Your Obsession With Productivity Is Destroying The Planet

How to sustainably manage energy, not just time

This week, I’m bringing you a guest post from Elizabeth Svoboda. It's an exclusive excerpt from her upcoming book, The Art of Pacing: A Guide to Balancing Short-Term Demands with Long-Term Thriving. Svoboda is an award-winning science writer (Scientific American, the Boston Globe, Psychology Today), whose work has appeared in the Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology. She’s also an exceptionally thoughtful, curious person whose thinking I’ve enjoyed since we were in college together.

This excerpt is making me think about the connection between my own personal drive to constantly work and produce, and the burdens we’re placing on the planet through overconsumption, overproduction, and over-extraction. Sustainable creativity is seasonal and cyclical. People need to rest and lie fallow sometimes, just like land.

The Art of Pacing was named a June Must-Read Pick by the Next Big Idea Club. You can subscribe to Svoboda’s Art of Pacing newsletter here, or find her @svobodster on Instagram.

Here’s Elizabeth:

Part of the reason I dove into the art of pacing was that I have such a long history of pacing failures. I grew up in a competitive public school district, and throughout my teens and twenties, I never even considered pacing myself. In fact, I would have found the concept completely alien.

I had many mentors who encouraged me, but I didn’t really learn how to be discerning about which commitments I was taking on and why. I just piled up activities and accolades as if life were a smorgasbord. The result was that I got into a pattern of doing too much, mentally crashing out, and eventually recovering, at which point the cycle would start all over again.

…[B]y the time I reached my 40s, I was highly motivated to pull myself back from the brink of another crash before it happened, rather than having to struggle in its aftermath.

I spoke with high-level athletes who’d thought a lot about how to avoid such crashes during long-term training, and who were skilled at managing their energy in nuanced, incremental ways throughout the season. I also talked to creative people in a range of fields who’d established their own sustainable rhythms of speeding up and dialing back, which allowed them to move toward their goals with their health and sanity intact. The Art of Pacing explores science-backed practices that help readers learn to do the same — to range fluidly across the full spectrum of possible paces, so to speak, instead of just ricocheting between grinding and withdrawal.

I’ve found circadian rhythm-based energy management, which many athletes use, to be quite helpful. You identify which times of day you naturally tend to be most alert and focused — for some people, like me, it’s mid-morning; for some, it’s afternoon or even late at night. Then, you plan your most high-priority/demanding work to coincide with those natural energy peaks, and take a break or do less demanding work during your energy lulls (many people have one after lunch).

When I tried this more deliberate energy management, I was surprised how much difference it made. I set word count goals as a writer, and I’m much more likely to meet or blow past them at my mid-morning energy peak than I am if I try to write right after lunch, when getting words out feels like squeezing an empty toothpaste tube. This approach is about tackling the hardest work at the times it’s most effortless — when it feels like running downhill instead of uphill. And when you do that, you have more energy to devote to life outside of work too.

I began writing this book in 2022, which seemed like a hopeful moment at the time: after a long stretch of pandemic isolation, we were just starting to resume the rhythms of normal life. But as I got deeper into my research, national and world events took some grim turns, and the book took on new dimensions as a result.

Pacing, I realized, was a higher-stakes business than I’d thought at the outset. It’s crucial not just because it helps us function better on a day-to-day basis, but because it helps us maintain our commitment to the repair work that matters so much to our communities and the world. Personal pacing facilitates shared pacing toward global-scale solutions. We need bravery to set healthier rhythms, whether individually or collectively.

Anya here: we also need to take the time to question the ultimate goal we are working toward, and whether “more” is always the answer.

As pacing shifts shape our individual trajectories, they play into our collective fate as well. Nationally and globally, we are failing to pace ourselves toward finding viable solutions to the climate crisis or viable ways to preserve the earth’s resources. We sabotage our future well-being in misguided attempts to preserve the status quo, though so much about it is unworthy of preservation.

These failures are rooted in a rugged ethos of one-upmanship that’s proved ferociously sticky in the United States and societies that follow its lead. This ethos stems from other, still deeper-rooted ideas—that the best way to live is to aggrandize the self, and that in order for someone to win, someone else must lose. These entrenched ideas have spawned a succession of social ills: an economic system that prizes growth over long-term sustainability; a political system that rewards shows of dominance and cruelty; an education system that devalues nonlinear thinking; an online universe built to monopolize our attention and deplete our savings rather than enrich our lives.

Faced with counterproductive modes of juicing productivity, it’s easy to conclude we’re stuck with them for good.

Yet if sustainable pacing practices are ever to emerge on a global scale, they must begin on a human one. When you log out of social media for a week, rest under your desk between meetings, or quit your job and give yourself a month to decide what comes next, you create space for others to follow your lead. You model taking time to recover, think, and plan before plunging back into the fray. As self-repair becomes socially contagious, it can also become a catalyst for meaningful collective repair.

In a shortsighted, always-on culture, however, these repair attempts take no small amount of courage. While death-defying heroic acts cluster at one end of the bravery continuum, closer to the middle—and far more accessible—is everyday, necessary stubbornness: a refusal to sacrifice our lives and principles on the altars of productivity, dominance, and self-promotion.

It takes courage to let children grow and explore at their own pace when other parents opt for academic “enrichment” courses billed to supply a competitive edge. It takes courage to quit a high-octane job that makes you miserable when everyone around you is toasting to your success. It takes courage to stand behind your values when doing so disrupts your company’s earning power and your own career ascent. It takes courage to pull back judiciously and deliberately, “to figure out how to make a contribution to the world that feels both authentic and well within your human limits,” as essayist Rosie Spinks writes, “to participate in an energetic exchange that isn’t predicated on burnout or a ceaseless expectation of more.”

It’s easier to summon this kind of courage (or stubbornness, as the case may be) when you surround yourself with the off-course equivalent of a runner’s pacing team: people who are making authentic contributions untethered to one-upmanship, who reject cultural norms that equate grind with virtue, and who create abundance that has nothing to do with their job title or account balance.

These fellow travelers’ influence is contagious. When you witness others calling out lapses in integrity, you, too, will be more drawn to honest reckoning, recognizing when your bodily, mental, or ethical integrity has broken down and taking steps to restore it. This is the essence of pacing: noticing when frantic sprints or drawn-out stalls are consuming you—not just physically but ethically and existentially—and making bold adjustments that heal and strengthen you on every level.