What oak trees teach us about personal productivity

Is it possible to be more productive by doing less? 

As a busy working professional and middle-aged father of two grade-schoolers, I’m constantly looking for ways to squeeze more into my life. More accomplishments at work. More activities with the family. More projects around the home. More volunteer work with my favorite nonprofits. More impact on my community. 

More. More. More. 

It’s the American way, right? We equate success with busyness and sleep deprivation. And then we wonder why we’re stressed out, burned out, and just all-around “out of it” all the time.

I don’t think we’re getting it quite right. And I believe nature generally has the answers, if you know where to look. Today, I’m looking at oak trees.

I remember this oak tree study where the researchers explored ways to get more acorn production. They took three similar stands of oaks and applied experimental treatments to two of them, leaving one as a control. On one stand, they fertilized the trees. On another, they cut down half of them. 

Yes, you read that right. In trying to boost acorn production, these crazy fools cut down half the trees in one experimental site. I’m pretty sure this was somewhere in the south, so what do you expect?

Then over several years, the researchers measured acorn production on all three sites. Care to guess what they found? 

On the control site where they did nothing: no measurable change. 

On the site where they fertilized the trees: again, no measurable change. Apparently oak trees aren’t like corn. Or over-caffeinated working professionals. 

On the site where they removed half of the forest: a 60 percent increase in acorn production. 

In other words, if you got 100 pounds of acorns from the site before thinning out the forest, you’d be getting 160 pounds after you cut down half the trees. How is this even possible?!

Turns out, it’s a consistent rule of nature. Productivity is subject to the law of diminishing returns. Having too many trees on a site results in reduced output across all the trees. Anyone that gardens or farms is aware of this. It’s why you pay attention to row and seed spacing and why you remove the weeds. Plant too dense and productivity suffers. 

I’ve concluded that the same applies to life. Too much stuff in our “ecosystem” reduces productivity. There’s diminishing returns in our perpetual striving for more and more. 

As we seek to be more productive, I believe it’s worth asking what we can subtract from our busy lives instead of just looking at what we might add. 

But cutting out family time for more time doom scrolling on the socials is obviously not the kind of subtraction I mean. Nobody ever said, “I really got a lot done today. I spent a full eight hours on Facebook!”

So you have to focus first on what is really, truly important and worth your time. What oak trees do you want to keep in your forest, so to speak? 

At work, maybe it’s time for creativity, or for making sales calls, or in my case, getting out into the parks and helping our short-staffed field team with construction and maintenance projects. 

At home, maybe it’s time with the kids practicing softball, or throwing them in the pool, boating on the river, or taking that summer trip you keep putting off. Maybe it’s just going fishing with dad, or having dinner with mom. Or learning something new to keep the mind sharp. 

Once you narrow down what the truly important “oak trees” are in your life, then it’s time to apply the law of subtraction. No, more caffeine won’t do it anymore than fertilizer did for oaks in the study. You have to remove the stuff that gets in the way of the important things. And no, you obviously can’t cut out everything. Unfortunately, we all still have to take off the ball glove occasionally to do the dishes and the laundry. And there are still the reports and menial tasks at work that will need done. 

But you can cut out some of the meetings that you don’t really need to attend. You can say no to new tasks and projects that don’t rise to the level of oak tree priority. Heck, you can remove the Facebook app from your phone altogether. 

I’ve done all of those things this year. 

Am I still busy? Yep. Ridiculously so. But for the most part, I feel like I’m busy doing the right things. Most of the time, anyway. I still haven’t found time to go fishing with dad and I don’t remember the last time I had dinner with mom. 

Sorry, guys. 

But my shoulder hurts from throwing a softball, there are Lego builds in every room of our house, and the swimsuits are rarely dry. And there’s new landscaping around Starr’s Cave Nature Center, a new fishing dock on a pond at Big Hollow, and I’ve got scrapes on my knuckles and dirt under my fingernails to justify why I’ve missed so many county supervisor meetings lately. 

We all want to do more, and society tells us we should. But just like corn and oak trees, there’s diminishing returns in trying to squeeze more into limited space. And we all have limited space. Instead, decide what’s truly important, and start removing what isn’t. 

And also…call your mom.