Are you an over-committing over-achiever? In Toxic Productivity, author Israa Nasir argues that you can only maintain that approach to productivity for so long.

Eventually you’ll burn out, exhausted by all those ‘time management hacks’ that organizations (like Mind Tools!) keep suggesting.

So this week on The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, Israa joins Ross Dickie and Ross Garner to offer an alternative approach. We discuss:

how toxic productivity manifests in our lives

how getting rewarded for our productivity tricks us into trying to achieve more

how the signals that managers send sets expectations for their teams.

The book, by Israa Nasir, is Toxic Productivity.

In ‘What I Learned This Week’, Ross D recommended checking out the NotebookLM AI-podcast version of our newsletter.

Israa recommended the ‘Under the K’ venue in New York.

For more from us, including access to our back catalogue of podcasts, visit mindtools.com/business. There, you'll also find details of our award-winning performance support toolkit, our off-the-shelf e-learning, and our custom work.  

Connect with our speakers   

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn:

Ross Dickie

Ross Garner

Israa Nasir

420 — Toxic productivity: Time to say ‘no!’

The Mindtools L&D Podcast