I started earning a paycheck at age sixteen. In my forty-two years in the workforce, one thing has remained constant regardless of employer or industry: the insistence that none of us are doing enough. Through boom or bust, no matter how busy we may be, leaders demand that we be more productive. It’s maddening enough at work, but that mindset of constant productivity doesn’t turn off when we stop our workday. It oozes into our everyday lives and poisons our well-being.
My first public sector job was as a retail clerk. While the store’s budget for hours didn’t always allow us part-timers all the time we wanted, there were enough hours to staff the store with enough people to handle the registers, help customers, stock shelves, and keep the place trim.
Over time, though, the budget for hours shrank. Even before the 1990 recession, the corporate mandate was a phrase I quickly learned to loathe: “Do more with less.” (Not even “hold the line,” mind you. Do more.) When the recession hit, they scaled hours back even farther. In the aftermath, the budget for hours never returned to pre-recession levels. By the time I quit, it was common for a lone employee to do it all for four or more hours.
Later, when I began my career in Information Technology, the situation was just as bad and often worse. Management assigned multiple projects to people and teams. They dubbed each one a high priority and usually set unrealistic deadlines. As a consultant, I encountered companies where leaders assigned so much extra work that people referred to their normal duties as their “day job.”
The drive for hyper-productivity is so pervasive we become blind to it. We eat lunch at our desks and stay late. Back-to-back meetings keep us constantly busy, and the work piles up. When we get a moment between meetings to file those TPS reports (with the new cover sheets, natch), we’re also monitoring Slack and email so we can respond in real time. We’re so busy that we don’t even have time to think about how to get less busy.
It not only seems normal, but it becomes a point of pride to maximize every moment. People brag about how busy they are or that they stayed up past midnight getting work done. Working fifty, sixty, seventy hours becomes a point of pride. At one place I worked, a developer went on vacation with his family but boasted of still putting in eight hours each day on work projects while his wife and children saw the sights.
We turn being busy for its own sake into a moral imperative, and it doesn’t stop when we’re off the clock. Weekends become a race to catch up. But we never can, because there’s more to do than time and energy to do it. And even if we take a break from responsibility and try to unwind, everything is gamified to urge us to compete with each other, and ourselves. “You’re on a three-day reading streak!” my e-reader informs me, and commands me to keep it going. We can’t do something for its own sake. We have to beat a metric, outperform yesterday. Just like at work.
You lose track of what you want to do versus what you think you should be doing. You accomplished a lot of tasks but never feel rested or fulfilled. It leads to guilt over not getting it all done, depression over not having time for fun, and irritation at the whole mess. But there’s no time to think about solving the problem. You blink and it’s Monday. Time to get back to work.
What’s the alternative?
I won’t presume to offer one-size-fits-all advice. What I can offer is the assurance that if you feel overwhelmed, you’re not alone. And I can tell you tactics I’ve adopted, not as a prescription, but as encouragement to find your own way to get off the task-completion treadmill.
At home, I try to recognize that not everything has to be done. Or it doesn’t have to be done right now. Last year, after Hurricane Milton knocked a mango tree in our yard over, I trimmed away the branches that might endanger the roof and then left it alone. Yes, the rest must ultimately come down, but it didn’t need to right then. I’ll tackle the job when it eventually becomes necessary.
I recently adopted a new practice where I rewrite my reminder list each morning on three 4×6 cards, labeled “Must Do,” “Want to Do,” and “Should/Could Do.” I keep that first list short. If I don’t do the task, will anyone die? Will the house burn down? If there’s no major consequence, it goes on the “Should/Could Do” list. Being clear about the urgency of each task helps me focus on what’s important to me.
At work, it can be harder to avoid the trap. If you have pressure from above to “Do All the Things,” you have fewer options. The three-list method might help even under that pressure, because it can help with triage and surface the critical work. I’m fortunate that at my workplace, “balance” is not just a buzzword. Even though leadership seeks greater efficiency and productivity, they also recognize the limits of time and attention.
Escaping the productivity trap isn’t necessarily about doing less. It’s about recognizing that your time on this earth is finite and that you can’t do everything. It means that you don’t need to obligate yourself to do more just because productivity culture says so. Sometimes the recognition leads to doing less, and to rest. Sometimes it leads to deeper, more satisfying doing.
Semantics & So On 