Productivity is how long I sit in front of a computer, right? (No.)
Regardless of your profession, many of use have been reduced to a single occupation: computer-sitter-in-front-of. Is all of that screen time productive? Hah. But do we tell ourselves it is? Usually.
We need to challenge societal and personal narratives around what does and doesn’t count as “being productive.” A lot of this is decolonizing work, and if not straight up anticapitalist, at least a challenge to capitalism’s assumptions about the relationships between time, self, and value.
I'm now a career and life coach, but when I was a freelance writer, I often wrestled with the twinned feelings of “I need to work longer and harder” and “I need a break!” Then one day I picked up my old copy of Ernest Hemingway short stories and remembered how much freaking time the guy spent skiing, partying, and blasting away at charismatic megafauna. Sure, he worked long, hard hours writing, often standing up to do so before it was cool, but if we looked at how much time he spent at his typewriter compared to how impactful he became (not to mention rich and famous), I'm sure he clocked fewer hours than most of us spend on our screens today - perhaps just on our phones!
Psychologist, meditation teacher, and author Tara Brach wasn’t explicitly speaking about productivity when she said the following in a recent segment with 10% Happier podcast host Dan Harris, but it jumped out at me as a statement about the relationship between how we spend our time and what we accomplish:
"Gandhi took off a day a week... so that his actions were aligned with his heart. And Desmond Tutu... somebody said ‘How do you find time for prayer and meditation with all the work you’re doing?’ And his response was ‘How do you think we could do all this work without prayer and meditation?'"
Think about how much time you spend in front of a screen but not really accomplishing anything. It's not just the time you spend on social media or doomscrolling; it's also all the transition time lost between those activities and the essential parts of your work. How many minutes or hours a day does it all add up to? How about in a week? A year? What could you accomplish if you spent that time with greater intention and focus? What could we all do collectively?
Try this: Take the time you spend in front of a screen, boil the essential work down to the minimum, and use all the rest of the time for something you truly love. How would you feel differently about yourself and your productivity?
If you want to explore your productivity with me, get in touch. For more challenges to our notions of productivity, check out The Nap Ministry by Tricia Hersey.
[Photo: Tara Brach; Wide Open Spaces]
