The folly of pursuing productivity
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Here’s what I’ve come to understand over the years about aspiring to productivity in the workplace—it’s potentially ruinous. Maybe not for everyone, but for a lot of people? Probably. Certainly for me. At least with regard to knowledge work, it’s too crude a concept to quantify in any meaningful way. It reminds me of that Carl Sagan quote, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” At what point are you officially productive? Is it when you’re at work? No, that can’t be it. I spent twenty minutes today talking with coworkers about the 1974 Blue Swede track, Hooked on a Feeling. We’re an IT services firm, not Pitchfork or Rolling Stone magazine, so that conversation can’t have been productive, can it? Maybe productivity starts when you’re actively trying to solve a problem or create something. Except, hang on… I could spend hours trying. That doesn’t mean I’ll actually get anywhere.
Maybe productivity can only be identified in retrospect. Still, how? Check marks on a task list? Products made? Features delivered? Happy customers? If so, how many?
Aiming for productivity leads to burnout
Nobody’s ever been able to answer these questions to my satisfaction, and in the absence of clarity, I’ve charged ahead through the fog and shipwrecked myself again and again. That’s what burnout looks like. You’re on the rocks, and you can go no further, regardless of who’s waiting on you or how important their needs are. Burnout is a place where people who have reached the end of themselves stare at walls and feel bad for not doing anything, but until they have more of themselves to give, it doesn’t matter; there’s nothing they can do.
I used to write about burnout regularly when I freelanced for a health website. This was years ago, and I still haven’t found a way to reach for productivity without eventually landing on those rocks. What I have found is a growing, automatic, almost visceral reaction to the very concept of productivity. I’m surprised I don’t break out in hives. This revulsion has snowballed of late and forced me to consider something I would’ve seen as unthinkable in years past: What if I stopped trying to be productive? What if I quit trying to convince myself, in the absence of even a shred of evidence, that this idea—this ill-defined and resistant-to-meaningful-measurement idea of productivity—matters at all? Not to put too fine (and arguably depressing) a point on it, but we’re all slowly dying and everything we make and do in this life will eventually fade out of memory. So what matters? What really matters?
Working backwards, it starts with this: not getting shipwrecked. Avoiding burnout altogether is more important than productivity, I’ve concluded.
Productivity doesn’t earn enough to pay burnout’s bills
To begin with, burnout is miserable. But that’s not the most compelling reason to steer clear of it—no, it’s the cost! The cost of burnout is exorbitant! If I were an investigative journalist, I’d need to find statistics and other numbers (lost revenue, lost jobs, unemployment rates, etc.) to support what I’m saying, but I’m not and besides, I write this for the people who recognize themselves in my words, not for the ones who don’t. And those people know the cost of burnout even if they don’t know it know it. It’s to them I say, listen, it’s wasteful, this pining after productivity. Because at the end of the day, burnout costs more than productivity—real productivity, not fantasy productivity—creates. In more ways than one, it is more expensive to burn out than it is lucrative to chase productivity.
For your consideration, a representative anecdote:
It’s 1999. I’m working at a daily newspaper in the display advertising department. The deadlines are tight and unforgiving, and I want to do a good job. I show up before sunrise and leave after dark. I develop a system to help me keep things from falling through the cracks. I organize my work, communicate with my clients, and make nice with my coworkers in other departments in a continual bid to smooth efficiency. It pays off. My territory has a boom year. I earn a salary and a flat bonus. It is enough, I think. Three years later I see the error of my ways: Because my sales goal is always an increase (of 10%? 5%? I can’t recall) over the year before, I’ve effectively worked myself into a corner. I try, but eventually I’m fired from my job for failing to meet the ever-increasing quotas. When I get over the prodigious sting of it, I can only be grateful. After all, I’m exhausted.
You can see it, can’t you? The enormous cost!
There’s the price I paid in the form of stress, lack of appropriate rest/recuperation, reduced pay when I stopped making my sales goals, lost wages upon termination, etc.
There’s the price my clients paid—they had to retrain their next sales rep on their business needs, their target markets, their budgets (advertising executives were outright instructed to treat the budget claims of SMBs as naive starting points to haggle over ad nauseum in an endless tug-of-war), etc.
In pure dollars, the newspaper may have paid the highest price. It’s expensive to put people on probation, redirecting management time to coaching them closely. It’s expensive to terminate employees and to fill the vacancies doing so leaves.
What if I’d, you know… slowed d o w n? Paced myself? Worked less to maximize output and more to maximize sustainable employment?
Steer towards sustainability, not productivity
I kind of think—and maybe this is pushing the shipwreck metaphor past the point of literary decency, but this is a blog, not a piece of art, so what the heck—productivity is a siren’s song. It’s not that one can’t or shouldn’t produce things (ideas, solutions, what have you). It’s not even that one can’t or shouldn’t produce things deliberately. It’s that producing for the sake of being productive is self-serving and therefore, like so many self-serving endeavors, corruptive. I don’t love how moralistic that sounds, but when you really stop and think about it closely, why do you, dear reader, want to be productive? Speaking only for myself, I can say with certainty that when I hear that old refrain, “You could be doing so much moooooooore,” it’s my ego that wants to dance. It doesn’t necessarily feel like an ego thing; it feels like an integrity thing or even a survival thing, and maybe the pursuit of productivity starts that way—with a genuine desire to serve well and provide for oneself/one’s family. But if it leads to burnout again and again, can you really continue to claim you’re in it to deliver your best?
Idk, maybe this is too ham-fisted. Maybe there are loads of reasons people burn themselves out in the pursuit of productivity. Besides which, what’s wrong with wanting to feel good about yourself and your accomplishments? Nothing, that’s what. But even from a purely selfish standpoint, if pursuing productivity leads to burnout, you’re not looking out for number one at all. You’re kind of throwing yourself under the proverbial bus, in fact.
At the newspaper, I asked myself, “How do I maximize productivity?” A better question would’ve been, “Is what I’m doing today something I can realistically keep doing, day after day, year after year?” Of course, some days are more demanding than others. Some weeks, even. Some months. But if I’m steering towards sustainability rather than productivity, I can meet the outsized demands that some seasons of life and work place on a person. That simply isn’t possible if I’m always trying to get as much done as I can.
Just me?
