Chasing Productivity- Turning Pandemic into a Contest
The current situation out there seems like a perfect plot for the next Black Mirror episode. But hey! Don’t waste your time watching this new episode, because you need to do something ‘Productive’, like take an online course, learn a new language, find a work-from-home internship or do any other pseudo-activity, which makes you feel less guilty when you go to bed. The idea of being non-productive is just too much to handle, especially when you scroll through your Linkedin feed and find your colleagues being obsessed with productivity and trying to make the best use of this quarantine time. The fear of missing out eventually takes you over and you promise yourself — “I’ll be more productive tomorrow and complete all those courses I took on Coursera.” By having this anxious feeling, you’re essentially falling into the trap of hyper-productive mayhem.
‘Productivity Boosting’ apps on play stores are seeing a huge jump in downloads during this pandemic lock-down. Similarly, if you go to Youtube and search for the word ‘Productivity’, you’ll be served with hundreds of freshly baked videos like how to be productive in quarantine or 10 tips for being productive during isolation or 7 habits of successful people that you must adopt today. The title of these videos might be different, but the underlying theme is all too identical. All of them aim towards your general lack of motivation for the activities that society generally consider ‘Productive’. “And the solution?”, you make ask. Well, unfortunately there’s no magic potion that can suddenly boost your motivation to do things that deep-down you don’t want to do. Most of these videos offer similar suggestions like waking up early, making a to-do list, cleaning your room, turning off your phone and so on, which probably you’ll never follow. Nonetheless, some of these habits can actually help you in improving your overall well being. But let’s be honest, you won’t suddenly change your daily habit just by watching a video on Youtube. It requires a lot of internal motivation. The source of which is extremely difficult to ascertain.
What the heck is this Productivity anyway?
Productivity has multiple meanings based on the context and background. But a generally accepted definition is the rate at which a person, company, or country does useful work. This sense of doing ‘useful work’ within a given period of time, is closely tied to a monetary value, which determines your individual worth and thus, gives you a sense of accomplishment. And this is perhaps the reason why you feel worthless, when you do something which doesn’t produce any direct monetary benefit, even though it gives you a sense of intrinsic satisfaction. This is something we’re conditioned to believe in, right from the first Industrial Revolution to the current Digital Era. The means of productive work might have changed over the years, but the idea still remains the same. In fact, more than a century ago, Max Weber in his book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, pointed out that our fixation to productivity can be understood from the Protestant ethic driving the spirit of capitalism, which says, “the waste of time is the first and in principle the deadliest of sins.”
It goes without saying that our never-ending obsession with productivity is a direct result of our mental adaptation to a capitalistic society, where our self-worth is an absolute measure of how productive we are, as a monetary asset. Relaxing or taking out time for yourself is often discouraged, because you’re not acting like a robot that you’re supposed to be. And this ultimately drives you crazy.
At this point, I want to make it very clear that I’m not really propounding that people should stop working and become some obscure painters in search of ‘inner passion’ and ‘creativity’. Instead, what I’m suggesting is — It’s perfectly fine to take some time off and do things that you profoundly enjoy, despite the fact that it doesn’t produce any monetary benefit or up-skill you professionally. It can not only give you much needed emotional and mental relaxation, but can also serve as a time-healing effect for your overall well-being as a conscious human with psychological bruises.
Numbers reveal the truth
No matter how many times we are told — “Your generation is so lazy and distracted by all these Snapchat filters and Instagram stories”, the truth is, our average labor productivity is 75% higher than an average employee in 1973, whereas our median compensation (hourly) has grown only by 11% during this time. This sharp divergence between our labor and how much we are actually paid for it, paints a rather different picture than what we’re constantly told. For most of us, life is actually about ‘living’ in the after office hours or on weekends. We long to be with our loved ones and enjoy our spare time with them. But now that we’ve actually got that much-needed respite from our daily rat race, we long to participate in a productivity contest again. Isn’t it absurd?(particularly when you’re not even paid enough for it)
Productivity vs Creativity
Bruce Daisley in his HBR article Don’t Let Your Obsession with Productivity Kill Your Creativity (2020), explores an interesting aspect of our productivity fixation. He says — “Wanting to optimize our own productivity is a perfectly reasonable response to increasing demands. But our relentless pursuit of efficiency has become an over-correction — if we do truly value the originality of creative thought, then it’s time to recognize that productivity and creativity often exist in opposition to one another. Productivity is focus, creativity is unfocus.” This proposition is also backed by a neurological view of our brain. According to the research paper titled — Remembering the past: Two facets of episodic memory explored with positron emission tomography published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, highlights that neuroimaging studies on episodic memory often referred to the resting brain “… a resource not only for the creative process, but also for meditational states, religious experiences, and dreams” and that its activities reflect “substrates of the creative process”. Thus, it can be said that our productivity obsession might actually kill the creative activity of our brain.
What should we do?
The very first step is to unlearn this concept of attaching your self-worth to a set of productive work. In a world with so many incidents to bruise your soul, it’s perfectly okay to just survive and explore ideas or do things that makes you feel alive and intrinsically satisfied, without being judged on the basis of productivity. Second is to be completely unapologetic about you choices and priorities. Let no one tell you that you’re worth any less, just because you’re not fully utilizing this time of global health emergency for professional benefits. It’s a Pandemic, not a productivity competition.
