologists examine how habits form, how we respond to rewards and consequences, and why changing a behavior can be so difficult.

Organizational psychologists study how people function in different jobs, teams, and working environments.

Researchers studying creativity explore how we generate ideas, make unexpected connections, evaluate possibilities, and turn imagination into something tangible.

And researchers studying motivation and self-regulation examine why we persist at some activities, avoid others, and sometimes struggle to do things we genuinely want to accomplish.

Take habits, for example.

In a 2010 study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, researcher Phillippa Lally and her colleagues investigated how long it takes people to develop automatic behaviors.

Participants practiced simple daily activities, such as eating, drinking, or exercising, in consistent circumstances. Among those whose habit formation could be modeled, the estimated time to reach near-maximum automaticity ranged from 18 to 254 days.

That’s quite a range.

So the productivity coach who told my novelist that habits take time wasn’t wrong. The science supports his point.

But here’s what fascinates me.

The research tells us something about how repeated behaviors become automatic. It doesn’t tell us whether the behavior we’re trying to make automatic is the right one for the work we need to accomplish.

My novelist might eventually have become exceptionally good at maintaining her task management system.

She still might not have finished her book.

Building a habit and solving a productivity problem aren’t necessarily the same thing.

That’s just one example from an enormous body of knowledge about how human beings work.

And I find it endlessly interesting.

Because here’s the question I keep coming back to:

If human thought and behavior are this complicated, why do we keep expecting one productivity system to work for everyone?

I’m not particularly interested in the latest productivity hack dressed up in scientific terminology. I want to understand what’s actually happening when we work.

What does the brain need when we’re developing a new idea? How is that different from the mental effort required to evaluate it, refine it, or carry it through to completion?

Why does one person find a detailed plan reassuring while another experiences the same plan as a constraint?

Why can we move effortlessly through one kind of task and feel as though we’re wading through wet cement when we switch to another?

And how much of what we call procrastination, distraction, or lack of discipline is really a mismatch between the person, the work, and the circumstances?

These aren’t questions any single scientific discipline can answer on its own.

But together, these fields give us ways to investigate them.

That’s what interests me most: taking what we’re learning about human cognition and behavior and figuring out how to harness it in the real world.

Not to make everyone work the same way.

To help people understand how they work, what different kinds of work demand of them, and how to create conditions that help them accomplish what matters.

And increasingly, to understand how technology and AI can support that process rather than simply accelerate it.

This is the intellectual foundation of Creative Clock.

Not another universal productivity formula.

A different way to ask the questions supported by science.

The Six Principles Behind Creative Clock

Creative Clock is built around six ideas. They’re straightforward, but together they challenge quite a bit of conventional productivity thinking.

1. Creativity is part of every discipline.

Creativity isn’t reserved for novelists, artists, or musicians. A chef creates a meal. A mathematician creates a proof. An entrepreneur creates a business model. A project manager creates a plan that allows dozens of people to accomplish something together.

To create is to imagine and produce something new.

We all do it, whether we consider ourselves creative or not.

2. Not all work is the same kind of work.

Imagining something new, making decisions about it, building it, refining it, coordinating it, and keeping it running are different kinds of work. They make different demands on our attention, thinking, and energy.

A strategy that helps you with one may be entirely wrong for another.

3. Not all people work the same way.

We differ in how we approach tasks, manage attention, organize information, make decisions, and regulate our energy.

Those differences aren’t necessarily deficiencies to be corrected. They’re characteristics worth understanding.

4. Symptoms tell you something is wrong, but not what.

Procrastination, distraction, overwhelm, and unfinished projects are signals worth investigating.

Much productivity advice begins by trying to eliminate the symptom. Creative Clock begins by asking what’s causing it.

5. Productivity isn’t a single thing.

It’s the interaction of the person, the work, and the context.

You can’t reliably understand a productivity problem by examining only one of those factors.

6. Strategies are conditional.

A system that helps one person accomplish extraordinary things might actively derail another.

And a strategy that works beautifully for you in one situation might be exactly wrong in another.

The goal isn’t to discover the universally correct way to work.

It’s to understand what works, for whom, under which circumstances—and why.

Before You Download Another Productivity App

I’d like you to try something.

Think of one task or project you’ve been struggling with.

Not your entire overflowing task list. Just one thing that keeps getting pushed aside, takes longer than it should, or leaves you feeling oddly exhausted.

Now ask yourself three questions.

Is it me? Does the way I’m approaching this work fit how I naturally think, focus, and use my energy?

Is it the work? What is this task actually asking me to do? Generate ideas? Make decisions? Manage details? Coordinate other people? Finish something?

Is it the context? What about my current circumstances is making this harder than it needs to be?

You don’t have to solve the problem today.

Just resist the temptation to assume you already know what’s wrong.

Because the next time your productivity headlights start flickering, I’d rather you investigate the electrical system than buy another bulb.

And I would especially rather you not conclude that you need more discipline to keep the lights on.

That’s where we’ll begin.

Your Creative Clock isn’t about doing more for the sake of doing more.

It’s about understanding how you work so you can create and accomplish more of what matters.

And that is a much more interesting problem to solve.

Explore Creative Clock to learn more about the Time + Energy framework and ClockPrint™.

Research reference

Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998–1009. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.674