How productive is it to listen to productivity gurus?

I was making my way slowly through one of my dismally prosaic little to-do lists – ‘pay the water bill’ ‘wash hair’, etc. – when the voice of the journalist Helen Lewis came on Radio 4 talking about productivity. It’s the Holy Grail of modern life, apparently, and we are now constantly looking for ‘charismatic individuals’ to help us maximise it. Her writer friend Julian Simpson is obsessed with the topic, she said, even though he disarmingly admitted what some of us may quickly have suspected, that ‘my interest in productivity manifests itself when I need to be doing something else’. 

My ears pricked up, however, when Simpson named one of the leading ‘productivity gurus’ as James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits. This book is a vigorous guide to how small, oft-repeated actions can eventually result in what Clear calls ‘the compound interest of self-improvement’.