Productivity Is a Cult
It’s time to deprogram yourself and exit
If you clicked on this article, then I bet you are a lot like me (and thousands of other readers): We’re eager to use our time wisely, manage our attention, and reach the nirvana of ultimate productivity. We’re productivity nerds, and we’ve got a solution for every time or energy management problem you can throw at us. We don’t always practice what we preach, but we definitely know what everyone should do to maximize our professional and personal lives.
But for many of us, I think it’s fair to say we’ve crossed the valley of self-help and arrived on the doorstep of a doomsday cult. We’ve turned studying productivity hacks into a kind of reverent practice. That practice almost inevitably leads to serving the needs of an endless production of labor, whether it’s valuable or not.
When your productivity practice becomes the goal — and you are no longer thinking about what you produce, how you produce it, and whether or not you should produce anything at all — you might have become a productivity cult member.
Three Signs You Are in the Productivity Cult
It’s always hard to see when you’ve gone from productivity enthusiast to productivity cult member. You’re a bit like the apocryphal frog in a pot of…
