Tyrannical Productivity
by Miki Saxon
Is productivity important to you? Do you strive to do everything more efficiently? If so, you have a lot of company these days.
No matter where you turn you find hacks to improve your work skills, raise your kids, change your diet, lose weight, even improve your love life.
But in your drive for productivity, have you stopped and asked yourself if productivity is a good goal? In other words, are the benefits all they’re cracked up to be?
I’ve never believed they were.
It always seemed to me that constantly chasing a better way to do [whatever] in the name of efficiency meant expending great energy for a constantly shrinking return of higher productivity.
It’s not the improvement I have a problem with, it’s the relentlessness that turns me off. The feeling that if you aren’t constantly looking to improve you lose your value as a viable human being.
Last year, in a post about the idea that being busy was aspirational I said,
But no matter how long I live I doubt I’ll ever understand the fragility of egos that need to prove their value so badly they are willing to give up their lives to do it.
I didn’t then, and still don’t, have the historical knowledge or understanding to support what I feel, but Andrew Taggart, Ph.D., a “practical philosopher” who practices in Silicon Valley perfectly expressed my belief in Life hacks are part of a 200-year-old movement to destroy your humanity.
Taggart explains it this way.
These explanations can be reduced to two basic kinds. The first kind implies that much of life is burdened by mental suffering—feelings of being overwhelmed and stressed—that can, through our own concerted efforts, be alleviated or at least coped with by finding the right productivity hacks. The second suggests that life is a “middle class epic” whose finale would depict a form of satisfaction following from the completion of the most challenging tasks at work. Call it Inbox Zero Integrity.
Yet neither the desire to lessen our everyday mental suffering nor the pursuit for short-term satisfaction ultimately explains our deep cultural obsession with productivity. What drives it instead, I’d argue, is a 200-year-old movement toward making work the center of our lives.
I’ve been saying for decades that work should be part of life, not vice versa.
There are many ways to measure the ROI in your life, just as there are more important things for which to work.
They just don’t fit into the “productivity” or “efficiency” categories.
Read the article.
It may just change your life.
Image credit: Denise Krebs
