The productivity problem
Do more. Never settle. Get shit done. Is this the best advice?
As we age the central problem with the way we live is that we approximate having full control over our time while our appetite to let our time be governed by others diminishes. The higher we move up socially and professionally, the starker the contrast between how much we want to dictate terms and how little we want to be dictated to. Our attention span shrinks when it is anyone but us (or someone we’ve willingly given the power to) deciding what we pay heed to. How often have we bristled at the thought of an unplanned visit to/from a relative that threatens to upset the carefully divvied-up weekend. Or have demanded a day’s notice from our spouse to allow any change in baked plans. The line between being organized and being a control freak can be tenuous. In the quest for productivity, the urge to control unimpeded every waking hour of our days can make the experience of living rather fragile.
This is not an inherent flaw in human design. This is how we knowledge workers have, knowingly or not, decided to optimize our lives. Do more. Never settle. Get shit done. Modern time management / productivity-optimizing behavior is nothing but reducing the opportunity cost to zilch. If we can be efficient enough to get everything done in the time available to us, we don’t lose out on anything. All the choices made here are optimal choices, so there are no sacrifices either. We want to have it all!
This kind of seemingly maniacal design for the use of time--the most ubiquitous commodity available to all of us--may be worth umpteen laughs when we are young. But we seldom notice the inflection point, if any, when we become the object of our caricatures. Certain life decisions bring this change sharply into focus. Picking a college or choosing a partner may seem like important decisions about the quality of your future life and hence may merit our full attention, but they are very much about the quality of your future time. If we had infinite lives, we could afford to waste a few years and the decision of what to do or whom to spend our time with wouldn’t matter, would it? In the absence of immortality, it becomes a decision about time.
Side note: Because the time we have at hand is limited, we go to great lengths to fill it with activities that will imbue it with the most meaning. If we’re tired we want to pick something relaxing to do; if we’re bored, something fun to watch; if we’re full, something light to eat. In the process of making this selection some of us find ourselves in infinite browsing mode. Ironically, we end up wasting time in making the choice. It is a generational tic arguably that has been triggered by the wealth of options available to us today for every choice.
Business leaders and managers are productivity hackers. They train themselves to get more out of every unit of time. When we run our work lives on the maxim of outsource everything but the highest-leverage tasks, we may find it hard to apply it to other responsibilities like childcare. Always looking for the cost/benefit, we may struggle to see the outsized returns of giving up our high-yield mornings to play with a one-year old. Becoming a parent reframes how we look at productivity. Here are some lessons I have gathered from my limited experience that could be useful for others.
Lesson 1: Quitting is the (under-recognized) key
On a Twitter thread, early education expert Ana Lorena Fabrega turns the spotlight on quitting. For most of our lives, the value of perseverance has been drilled into us and we’ve been conditioned to finish things we take up. Grit is great, we’re told in an almost absolute sense.
Parenting shows us when unexamined perseverance may hinder us. It instructs us that because the time we have is non-negotiably finite, we’ve to be more selective. Think of all the small prices you pay everyday with your time. Think of the things you’re lukewarm about but you end up doing anyway. What were the circumstances when you decided to make those pursuits worth your time? Remember you can have anything you want, but not everything you want. So quit often, and quit early. There’s an immense compounding value that we may be deprived of if we quit certain pursuits early, hence there needs to be an internal filter for alignment with personal goals.
Lesson 2: Function in dual mode
A corollary of the getting-things-done philosophy is that how much we do matters. We derive our self-worth from being productive. But as life happens along the way, we realize we can no longer derive our competitive edge by putting in more hours. Where earlier we were used to living in one high-functioning mode, a duality surfaces in our days that must be acknowledged.
We are in parent mode when we’re doing childcare. That’s time not available to us or to the world. With whatever is left, it is easy to feel entitled to doing nothing and give in to more Netflix, more doom scrolling, but that is likely to lead to more of nothingness. Brings to mind those first months of the pandemic? Now ask yourself: how would I plan my day if it were twelve-hours long? We can be more intentional with the hours, however few they may be, available to us for personal use. Making the most of that time brings clarity to our actions.
Lesson 3: Make it meaningful
No matter how smartly we spend our time, there will be things we have to give up. Fighting this truth is draining. We all know people who jump from course to course, vocation to vocation in the hope of finding something that fits. They seldom do. Commitment to a choice lends it more meaning than anything inherent in what we’re chasing. It may appear like we’re foisting meaning on our choice but it is anything but.
In the book Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman, talking on the subject of time and how we use it to extract meaning in our lives, says “... it’s precisely the fact that getting married forecloses the possibility of meeting someone else--someone who might genuinely have been a better marriage partner; who could ever say?--that makes marriage meaningful.”
An activity or pursuit or choice can derive its meaning from all others we have decided to forego. If we’ve given up the chance to be with our child in order to be present for a work thing on the weekend, we will naturally be determined to make the most out of our choice. Extracting value for what counts from what we’ve foregone makes us intentional about how we follow through. If we had nothing to give up, we would have no choices to make and nothing to care about. That is undoubtedly far worse.