What's More Productive: Counting Hours or Tasks Accomplished?

The biggest advantage of constraining time is that it’s always unambiguous. If you decide to work for three hours and then stop, there’s no confusion there.

Disadvantage: time constraints can encourage a sloppier attitude towards work. For example, you might decide to spend all day studying in the library—but without tasks to constrain your productivity, you end up checking your phone.

• It’s unclear the time and effort required to complete the task.
• The work itself is ambiguous and may require a lot of trial-and-error.
• The work is continuous and can’t be easily divided into discrete chunks.

The advantage of constraining tasks is that it focuses directly on the object of productivity: whatever you’re trying to accomplish: you can't fool yourself into believing you’re working hard but you’re not actually accomplishing much.

Disadvantage: tasks can often be ambiguous or hard to predict. If you fail to predict properly you might create to-do lists that are unachievable or those that are trivial.

• Tasks are discrete and fairly predictable.
• You might be tempted to fill up time without making real progress
• The tasks are frequently repeated, and therefore easier to estimate.