The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.
I’m just sittin’ on the dock of the bay wastin’ time.
This morning at seven o’clock, my phone lit up with an alert that read: “The more you do, the more you can do.” I get this kind of bland, meaningless platitude pushed to my device every morning. They are intended to be motivational, but invariably they end up being the stupidest words I read all day. The notifications come from an app called Tide which is a focus timer1 —an app that splits time into 25 minutes for working, followed by a five-minute break and repeats this pattern until you finish whatever you’re working on or death, whichever comes first. Tide is one of the dozens, if not hundreds, of similar timers Apple will sell you, because productivity, while generally being in vogue since Stephen Covey told us all about the very specific habits of highly effective people, is more popular than ever.
It seems odd that, like, doing things can have a moment, but here we are. Somewhere between mindfulness (making doing literally nothing seem like work), minimalism (LOL), and TED Talks (oh, fuck off) live the Productivity People. They read pseudo-philosophical books (there’s little Tim Ferris can’t do with four free hours), offer “Claps” for Medium articles about morning routines, and support a cottage industry of digital and analogue tools designed to keep you laser-focused (this mostly involves making lists). It’s a thriving monetary and social economy based on the idea that the unexamined life is still worth living so long as every single second of that life is in service of getting shit done.
This cult of productivity is inextricably linked to work, or more specifically, a certain kind of work—the work of people like you and me whose jobs mostly involve looking at the internet. In this context, it makes sense—productivity breeds success and productive people become successful people. Except that, mostly, isn’t true. In my experience, our industry (the vague “I work in digital”) rewards people who work a lot of hours with little consideration for what’s done with all that time. Years ago, I worked with a guy who was always the last one to leave the office. He worked all the goddamn time. It wasn’t until years later some of us realized his giant yeti-paw hands made him the slowest typer we’d ever seen. He was anti-productive, but again, always stayed late. Today he’s a VP somewhere. Now, I just made about 50% of that story up, but that means the other half of it is entirely true—namely the bit about the people who work a lot getting the promotions. As the saying goes: “Work expands to fill time.” This is a universal truth, but if you want to get ahead in your career, you’ll still need to put in 16-hour days.
Maybe you keep a Bullet Journal to help you manage your workload a little better. That’s fine. But like any good cult, this one often becomes a pathology. When you are a Productivity Person, being busy is no longer the problem, but the goal. True productivity cultists make lists simply so that they can complete those lists, which is both batshit crazy and a sign that their lives might be lacking something. You can always spot a truly fulfilled person by their willingness to lounge in bed until only hunger or a strong urge to piss drags them into the day. That’s not laziness, it’s contentedness.
Now, it’s not really your fault if you feel compelled to get out of bed at 5 A.M. so you can reflect in your journal, update the family Trello board, and get in your 7-minute workout. You are a product of what Marshall McLuhan called our “age of anxiety.” You live in a world filled with distractions. Hell, your job probably involves building apps that create distractions for other people. You’re a victim who got their wires crossed and their priorities fucked just by living in a world where Twitter is a thing. Here’s some truth: being productive won’t make you a better person, it’ll just make you a busier one—and probably an unhappy one. If productivity is filling the hole in your life usually reserved for religion or alcohol or fantasy baseball, then maybe add “Reevaluate Decision-Making Paradigm” to your Apple Reminders, because the solution to “Man, I need to stop procrastinating and get this thing done” isn’t “Let’s bleed usefulness out of every waking second and, you know what, fuck it, I’m going to start listening to podcasts in my sleep!”
So we’ve now reached the part of the essay where I solve all your problems and explain to you the value of living slow, being bored, and taking a lot of naps. But this isn’t that essay and I am not that guy. You know that notification I got a seven o’clock this morning from Tide, the focus-timer app? I got that because I use Tide, the focus-timer app. I’m using it right now because if I don’t, this thing will never get written. I have personally elevated procrastination to an art form and forcing myself into a very rigid work-break-work-break-work-break system is the only way I get anything finished. I am also obsessive about productivity tools but in a very strange way. I jump between notebooks and apps and systems like I’m changing clothes. Changing up your productivity systems may seem inherently unproductive, but for me, the very act of trying a new productivity tool is the thing that makes me keep working. I’ve been quietly funding the Cult of Productivity through in-app purchases and Moleskine hacks ordered from JetPens.com for years.
Am I a self-loathing hypocrite? Sometimes. But that’s not my point. We all have systems to help us cope with the things we need to do. I have a job, I’ve got a novel coming out in a few months and I write regularly for magazines. I’m busy. I’ve also got three kids, a mortgage, and a fondness for watching pro wrestling. (Do you know how much original wrestling programming is on every week? It’s nuts.)
Relaxing matters. Being bored is important. But a little anxiety around the things you need to get done helps. There’s a balance and you need to find the system that helps you keep moving forward while also staying sane. The reality is, if you want to read more books or spend more time with your family or go for more walks or work late into the evenings to earn that big promotion, you’ll need to do less of something else. There’s no way around that, no matter how you organize things. But there’s a big difference between being a productive person and being a Productivity Person—the first is necessary, the second is someone nobody wants to talk to at parties.
Epilogue
This essay was filed six days past deadline.
