Productivity coaching is useful to anyone pursuing a goal. While in an ideal world all of us would maintain maximum motivation and focus all day long, every day, with no psychological blocks, the truth is that most human beings can't. Our organization can be inadequate. Our motivation can flag. Our focus can drift. Our ability to take action when action is needed can wax and wane, and we can find ourselves unable to do what needs to be done when we need to do it.
The result is an unsettling variation in our ability to come through for ourselves. We have good days and bad days, good hours and bad hours, and sometimes don't perform our best when we most need to. The results can be tough to swallow: we don't go to the gym when we said we would, don't study for the test when we needed to, don't prepare the report or presentation in time to do our best, and so on. The disappointment we then feel, when we fail to do our best in the service of our own best interest, can be immense. Looking back, when the moment has passed, many of us feel regret and shame, and wish we could go back in time and do things differently and better: organize sooner, decide more clearly, study harder, work longer, keep our motivation up from start to finish, persist.
In response to this widespread and very human problem there has been a major investment in improving people's executive functioning (EF). Two major approaches are biological intervention, on the one hand, and learning/education on the other. In the first people improve their sleep and nutrition, drink coffee or ingest nicotine, or even take psychostimulants like Adderall prescribed by a psychiatrist. In the second, people learn and practice executive functioning skills aimed at resisting impulses, increasing focus, fighting distraction, increasing delayed gratification, deliberating practicing conscientiousness, and so on. Both of these approaches have major benefits, and here at Slothzero we aren't knocking either. Many of our clients use biological interventions to boost productivity, and virtually all of them put significant time and attention into improving their executive functioning. Indeed, one of the "side effects" of what we do is that EF improves all by itself.
But we also believe that there is a "third way" that is often neglected: productivity coaching. was invented to address this problem. Its core insight is that we don't have to solve this problem on our own. While of course building motivation, getting more sleep, taking medication, reading self-help books, and many other individual approaches to the problem can help, asking for help can also work. And that help can be as simple as asking another person to help motivate us when we are demotivated.
Different responses need other people to help them perform their best.
Human beings are social animals. We evolved in groups, and we are hard-wired to respond to the needs of others — often more reliably and quickly than respond to our own needs. That's why productivity coaching by a real person, rather than an app (like an alarm or task list) so reliably helps people do their work on time at a high level. Here at Slothzero we believe that AI and automation will never replace the human connection.
