Over Efficient: At What Point Does Productivity Become Counterproductive?
In a tech-heavy and fast-paced world, aren’t we all just robots who cry?
With every passing day, our lives are becoming more and more efficient (meaningless). The eternal human struggle to live a fulfilling life and delay inevitable death has spawned a society that idealises progress and relies on technology to think for us, work for us — essentially, live for us. Our obsession with exponential advancement and increased productivity has become our civilisation’s primary focus. But in trying to maximise each of the 4,000 weeks that makes up the average human lifespan, it seems we have created nothing more than a more efficient way to reach that sweet, sweet relief that we’re all hurdling towards: death. Our desire to make everything quicker and easier has resulted in our lives becoming more efficient while our experience becomes less sufficient.
In a society where it’s inevitable to become ‘a lil stressy and depressy’, most of us have experienced that familiar creeping sense of impending doom — that there are only so many hours in a day, that our lives are incrementally slipping out of our control.
The new-age personal productivity movement that promised to make our lives simpler and more fulfilled with its shiny array of technological time-saving solutions seems to be not only saving us time but saving us life. A hyper-efficient love child of the personal advice and self-help eras, the personal productivity movement has been infiltrating our human experience for decades, dripping slowly into our everyday lives until we’re suddenly drowning in it. There are now an endless number of productivity-focused apps available to download onto our streamlined technological devices with a quick click of a button — even procuring the software to structure our efficiency has become inherently efficient in nature. There are now apps to measure your work productivity rate, apps that find the fastest route to your destination, even websites that simulate the bustling sounds of a coffee shop — an environment which, in psychological experiments, has been proven to help people focus on work.
There are now a sea of online pseudo psychologists and efficiency experts blogging their thoughts on productive dating, productive parenting, productive travel, even productive eating — unappetising meal replacements have popped up left, right and centre to reduce the time that you squander feeding that time-wasting face of yours, all so you’ll have time to do more work. While it’s a concept born out of motivation and positivity, the consequences of this work-obsessed mentality are shiningly obvious: all work and no play makes humanity a dull boy.
The cogs of our over-productive society started turning back in the Industrial Revolution, when mechanical engineers began creating a way of thinking to improve the functioning of machines, a mentality that then transferred to the (declining) functioning of humans. In the early 20th century, Harrington Emerson, an engineer, argued that ‘an efficient organisation was a necessary prerequisite to task and process efficiency’. Wanting to push those dusty old boundaries of just letting humans be humans, Emerson dreamed of a world where efficiency was a natural occurrence, where people were treated as machines — a philosophy woven through the very fabric of our everyday lives.
All of a sudden, this new idea gave people the illusion of control — a way to structure their lives and time with the promise of measurable results. In a world driven by industry, employment and money, a method by which to assess a business’s, system’s or employee’s worth and relative contribution would make sure no time or money would go to waste (just people’s mental and emotional health, but whatevs).
In 2017 — the era of memes, dogs and serious-not-serious suicide jokes — productivity’s presence is practically suffocating. In a society decreasingly held together by the crusty, dried-up glue of religious and social obedience, we have entered a scary, unfamiliar age of technological growth, insecure employment and increased shades of grey in the work force. With new jobs and careers popping up left, right and centre, and the freelance industry booming like Pavarotti with a megaphone, it is more important than ever for us to prove our worth and demonstrate our usefulness as contributing members of society. As much as I hate to admit it, along with a trendy co-working space, a Mac laptop and, like, at least four soy lattes, increased personal efficiency is perhaps the most essential element of the creative- freelancer survival kit; if you don’t use your time productively, the only person who suffers is you.
Even at the opposite six-figure end of the employment spectrum, efficiency can apparently provide something even more seductive than time-saving strategies. No, not prostitutes, but close: peace of mind. In his 2001 bestseller, Getting Things Done, David Allen, while sitting atop his productivity throne made of gold and to-do lists, wearing a crown crafted from spare time (I imagine), declared: ‘It is possible for a person to have an overwhelming number of things to do and still function productively with a clear head and a positive sense of relaxed control.’ Tell that to my over-worked, existentially dissociative, nervous-wreck of a uni cohort, Dave, ya pretentious douche. In my measly twenty-five years of experience, I have found that a positive sense of relaxed control is becoming an increasingly elusive concept.
The uncomfortable truth of these over-efficient lives which we are conditioned to lead is that increased productivity, more often than not, simply fuels the fire it was designed to put out. The more time you save, the less you seem to have.
With every spare minute that comes from our productivity, we feel the chocolate-scoffing, Netflix-bingeing, guilt-ridden need to spend it doing something even more productive than the last.
But our society’s collective efficiency-driven attitude is not only dominating our attitude towards work, oh no no no. It’s also bitch-slapping our attitude towards enjoying ourselves into submission, until it’s crying and shivering in the corner. The unrelenting personal expectation to be consistently productive means that there is more pressure to use our non-work time as efficiently as we can — a mentality that subconsciously teaches us that relaxing is not only inefficient, but lazy. This creates an underlying and unhealthy expectation that unless we have used our time productively, we don’t deserve to relax, precariously hanging our self-worth on how much we are able to do, learn and achieve.
Suddenly, travelling becomes not an enriching human experience but another achievement to tick off the list. Watching a documentary becomes not a way to wind down but a way to better our minds and prepare for intellectual conversation. Exercising becomes not a natural and enjoyable human experience but a way to lose weight or improve our health. In a world preoccupied with moving forwards and upwards, time can only be perceived as valuable as long as it has a purpose: to enable more work. And you know what? I’m not effic-into it. As critic Walter Kerr aptly states in his 1962 book The Decline of Pleasure (same): ‘We are all of us compelled to read for profit, party for contracts, lunch for contacts … and stay home for the weekend to rebuild the house.’
This obsession with productivity and self-betterment has become a lose/lose epidemic: a doctrine that teaches us to save time, but also that we’re a pathetic failure if we don’t use every second of our time productively. Even though I am well aware that working two jobs, studying five subjects, playing three gigs a week and attempting to maintain a healthy social life has nearly burnt me out to the point of purchasing a gun and a trench coat and taking a lil stroll down to the caf, I still continue to take on more and more responsibilities in the name of being productive.
Y tho’? Is it better to be over-achieving and stressed than under-achieving and carefree? Is it more beneficial to march life’s most efficient path, rather than wander the scenic route? Is productivity simply a busy way to distract ourselves from the pathetic emptiness of our meaningless consumer-driven lives?
The unattainable allure of productivity is that maybe, one day, we might finally have everything under control. That one day we will eventually feel accomplished, fulfilled, happy. But it seems that with every deadline met and every personal best beaten, we still find ourselves greedily lusting over the next goal, our jowls dripping at the thought of another second saved.
Personal productivity claimed to be a cure for our busyness, an antidote to the overwhelming human condition of pursuing a purpose. But at its core, productivity is nothing more than another form of busyness, a big bad wolf disguised as a comforting little old lady. The truth is that efficiency and productivity play the same psychological role that almost anything does: to protect us from the truth, and to distract us from asking those terrifying questions about who we really are: What will I become? What should I forsake? What path should I choose? What really matters? To quote Friedrich Nietzsche: ‘Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from themself.’
Did you just read 1500 words on the counter-productivity of being productive? How very unproductive of you.
