I had a great conversation the other day with a client about how easy it is to get addicted not just to busyness, but to being productive.
Productivity feels good and has the quality of being justifiable. No one will give you shit for having a slammed calendar if you tell them it was a productive day!
As a matter of fact, they’ll likely applaud your productivity.
For me, writing usually feels productive. By the time I finish 3-4 drafts of this very newsletter, I’ll feel like I did something useful which was to take an idea I had and articulate it so that you and I share an understanding about said idea. This kind of productivity is gratifying.
I can, over time, start operating under the impression that I need to be productive every day. I can get used to the dopamine hit that comes from crossing a task off my to-do list, even more so if it was a particularly gratifying task.
The problem here is that (maybe this is more true for me as an addict) I want that dopamine hit all the time. I want to feel like every minute of my work day was spent wisely and effectively. But that’s just not how life works. I know from personal experience that this can only last so long before my work gets worse or I start to experience burnout.
So how might we not get overly hooked on the idea that we need to be productive ALL THE TIME?
I think the easiest metaphor lies in working out at the gym. We lift weights to build muscle right? Wrong! We lift weights to tear muscle. It’s the rest and recovery that comes afterwards where muscle is built.
In order to be productive, we have to give our hearts and minds time off to recover. To come up with new ideas and points of view. To reframe what we think we know. That kind of work is hard to do when we’re constantly forcing ourselves to be productive. And yes, this means that sometimes we need to pause and take a real break even when it feels good.
Writers like Stephen King and William Faulkner (among thousands of others) have a daily word count they try to hit. When they’ve reached that word count, they stop. No matter how much momentum they have, they stop for the day.
Some people close their laptop at 5:00. Others take a multi-week sabbatical every few years. The rest of us find something in the middle of these extremes that keeps us in proper working order.
To use (yet another) tired ass metaphor, it’s a marathon and not a sprint, but I want it to be a great marathon! I want the miles to feel good and I want to have a smile on my face as much as possible. And I want you to enjoy this marathon as well. So, what kind of productivity guard rails do you think would best serve you over the next 90 days? Is it worth a short experiment to see if you can find a more sustainable and more creative way of working?