How do Productivity and Promises correlate? In times of constant demands, too much work to do, blurry information about priorities and different senses of urgency you can hardly blame people for breaking with their promises anymore.

They want us to reply to their email within their desired timeframe. Or they want us to be available on Slack when they need us. Or whatever.—Shawn Blanc

If we’re constantly getting expectations by other people like “please get back to me by 1pm today”, how can we stick to our original schedule for the day and be productive? Should we ignore such external demands and say “we had better things to do” than replying to the non-urgent but urgency creating email ‘in time’?

It definitely takes some courage to do so but in the end this is what productivity is about: Sticking to a schedule and dedicating focus time to one single task.