Writer’s Life
A Letter of Authenticity: The Big Fat Lie of Productivity
Did you know there are only 100 days left in 2024? Time to get productive! Or, you know what, f** it, I’ll stay in bed…
I am a hustler and a struggler. More of the latter than the former actually. I don’t get up before 8am. EVER. And beat myself up after because my lecture starts at 9am.
I am a daily victim of revenge night-time procrastination and recently discovered that I didn't even have a functioning calendar. My notion app keeps glitching and yet that is my only access to self-organization.
I was recently lying in bed at 1am, scrolling mindlessly through YouTube shorts. I know, what an unpopular thing to say, but at least I am being honest. Suddenly, I received this message from the god we call “algorithm”:
This is a reminder that every dead body on the top of mount Everest used to be a highly motivated person.
This made me laugh at first as I shared it with some friends, but right after I fell into a spiral of reflection. I am a religious follower of Ali Abdal and other productivity gods, yet I was there in bed, internally beating myself up over wasting my lifetime.
Productivity Guilt-Tripping
I have been telling myself to wake up early for years and never did. I have many projects on my to-do list and yet I always procrastinate, even on the stuff that I actually like. I have no corporate job and I don’t have a morning or evening routine.
I short: I am a complete failure. At least in reflection on all of the productivity advice I have ever received, and let me tell you, I have consumed a lot. Ali Abdaal and Andrew Huberman are a constant on my YouTube feed and I love these guys for their advice, but even they seem to recognize that productivity can be toxic.
Toxic Productivity
And I am not talking about the type of “toxic productivity” here, where you overwork yourself until you eventually burn out. After all, these people are still celebrated as ones who “have made it”. Burning out seems to be regarded as a positive sign too often.
No, I am talking about the toxicity that productivity brings to your and my brains on a daily basis. In the face of all of this advice, you are bound to feel guilty. Your soul is weighed down by all the things you are told to do, but never actually do.
I have a radical proposal: What if we stopped giving a f**? Honestly, it is great to wake up at 5am, but what for if my class only starts at 9am? It is great to time-block, but what if I want to go for a coffee with a friend I just randomly encountered?
I‘d love to have elaborate to-do lists organized in Kanban boards, Eisenhower matrixes, and paid productivity apps, but what is it good for if all I end up doing is beating myself up over the fact that there are still unticked boxes? Or even more drastically: Is revenge bedtime procrastination a problem? Or do we just want to live our days AND nights?
The Definition of Productivity
We all talk about getting more productive… but who said what “productive” looks like? The word has only been around for a limited amount of time in the form that we view it in today and it seems like people before our time were able to survive fine without it. Guess what, they were productive without even knowing it!
Maybe we should stop blaming ourselves for “not being productive”, because we have no firm definition of it, aside from what we are told by Social Media. As we are all uncomfortably aware, these influencers are often very busy marketing their own products, so their information should always be taken with a grain of salt.
Funnily enough, if you google the definition of the word “productivity”, most of the results stem from business English. Mostly they are talking about the production rates or efficacy of a whole business or country, sometimes relative to their population. The most broken-down version, relevant to the individual, that I could find in the Oxford Dictionary online comes from the “American Dictionary”:
Productivity is … the rate at which a person, company, or country does useful work. -Oxford Dictionary online
I can honestly relate to that definition a lot more than the concept I have built of productivity in my mind since being exposed to what content creation made of it. “The rate” actually indicates to me that there is a spectrum, which is already more inclusive than the usual yes or no.
And the word “useful” indicates, that there is also non-useful work. It seems like if you do work that you don’t need to do, like spending hours refining your notion page, that might actually not be “productive”. What a shock, right?
And because I am a GenZ and have a secret boyfriend always right at my fingertips inside the pocket of my dress (yes, I wear dresses with pockets, and you should too!), I of course had to ask ChatGPT about what productivity is. Here is its answer:
Productivity is typically defined as the measure of efficiency with which goods or services are produced, often expressed as the ratio of outputs (products, services, or value created) to inputs (such as labor, capital, time, or resources). In a broader sense, productivity refers to how effectively resources are used to achieve desired outcomes.
Personal context: Productivity is linked to how effectively an individual manages time and resources to complete tasks, achieve goals, and maintain a balance between effort and results.
The goal of improving productivity is usually to increase the output with the same or fewer inputs, thus maximizing efficiency. — ChatGPT
Of course, my friend is a little more wordy than the Oxford dictionary, but also a little more comprehensive at the same time. Again, the idea of a “productivity ratio” strikes me. But I especially love how this definition focuses on a relationship between input and output. Productivity is not simply “doing more”, but it is actually “doing less” with “more output”.
Re-Learning Productivity
Honestly, this is a striking revelation for me, because I have been conditioned to believe that productivity is a measure of maximum output. At least that is the fairy tale I was served online.
I think I have learned that it is a pill to take with caution. And also, I view my goals and achievements differently now. Rather than being inspired to do “more”, I think that maybe I can learn to be fine with just doing what I want BUT that, more efficiently.
For instance, I love staying up at night. I have a charming rooftop and my life has been one of staring at the moon in awe. What if I just decided to enjoy staying up until 3am and stopped beating myself up for getting up late? Life is better past 6pm anyway…
At the same time, there are a couple of projects I have found myself pushing away from because I was under the impression that they would disrupt my imaginative “schedule”. You know what, f*** it. I WANT to participate in writing academic articles with my professor, which I feel so honored to be invited to do. So there is no point in holding back, if I like it, why not do it?
To put it in a nutshell, productivity is not an endless summary of all the things you have achieved in life. It is an equation of input minus output and at the end of the day, the resulting number of hours should be as high as possible. So that is what I will now keep in mind when exposing myself to other people’s ideas of productivity.
Final Crumbles of Inspiration
If you are looking for a very creative and highly entertaining way to engage with productivity, I can not recommend “Struthless” enough. He is first and foremost an artist with an open mind and secondly, a miner of productivity advice.
I love his book “My Head is a Houseboat” just as much as the care, love, and humor he puts into his videos. If you would like to discover someone new on the productivity horizon to be inspired by, this is my wholehearted suggestion. Trust me, his content is mesmerizingly refreshing.
I love his cynical approach to work, the creative and non-digital ways he finds to target productivity, and the genuine quality of his research on all topics he talks about. Every piece of advice always comes packaged with a spicy pinch of dark humor, which makes his output so special to me.
I find that his productions are a little less prescriptive and more uplifting, with a nice portion of realism on the side. This video in specific is one of my favorites because it shows how productivity can essentially be an arts and crafts project. And that is what it should be to all of us, rather than a money-making machine for a new calendar app…
I hope I could inspire you to beat yourself up a little less, over your own levels of productivity. Maybe you are walking into the rest of your day after reading this with a titbit more love for all the things you do in life.
This article is somewhat of a full-circle moment for me, as the very first article I wrote on Medium, nearly a year ago now, was about a similar topic and I guess I recently needed a reminder of that.
If you would like to read my first article and get some more inspiration on why maybe your life is great and productive the way it is, here is a little food for thought:
I hope you had a nice coffee with this article and felt a little hug from my mug to yours. Thanks for reading! Your Hug in a Mug :)
