Why The Pursuit of Productivity Is Killing Us
We know that stress can literally kill you, yet America's stress levels just keep creeping higher and higher. Is it possible that our obsession with productivity is actually killing us?
Everywhere you look, there are a multitude of products, apps, books, articles and blogs promising to help you be more productive, productive, productive. There's certainly nothing wrong with being productive; nor is there anything wrong with increasing our personal disciplines in order to be more productive. But when was the last time you heard the phrase "free time"? Do you even know what that means any more?
Did you ever stop and ask yourself, “what is the point of being so productive?”
You see, being "productive" means to "produce something." It means to have something to show for your time. But show whom? Certainly there are a few hours of the day in which we need to produce something for which we are paid. But it seems as if we have made productivity a 24/7 goal.
Meanwhile, we know that chronic stress can literally kill you by raising your blood pressure, which can in turn cause heart attacks and strokes. Long before there was a global pandemic, heart disease was already killing nearly three-quarters of a million Americans every year. While Covid may have killed close to a million Americans in roughly a two-year period, heart disease kills close to that many every single year.
Productivity should be for the purposes of helping us finish tasks more quickly in order to give us more free time But that's not actually what happens. Instead of using our productivity skills to create free time, we simply fill up the extra time we create with more tasks!
“Free” time is time in which we do not produce anything.
Businesses and companies have become famous for "rewarding hard work with more work." But is that really what we want? If you want to understand The Great Resignation, this is one place to start. People might be finally waking up to the idea that all increasing productivity really does is lead to more shit being piled on their plate. It's kind of like if you learn to condense what's on your plate in order to create some free space, but every time you do, someone just comes along and dumps something more on your plate - what's the point of freeing up space on your plate?
We have turned “productivity” into a religion in which people actually feel guilty if they spend time not producing anything.
It has become so prevalent, in fact, that we actually have a word for it: Stresslaxing. We have made constant productivity such a goal, that people literally don’t even know how to relax anymore - and when they do, they feel guilty about it!
So what is the answer?
Well, the answer to this problem is pretty much the same as the answer to almost all of our problems: personal discipline.
We’ve all heard the phrase “time is money” but I think we have pretty much lost sight of what it actually means. Your “life” is literally just the compilation of how much time you have on this planet. Every hour that a job pays you to work is an hour of your life you are giving them. So how much is your life worth? What your job is literally paying for is a unit of your life that you will never get back. Unfortunately, if you are a stay-at-home mom or someone who doesn’t have a paying “job,” then the value of your time gets lost. The same way you budget your money, however, you need to budget your time, because your time is your life.
We’ve also heard the phrase "work/life balance” but the truth is, that doesn’t actually work for women because, as the pandemic has shown us, “life” for women is just a different kind of work.
We need to learn to develop work/rest balance rather than work/life balance.
The first thing to do is actually write down everything you think you need to do every day and every week. Every chore, every task, every responsibility. From there, you need to determine which are actually necessary each day and which ones you really just do because you think they are important for productivity. For instance, you may Swiffer your floors every day so you can always feel like you have a clean house. But is having a clean house really important to you or do you do it because you feel like your house is always supposed to be clean? FYI, Martha Stewart has maids - lots of them. So if you don’t have a maid, you shouldn’t feel obligated to have a house that looks like hers.
At work, you may do something every day more because it is a time-filler than because it is genuinely necessary. When you break your job down into only the necessary tasks, how long would it take you to actually do only the things you really need to do?
A few years ago I got a temporary Accounts Payable job. By the time I left, I was accomplishing all of the tasks the previous person had done in 36 hours a week (they had half days on Fridays, so a full week was 36 hours) in about 12 hours a week. The truth is, if the previous person had just focused more, they too could have probably done all the same tasks in about 12 hours a week. The question is, why would they want to? What is the reward for compressing a 36 hour work-week into 12 hours worth of work?
Needless to say, if I stayed at that job, they would have wanted me to take on more tasks in order to fill that extra time. But do you see the problem there? Why would I want to do more work for the same pay? That person who had the job before me was probably smarter than me. She realized that doing her work faster would only result in being given more work for the same pay. Thank goodness that was only a temp job.
I think there are millions of workers that already understand this concept - but maybe they are also tired of spending 36 hours of their lives doing about 12 hours worth of work just to get a paycheck. Perhaps they are tired of just doing “time-fillers” rather than spending that time doing other things that might be more important to them; like whittling away their reading list or spending time with their kids or loved ones. Conversely, there are also perhaps millions that have not figured this out yet. They are still trying to be productive, productive, productive - without fully understanding that being productive in America only leads to more work (but not more pay.)
There are also millions of moms desperately trying to live up to a standard that only exists on the internet. Perhaps it is time to let go what you think you are supposed to be doing and only do what is important to you? How clean would your kitchen really be if you lived in the middle of nowhere and knew no one would ever just be “dropping in”? How often would you really bathe your kid if you didn’t think everyone would be judging you for having a dirty kid?
Once you figure out what all you actually have to do each week, then figure out if you could actually do them in less time. If so, maybe it's time to have a talk with your boss. Maybe what you really want is not more pay, but more time. If you can do your job in less time than you are currently taking to do it, see if you can't negotiate the same pay for fewer hours of work. But if you do, don't fill your time with more work.
If your boss won’t let you work fewer hours, then don’t take on more work unless they offer you more pay. Do the work that needs to be done in the shortest time possible. Then, instead of filling your time with more busy-work, just start hanging out in the break room reading a book or doing something you want to be doing. If they try to give you more work, then just say “Great, this is not in my job description, so how much more will you be paying me for this additional work?”
Conversely, if you are an employer, do your employees really need to spend 40 hours a week doing their current job or could they perhaps do it in 20 or 30 if they were incentivized to do so? Every hour that employees spend in the office actually costs you money. From heating and cooling costs to extra internet bandwidth to janitorial services and supplies. Ironically, having your employees doing the same job in fewer hours could actually save you money all by itself.
Why do you actually think we have so many meetings?
Numerous meetings are pretty much concrete proof that everyone can actually do their job in less time, but they have to fill their time with something in order to get paid. I highly doubt that anyone actually produces 50-60 hours worth of work each week. Instead, we’ve figured out how to fill our weeks with busywork because busy-ness has become a status symbol that we worship. Ask almost anyone how they are doing these days and “fine” has been replaced with “oh man, so busy!”
In America, we need to remember the concept of "free time" and learn to take it more often. Every minute of your day doesn't actually have to be crammed with "go, go, go" or "do, do, do." In fact, some of the most productive people in the world actually schedule free time into their day. While, unfortunately, they often end up filling that free time in with work, what if we started religiously scheduling genuine free time into our day, in which the goal was to simply waste it doing absolutely nothing productive?
How about you schedule some time today, in which the goal is to have absolutely nothing to show for it at the end. If your schedule is too crammed today, try starting next week, or the week after. But don’t wait too long, you just don’t know how much time you have left.