My Struggle with Productivity During Quarantine
There is a constant struggle to measure success when we’re all locked inside every day.
Productivity is a metric that I have used to define my successes, but the coronavirus outbreak has impacted what the term means and how I evaluate my own success.
Recently, my digital journalism class picked up the book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell. The book is interesting as it covers the ethics of social media design, how we are trapped in social media and how the desire to be productive affects us all.
At the beginning of the outbreak, I found myself thinking about the various ways to “better myself” or how I could read with all the extra time I would have being locked inside all day.
About a week in, I felt lost and lacking in motivation. What was I to do now since I couldn’t talk about the various tasks I had completed throughout the day.
I did what every Gen Z college student does when they don’t know the answer to something: Google it. I found various articles, some of which highlighted how working from home makes you more productive while others stated that it’s okay to not be productive.
Professor Odell, in the first chapter of her book highlights how productivity is a trap that the world has lured us into. It makes us believe that our success or failure is defined by the number of tasks that we are able to complete each day.
That’s because the attention economy and the world we live in has become obsessed with near-instant gratification and fast results.
I didn’t find this satisfying because it defined my problem, but it never made a connection with me about how I could fix it. Perhaps I could refrain how I thought about productivity, or I could continue to think about how poorly I was using the time I gained from being inside all day.
I then browsed The New York Times who published an article on April 1 about how others are dealing with the productivity question. Not only that, but they were saying it was okay to not be productive.
The article highlighted several different examples which hit home for me. The biggest one was the burnout that this has caused.
By almost any way you decided to look at it, I was getting less work done. I was stressed out about the surrounding world because I was not only living through most of my peers’ worst crisis, but I was covering it.
I had to find ways to manage my stress while still turning in articles for deadlines and completing class assignments by their due dates. Even though I was scraping through, I was still burnt out and exhausted. My motivation was gone, and I was having a small identity crisis.
One of the things I decided to take up with my extra time was cooking. I still recall helping my mother prepare food for Thanksgiving or trying to prepare various dishes with mixed degrees of success. Along the way, I began to understand why it is so hard for on-the-go families like mine to even find an hour to prepare a meal.
I was tuning into meetings via the dial-in function on Zoom so that I could balance my work and home life.
I then came across a piece in Business News Daily that mentioned a survey where 30 percent of respondents said they struggled to maintain a work-life balance. Together with the article in The New York Times, I finally felt like I had a point of reference to work from.
Here are everyday people struggling like me. They are trying to maintain the same work-life balance while searching for the meaning of their productivity.
Two weeks ago, I finally found a satisfactory answer to my problem. My problem was never that I was doing less or that I wasn’t working hard enough. It was that I wasn’t giving myself enough credit for being productive.
The day of my epiphany, I went to the grocery store, washed dishes and did the laundry. I spent the rest of the day caring for myself. But it was productive, and I finally felt content with a day in quarantine.
