it feels like productivity has become the prevailing virtue of our time we have to get more done forever of course for the individual this is wholly unsustainable it's a battle to be productive enough is unwinnable indeed chasing productivity can have devastating consequences on your well-being both physical and psychological it's difficult though our unrelenting thirst for productivity is the reason for so many modern luxuries productivity is not inherently bad at all in fact work can be immensely rewarding but our entire lives and our self-worth should not revolve around being productive yet a survey of one million
people in late 2022 found that productivity is most people's number one priority in life 65 percent of Brits 63 percent of Americans and 58 of Australians ranked productivity above having a healthy body having more money or even being happy unfortunately this Lust For productivity is bad for everything it crushes our souls and ironically crushes our ability to get things done so how can we rethink productivity rest and the idea of getting things done well to answer that we need to figure out how we got here [Music] the Protestant work ethic is an idea that says
hard work gets you into heaven while laziness is basically sinful this concept was pretty foundational to America's early Economic Development the Protestants came to America worked hard and built businesses to earn God's favor and in theory that idea still lingers with us today and while Protestant work ethic may still be relevant to the conversation there are also more contemporary factors at play after all we don't mix Red Bull and Adderall to earn God's favor we just want to make some money and it would be easy to blame capitalism for our obsession with productivity but that
would be like blaming gravity for an airplane crash assigning the blame is technically accurate but only in an abstract and not really helpful sort of way the roots of our obsession with productivity stem from the transition out of the Industrial Revolution during the Industrial Revolution we increased productivity by increasing the efficiency of systems think modern farming assembly lines factories Etc but then came the rise of office work in the 1960s jobs moved from factories to desks still maintaining and increasing productivity was as important as ever but we stopped trying to improve systems instead we began
trying to improve productivity on a macro level by doing so on a micro level no one was interested in making an office operate better but instead how to make an office worker work harder the burden of improving output shifted from the organization onto the worker productivity got personal this idea becomes silly when you consider the refinement of systems in the industrial revolution didn't happen in an instant creating efficient Factory systems happen quickly perhaps but not overnight Henry Ford invested massive amounts of money and time into developing new tools methods and infrastructure but today we casually
expect ourselves to wake up and invent the assembly line every single day and not only do we need to optimize our productivity but we also need to keep executing our current workload at the same time we're still stuck in this archaic post-forward way of thinking more is always better there's no upper limit to the output we desire to produce when you expect people to buy into this idea you put their professional interests up against their personal life you can get more work done just skip the bike ride with your wife you can get this turned
in tomorrow just to eat lunch at your desk our personal and professional lives are now stuck in a cold war eventually one will crumble and today it feels exceedingly clear which side is winning this is difficult to Grapple with because well productivity is good everyone does a little bit of work towards a common goal and all of our lives are improved in theory so it's pretty easy to justify this endless Sprint the most productive members of our society are also generally lauded as Heroes on the opposite side not being productive means you're lazy and laziness
today is seen as ethically wrong the historical context of productivity mixes with contemporary cultural forces to create our problem and it is a problem indeed allowing productivity to take over our lives is well killing us it's tremendously easy to wrap your sense of self-worth up in productivity you make a to-do list you don't get everything done and then you feel like a failure or perhaps this sounds familiar you cram as much as you can into your work day then you get home too exhausted to do anything but sit on your phone for three hours then
you feel lazy about not being productive despite all of this happening as an effect of being too productive throughout your day this is basically many burnout every single day see if you determine your self-worth by how much you get done you will be forever worthless there will be always more that you could have done the mountain has no Summit as you focus entirely on productivity you obviously Focus Less on other things healthy natural foods become processed ready to eat meals breakfast becomes gray smoothies that guarantee an efficient mix of nutrients minus any of the joy
involved in actually eating you spend less time with the people you love leaving them feeling estranged and likely less interested in being part of your life you drink Celsius or whatever so you can get five hours of sleep when in reality this lack of sleep proves time and time again to significantly reduce cognitive abilities which in turn makes you less productive low stakes Hobbies you love fall by the wayside zapping the joy out of your day-to-day life at the end of this you're left with some swirl of depression anxiety and loneliness this is nothing to
say for the physical effects of an unbalanced life which include increased risk of heart attacks stroke and a whole lot more but hey your to-do list is looking pretty good until of course tomorrow when this whole thing starts all over there is a massive industry around optimizing productivity this takes the form of books self-help gurus YouTube channels tick talkers and any other format you can imagine fortunately none of these things work in fact optimizing productivity is a great way to guarantee you be less productive take any specific productivity hack putting butter in your coffee time
blocking mushroom tea or whatever this is just one more thing for you to do these productivity hacks just expand your to-do list and then when you forget to do them as you inevitably will because you already have too much to do you're left feeling like a failure all over again you just have one more thing that you couldn't quite get to in a day the thing is cramming more and more into your day in some unending arms race for productivity only leads to burnout burnout is defined as a manifestation of chronic unmitigated stress during periods
of burnout your body has higher levels of stress hormones it's a physically observable phenomenon intense burnout can lead to depression insomnia loss of appetite even suicidal ideations tiredness is your body's warning sign for Burnout it's like an alert your body telling you to take a break things are about to get bad but in Today's Energy Drink world we ignore this warning we don't take breaks we drink caffeine then we get a promotion for working so hard in reality though rest is what matters and there's no shortage of literature to prove this resting helps your brain
Focus helps you get more done proper sleep has a profound effect on cognition and memory psychiatrist and researcher Nancy C Andresen coined the acronym rest in the 1990s random episodic silent thought this term describes the intensely creative neural activity that occurs when you do nothing according to her lifetime of study periods of inactivity are the most productive on a neurological level Andresen has studied creative people from all walks of life and found that Eureka moments usually come right after long periods of brain inactivity that said this type of advice is basically a trap it's just
another way to get ourselves to be more productive so relaxation really worthwhile if it's only in service of productivity I'm not so sure so what if we re-examine this idea of productivity from the ground up it would be tremendously easy to sit here and say well you should just stop going to work stop working so hard but the reality is not everyone can do that in fact most people can't a single mother raising three kids just can't make time for a walk in the woods every day it's not happening but I do believe relaxation is
still that Mother's right our culture has taken this right away from her but it's still a right so our focus should not be on stamping that right out of existence entirely but instead redefining how we see productivity and what things count as being productive to do this we can look at an old story called The useless Tree by Taoist philosopher shuang Zhu in this story a carpenter comes along a tree in the forest it's the most massive Tree on the mountain and the oldest the bark is gnarled twisted and full of knots these knots mean
he can't build anything from the tree's wood so he says that tree is useless later that night the tree appears to the carpenter in a dream tree tells him that fruit trees are torn apart as soon as they become ripe hardwood trees are demolished as soon as they reach maturity the tree says I have long strived for uselessness because for this tree this quote uselessness is the reason it lived longer and grew larger than any other training Forest also ask consider the squirrels that eat this tree's acorns or the insects that live on the trees
branches or the creatures that find shade underneath its canopy but they call the tree useless think not just like the Carpenter and his usefulness our definition of productivity seems to be very narrow the activities that we often categorize as the least productive relaxing idle hobbies that require very little effort can make us the happiest and as far as producing in a professional context if someone builds a company and wants that company to be as productive as possible perhaps they should squeeze the systems harder not the people instead of asking employees to individually produce more and
sacrifice their personal lives we should all ask our systems of work to produce more when your boss tells you the company needs to increase productivity perhaps that's his problem to solve not yours Henry Ford was not a hero of the working class by any stretch of the imagination but he didn't just tell people to build more cars he created the assembly line as it stands though we cannot even engage in these conversations but it's up to the individual alone to Output more work any attempt to manage one's workload can be and often is seen as
pure laziness so next time you skip lunch to work consider what are you producing for who and why I would argue that creating happiness certainly counts as being productive
