Guest Post: "Productivity" Is A Lie

Put your feet up and enjoy that pie

Hello friends. Happy Thanksgiving weekend.

Chocolate bourbon pecan.

I am grateful today for my health; my family; my work. The announced temporary ceasefire and release of hostages. For my older child’s signature pumpkin pie cheesecake bars with a shortbread crust. For those of you who open this newsletter and share it and who take the time each week to tell me that it’s valuable to you.

In the name of time off, and practicing what I preach, I did a newsletter swap this week.

Katherine Goldstein is a journalist, speaker and fellow at The Better Life Lab at New America who recently published a playbook on transforming care in America. Her weekly newsletter and community, The Double Shift, covers family life along with social and economic issues facing moms and caregivers. 

Subscribe to the Double Shift newsletter here—I subscribe and I recommend it! Here’s Katherine.

Accepting “Productivity” is a Lie

When several Double Shifters directly recommend an article, book or podcast to me it’s usually for good reason. Thanks to several of you, I recently picked up Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Written by a former productivity columnist, Oliver Burkeman, he refutes a lot of the premise of the life-hack industrial complex to remind us of some simple truths.

1. If we live to be 80, we will live approximately 4000 weeks, which feels alarmingly short when put into that calculation.

2. Much of our more modern obsessions with bucket lists, FOMO, and making the most of every moment comes from the collective existential unmooring of a less religious society that does not believe strongly in the afterlife.

3. In limitless capitalism, it does not matter how “productive” we are, because the faster we get at accomplishing things, the more we will find to do.

Nothing drives this third point home more than the incorrect prediction of economist John Maynard Keyes. He gave a famous speech in 1930 where he predicted that within a hundred years, wealth generation and technology advances would mean that no one would have to work more than 15 hours a week to have all of their needs met, and the real crisis would be how people would spend all of their abundant leisure time. Keyes had obviously never met his neighbors, The Joneses, who helped constantly push the bar higher for what kind of wealth and standard of living Americans aspire to, nor did he anticipate the extreme wealth inequality free market capitalism would generate.

In the working world, assembly line efficiencies didn’t result in workers getting a shorter day with the same pay; it only increased expectations of how much they could produce in a day. Since email has vastly sped up professional correspondence, we now just expect responses sooner and results faster. And if you need evidence that personal productivity merely causes us to add more work on ourselves, look no further than the invention of washing machines, dishwashers, vacuums and microwaves. All of these household appliances save untold amounts of time and energy over their manual counterparts, and yet now we have even more clothes to wash (thank you fast fashion), and the social expectation is now that more or less everything will be washed after one wear. Since 1975, the average new house size in America has nearly doubled, from 1660 square feet to over 2500, despite the fact that nuclear families have gotten smaller and fewer people are living in these larger homes. Bigger houses often mean it costs more to pay for them, maintain them and fill them with stuff, and definitely more time to clean them. All of this may mean more hours the adults of the household need to spend in the paid labor force and on unpaid household tasks, negating time savings of that revolutionary vacuum and dishwasher. And if you know you can heat up a microwave dinner in 3 minutes rather than spend two hours cooking and an hour cleaning up, that means you can commit to driving your kids to extracurricular activities for three hours every evening (which costs a pretty penny to enroll them in!) Under the social expectations of capitalism, leisure time has to be fiercely defended with a deadly weapon or it will be sucked up into new productivity expectations.

Four Thousand Weeks contains many gems of wisdom, but one that has really stuck with me is:

“I’m aware of no other time management technique that’s half as effective as just facing the way things truly are.”

I don’t think this means being passive and unquestioning. I think it means looking for loopholes and life hacks to circumvent the realities of unrealistic expectations will never pan out in the long term if you think you are always just a few moves away from outmaneuvering capitalism. And the quest to always squeeze a few more drops of productivity out of everything deprives us of being in the moment, which is how we access our full humanity. Answering work emails while on an evening out with your partner or trying to shop online while watching your kids at the playground isn’t how we want to remember our lives when we’re 80. Just like modern motherhood, when you realize the game is rigged and there is no way to “have it all,” it can start to free you of social expectations. And on the productivity front, once you embrace that you’ll never clear your to-do list or make your life efficient enough, it’s way easier to give up and just have fun.

Good Links

Thanksgiving, indigenous sovereignty, and climate justice

Wild bison are thriving again on tribal lands

Just heard about Radical Joy, group rituals for “wounded places”; can’t wait to try one

Profiles of young climate activists, part of a pretty cool toolkit from Unicef to get kids engaged ahead of the big UN climate conference next month.

Yay for Kate Marvel on informed climate optimism. “we have a once-in-human-history chance not only to prevent the worst effects but also to make the world better right now. It would be a shame to squander this opportunity. So I don’t just want to talk about the problems anymore. I want to talk about the solutions.”

World Central Kitchen is always a good Thanksgiving donation