What top performers have figured out, but rarely say it out loud
The other day, I blocked off a few hours of focused work to create a new short workshop. Something I have done many times before. Nothing unusual. But six hours later, what I produced was underwhelming at best. The slides didn’t land. The narrative felt forced. Nothing terrible, just not right.
I wasn’t distracted by my phone. I wasn’t procrastinating. I was fully in it. And yet, the result didn’t match my effort. How did I waste six hours on something I should be able to do in my sleep?
That reflection brought back a memory from my consulting days. Every week, we had to fill out the dreaded “Usability Report” — a sterile Orwellian name for what was really a productivity tracker. You were expected to account for how much of your time was “billable” to clients, meaning producing client-facing outputs. The magic number was 80 percent.
Eighty percent of your week needed to result in something visible, usable, and measurable. Thinking time didn’t count. Trial and error didn’t count. Anything that didn’t produce a deliverable was essentially invisible. And yet, all the best work I ever did came out of that invisible space.
Efficiency Is Not the Same as Value
We’ve been conditioned to associate productivity with efficiency. Fast. Clean. Output-driven. And that’s fine when the work is straightforward, familiar, and repeatable. But most meaningful work isn’t like that.
There’s a particular kind of resistance that shows up when we’re trying to make something good. When we care. When we push the boundaries. When we try to solve new problems or express something that doesn’t have a template yet. It isn’t laziness or procrastination. It’s the sign of real effort. And it’s deeply uncomfortable, because the effort is there, but the result hasn’t fully manifested yet.
You can’t be 100 percent efficient while doing high-quality work
That day with the workshop slides wasn’t unproductive. It just wasn’t efficient. And those are not the same thing. You can’t apply factory-floor expectations to complex, creative, or strategic work. Thinking takes time. Testing takes time. Getting it wrong, then getting it right, takes time.
If you’re trying to build something thoughtful, useful, or new, you will encounter resistance. And the more it matters to you, the more likely it is to show up. That doesn’t mean you’re failing. It means you’re doing work that requires more than execution.
The most productive professionals I know aren’t frictionless. They’re not immune to sticky days or slow progress. What they have learned is this: Resistance is part of the process, not a problem to fix. And they don’t let that shake their confidence. They come back the next day to adjust, refine, and keep moving. They trust the work enough to let it unfold on its own timeline.
So, when work feels hard and unproductive try asking:
Am I doing something I have done before, or something new?
Am I aiming for speed, or for insight, clarity, and impact?
Is this resistance because I’m avoiding, or because I’m creating something that doesn’t exist yet?
Often, the resistance you feel is just a sign you’ve stepped beyond familiar ground. That’s not failure. That’s real work.
We’ve all been handed narrow definitions of productivity. Be fast. Be efficient. But those rules don’t apply when you are doing meaningful, high-quality work.
You can’t be 100 percent efficient when you are trying to make something excellent. That’s not a weakness. That’s the cost of depth. So if you're in the middle of a messy project, or your effort isn’t lining up with your output, don’t panic. You're not behind. You're not inefficient. You're just inside the process. Give it space. Give it patience. Give it trust.
That’s how good work gets made.
