Member-only story
Are You A Productivity Cargo Cult?
Why your attempts at becoming more productive aren’t working.
During World War II, the American and Japanese military established bases on Pacific islands, often inhabited by primitive and sometimes uncontacted tribes. These tribes, completely oblivious to modern technology, would see soldiers creating runways. Subsequently, big planes would bring crates of food, clothes, medicine and other supplies.
The islanders noticed how much easier this was than farming and creating clothes by hand, and so they started building their own runways. They replicated what the soldiers were doing down to the last detail, going so far as to create wooden radios and straw antennas. They waited and waited, they kept doing what the soldiers did, but for some reason, those cargo planes never came.
These groups are called cargo cults, and some are still active. And while it may be easy to chalk this behaviour off as something only primitive tribes would do, you may be guilty of it as well — just in a more subtle way.
Just because you copied someone’s system, doesn’t mean you will copy their results.
- My Productivity System
- How I Organize My Life
