Time management and productivity porn can backfire on us
Do not confuse activity for progress
- Notes from Vivek Haldar
https://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/28465017852/productivity-porn
The internet is full of productivity tips and techniques. It’s like McDonalds trying to sell you healthy food. You know you should eat healthy food, but when you actually get there you end up eating the nutrition-free fast food.
If you really deeply care about something, you will do it. You will do it without needing a list or a system or a reminder. No, your brain will not feel cluttered by the burden of having to remember it. If it happens to be a complex task with many steps, you’ll make a list, without thinking “oh look I’m doing GTD.”
So what do you need a system for? You need it for chores. The stuff you don’t want to do, but you need to. The stuff which is easy to put off but will hurt in due time. Stuff like paying bills and calling customer service.
Do not confuse activity for progress. Sometimes blind activity can be a palliative, a false reassurance that we are moving forward. It takes courage to stop and ask if what is being done is actually having any impact - on our lives and our work and our happiness. We know the answer will often make us wince.
We spend a lot of time chasing the wrong thing entirely. We equate productivity with “getting more done”. But that’s not productivity… that’s just throughput. Productivity isn’t about getting more done. It’s about getting more done per unit of input.
The Efficiency Delusion
Efficiency isn’t always value neutral. Placing efficiency over other values can be a mistake — a lapse in ethical, political, personal, or professional judgment. Some human or civic interactions thrive when they’re deliberate and erode when they are sped up. There’s a great quote that’s been attributed to Virginia Woolf — “Efficiency cuts the grass of the mind to its roots” — though, alas, we can’t find any evidence that it was Woolf who actually said this. But the sentiment rings true and the expression is so beautiful that we wish she did put things this way.
In philosophy classes, we ask students to present respectful and rational criticisms of other people’s ideas. Don’t just say someone is wrong; instead, give the best interpretation of an argument that you disagree with and carefully explain where it goes astray. This approach to speaking and thinking takes time. It’s much slower than verbally kneecapping someone and stating a contrary opinion. But the lack of efficiency is a feature of the system, not a bug.
When we change something in our environment, we sometimes discover that we’re temporarily more productive and creative. Unfortunately, once something is no longer novel and the change in tempo or style stops feeling fresh, the effect fades.
Avoid burn out from the accelaration of the pace of life
Only the most successful are free enough to spend their time finding better ways to spend their time.
The acceleration of our collective pace of life is not a result of stupidity or irrationality; rather, it is a symptom of what is perfectly predicted by the prisoner’s dilemma at a global scale: Hyperrational individuals making hyperrational decisions on how to spend their time by launching into an inescapable arms race of productivity. Burnout is inevitable.
Productivity porn
Productivity porn and hustle porn can be annoying. It could even make us miserable. There seem to be too many inspirational speakers, internet personalities, urban monks trying to teach life hacks and productivity hacks trying to teach people how to be more productive, more successful, how to wake up early in the morning. There is so much content on the internet regarding this. There are too many videos on YouTube regarding this. Their titles look something like this: “Greatest motivation speech ever”, “We will teach you how to hustle”, “Increase your productivity by 10 times”, “We will teach you how to build an empire”, …
This productivity/hustle porn culture dismisses the generational decline of wealth and material production in the economy. Our generation was told that we could be anything, that we could do anything. We have entered the working world to find that it’s just not true yet. Things have improved but there are still huge obstacles to overcome and pursuing perfection along the way will only make that harder to do.
Hustle Porn is one of the most toxic, dangerous things in tech right now. This idea that unless you are suffering, grinding working every hour of every day, you’re not working hard enough. Silicon Valley has for too long encouraged its employees to work extremely long hours under the guise that it would lead to both a better product and them becoming better people. It has deleterious effects not just on your business but on your well-being. As entrepreneurs, we are all so busy ‘crushing it’ that physical health, let alone mental health, is an afterthought for most founders. - Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, a product of Y-Combinator
Struggle porn has normalized sustained failure. It’s made it acceptable to fly to Bali and burn through your life savings trying to launch an Amazon dropshipping business. Made it reasonable to keep living on your parents money for years after graduation while you try to become #instafamous. Made LinkedIn into a depressingly hilarious circle jerk for people who look way too excited to be having their headshot taken. The most dangerous part of this culture is how it lauds the lack of progress as a sign of success, and in so doing, considers “quitting” weak and a sign of failure. When you believe the normal state of affairs is to feel like you’re struggling to make progress, you’ll be less likely to quit something that isn’t going anywhere. - Nat Eliason, founder of the startup hub Growth Machine
Beware of the endless cycle. If you watch some videos like this on YouTube, it keeps recommending more and more of videos like this. That could push you into a mindset where you think you are not doing enough. The videos tell you things like you need to wake up at 4:30 a.m. every morning because the most successful people do that so they can start their days before everyone else. The videos could end up “warping reality”. They say things like, if you make a few changes in your life, everything will be better.
Bottomline is, they could encourage damaging habits.
Why Simply Hustling Harder Won’t Help You With the Big Problems in Life
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an interview with Kate Bowler, the author of “No Cure For Being Human (And Other Truths I Need to Hear)”
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There is an implicit promise hidden in the millions of words spilled on time management, productivity, and self-help: if we could just figure out the right strategy, we’d finally be able to live a more meaningful life.
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You can have it all if you just learn how to conquer your limits. There is infinity lurking somewhere at the bottom of your inbox or in the stack of self-help books on the bedside table.
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People experience time as productivity.
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The statement - getting life “right” is simply about finding the right strategy - is a lie.
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Find moments of enoughness without the promise of more.
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It’s a common misconception that self-help is not a spiritual genre, which it is. It’s largely based on the metaphysical tradition that imagines that our minds are powerful incubators. It has formed some of the primary assumptions of what we call the American Dream.
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Some of the assumptions about our selfhood, about how we’re made, about what we’re for, are deeply harmful to us. If we continue to promote these stories that we are these self-constituting work robots meant for invincibility and progress, we are going to find ourselves not just very tired, but really confused about our limitations.
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The more scared I get, the harder and faster I work. That’s because it’s so hard to give up on the illusion of getting life done.
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Separate out hustle for hustle’s sake, hustle because it gets you somewhere, hustle because you think you’ll wake up tomorrow feeling like you’re further down the road, and then learning how to do the work because the doing of the work makes you the kind of person you’re supposed to be.
Why time management is ruining our lives
- All of our efforts to be more productive backfire – and only make us feel even busier and more stressed
- And yet the truth is that more often than not, techniques designed to enhance one’s personal productivity seem to exacerbate the very anxieties they were meant to allay.
- The allure of the doctrine of time management is that, one day, everything might finally be under control.
- Never let your hard work fuck up the good things.
- We feel obliged to respond to the pressure of time by making ourselves as efficient as possible – even when doing so fails to bring the promised relief from stress.
- Depending on your rung of the economic ladder, it’s either impossible, or at least usually feels impossible, to cut down on work in exchange for more time.
- In an era of insecure employment, we must constantly demonstrate our usefulness through frenetic doing.
- The more efficient you get at ploughing through your tasks, the faster new tasks seem to arrive. (“Work expands to fill the time available for its completion,” as the British historian C Northcote Parkinson realised way back in 1955, when he coined what would come to be known as Parkinson’s law.)
- Then there’s the matter of self-consciousness: virtually every time management expert’s first piece of advice is to keep a detailed log of your time use, but doing so just heightens your awareness of the minutes ticking by, then lost for ever. As for focusing on your long-term goals: the more you do that, the more of your daily life you spend feeling vaguely despondent that you have not yet achieved them. Should you manage to achieve one, the satisfaction is strikingly brief – then it’s time to set a new long-term goal. The supposed cure just makes the problem worse.
- One of the sneakier pitfalls of an efficiency-based attitude to time is that we start to feel pressured to use our leisure time “productively”, too – an attitude which implies that enjoying leisure for its own sake, which you might have assumed was the whole point of leisure, is somehow not quite enough. And so we find ourselves, for example, travelling to unfamiliar places not for the sheer experience of travel, but in order to add to our mental storehouse of experiences, or to our Instagram feeds. We go walking or running to improve our health, not for the pleasure of movement; we approach the tasks of parenthood with a fixation on the successful future adults we hope to create.
- But worse perils await. DeMarco points out that any increase in efficiency, in an organisation or an individual life, necessitates a trade-off: you get rid of unused expanses of time, but you also get rid of the benefits of that extra time. A visit to your family doctor provides an obvious example. The more efficiently they manage their time, the fuller their schedule will be – and the more likely it is that you will be kept sitting in the waiting room when an earlier appointment overruns. (That’s all a queue is, after all: the cost of someone else’s efficiency, being shouldered by you.) In the accident and emergency department, by contrast, remaining “inefficient” in this sense is a matter of life and death. If there is an exclusive focus on using the staff’s time as efficiently as possible, the result will be a department too busy to accommodate unpredictable arrivals, which are the whole reason it exists.
- “An organisation that can accelerate but not change direction is like a car that can speed up but not steer,” DeMarco writes. “In the short run, it makes lots of progress in whatever direction it happened to be going. In the long run, it’s just another road wreck.” He often uses the analogy of those sliding number puzzles, in which you move eight tiles around a nine-tile grid, until all the digits are in order. To use the available space more efficiently, you could always add a ninth tile to the empty square. You just wouldn’t be able to solve the puzzle any more. If that jammed and unsolvable puzzle feels like an appropriate metaphor for your life, it’s hard to see how improving your personal efficiency – trying to force yet more tiles on to the grid – is going to be much help.
- “How we labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, in what reads like a foreshadowing of our present circumstances. “Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.”