The Problem with Productivity
Our devices enable us to do things faster. So why don’t we have more time?
Anita, a 42-year-old small-business owner and mother of three, approached her family life the way she approached her business—with extreme competence. With her husband frequently away on business, Anita told psychiatrist Pooja Lakshmin that she maximized her time with productivity tools, meal delivery services, Task Rabbit errand runners, etc.
But no matter how efficiently Anita ran her household, she still felt stressed out. In Real Self-Care: A Transformative Program for Redefining Wellness (Crystals, Cleanses, and Bubble Baths Not Included) Lakshmin writes:
[E]ven when Anita came up with the ‘perfect’ productivity and organization solution for her family’s needs, she didn’t feel complete. She still felt like she was managing her kids instead of being with them. The meal delivery service and time-saving techniques weren’t hurting. The problem was that Anita couldn't turn her brain off and stop thinking about what she could be doing better.
Lakshmin saw that many of her other patients were stuck in the same productivity trap. “It’s a fallacy that if we have that one infant sleep gadget or secret to scheduling, then our home and work lives will be transformed,” she writes, adding that these hacks “promise us that someday we can reach a pinnacle of productivity and efficiency such that our life will finally feel like it’s fully under our control. But the problem is that we never actually arrive.”
In 1930 economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that most of us would be working 15-hour weeks by now. With machines taking over the most tedious and time-consuming tasks, we’d have plenty of time for socializing, reading, playing piano, fishing, whatever.
We can laugh at Keynes, but isn’t it weird that he was so wrong? Journalist Oliver Burkeman makes this point in Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals:
Consider all the technology intended to help us gain the upper hand over time: by any sane logic, in a world of dishwashers, microwaves, and jet engines, time ought to feel more expansive and abundant, thanks to all the hours freed up. But this is nobody’s actual experience. Instead, life accelerates, and everyone grows more impatient. It’s somehow vastly more aggravating to wait two more minutes for the microwave than two hours for the oven—or ten seconds for a slow-loading web page verses three days to receive the same information by mail.
Those attempting to cultivate their own inner peace must still contend with ever-rising societal expectations of productivity. For 1950s housewives, that meant higher standards of household and personal cleanliness to go along with those shiny new vacuum cleaners and washing machines. For contemporary office workers, it means mushrooming inboxes and incessant direct messages. “Once most people believe that one ought to be able to answer forty emails in the space of an hour, your continued employment may become dependent on being able to do so, regardless of your feeling on that matter,” writes Burkeman.
Then there is the fact that many technology “solutions” actually make us less efficient. In Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—And How to Think Deeply Again, Johann Hari describes the “switch-cost effect”—the cognitive toll from interruptions like instant messages. “[I]f you check your texts while trying to work, you aren’t only losing the little bursts of time you spend looking at the texts themselves—you are also losing the time it takes to refocus afterward, which turns out to be a huge amount,” writes Hari. Twenty-three minutes, according to one University of Oregon study. And yet, on a typical day, most U.S. office workers never get an hour of uninterrupted time.
When she was in medical school, Lakshmin was trained to see her patients as the problem—it was her job to “fix” them with therapy or medication. But the more she listened to her patients describe their valiant efforts to find calm amid their stressful lives, the more she realized that many of problems they faced were systemic. Their anxiety wasn’t necessarily caused by their brain chemistry or unresolved parental issues. More often, the problem was rooted in a culture of overwork and social policies that provide little to no support for caregivers.
Prescribing self-care seemed like a slap in the face—her patients didn’t have time for yoga! She was just assigning them one more task. As I discussed in a previous column, nobody is against quiet walks in the woods. The problem is, when?
So what is a therapist to do? How could Lakshmin help her patients when the problem was rooted in their environment rather than their psyches? In Real Self-Care, Lakshmin tackles this enormous problem, working to blend personal transformation with systemic change.
While I’m skeptical that the book will spark a social revolution, I personally found the way she distinguishes “real self-care” from “faux self-care” quite useful.
The time-saving tricks and other temporary reliefs—massages, pilates classes, etc.—are faux self-care because they’re external fixes designed to get you back in fighting shape, ready to accomplish more stuff. Lakshmin:
Faux self-care is a method—in the moment, going for a run might improve your mood, but it does nothing to change the circumstances in your life that led you to feel drained, energy-less, or down. On the other hand, the work of real self-care is about going deeper and identifying the core principles to guide decision-making.
When it comes to productivity, “real self-care” means doing less—setting boundaries, saying no. This is not a simple matter for Lakshmin’s patients: women, many of them first- or second-generation immigrants, who are dealing with professional careers, children, and extended-family expectations that do not jibe well with American hustle-and-grind culture. I found Real Self-Care’s boundary-setting section particularly helpful. My favorite points:
Don’t let guilt control you.
“So much of the suffering I see in my practice is in women trying to ‘get rid of’ guilt or avoid feeling guilty—they see the guilt as a giant red flag that they need to drop everything and attend to so it will go away,” she writes.
Guilt is a useful emotion, a sign that one has a moral compass. But Lakshmin’s patients were allowing that initial twinge to dictate their behavior, rather than stepping back and realizing that they were not morally deficient if they declined to make cupcakes for the school bake sale. Instead of viewing guilt as a flashing alarm, she advises patients to treat it like a check-engine light. You need to pay attention to it, but it doesn’t necessarily indicate a crisis. “Guilt does not need to be our compass. It can just be a feeling in the background while we learn to reframe the discomfort as a signal that we’re taking responsibility for our own emotions,” she writes.
Let others disapprove of you.
When you say no—No, I can’t stay late. No, I can’t run a booth at the fundraiser. No, we aren’t coming to dinner every single Sunday—people don’t applaud you for taking charge of your time. They’re annoyed that you aren’t going to do what they want you to do. “Boundaries are hard not because you can’t identify yours, but because you are worried about the backlash,” writes Lakshmin.
Lakshmin counsels her patients to get comfortable with other people’s disappointment, and she warns them away from trying to change their feelings about a declined request. It’s not your job to say yes, and it’s not their job to make you feel okay about saying no.
Recognize the cost of saying no.
When New York Times columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom interviewed Lakshmin about Real Self-Care, Cottom was very frank about the challenges of applying the book’s techniques.
Lakshmin replied, “‘No’ always comes with a cost, and the lower you are in the caste system, the more cost there is.”
Cottom brightened. She said young women often come to her for advice about their career path. When she talks to these women, particularly if they are young women of color or young immigrant women:
I say to them, as you just said, saying no for you will always come at a cost. And that flies in the face of every feminist girlpower advice they’ve ever been given about negotiating salary and negotiating time off and being a She-EO, and all that kind of stuff. I say ‘No, you can’t get away with that. There are negative consequences with being interpreted as being bossy—and I’m using the kind b-word, I think we know the unkind b-word. But when it feeds into stereotypes of being angry that comes with a social cost.
Identify your priorities.
Sometimes the cost of saying no is too high. But such moments can be a useful way to identify your priorities and determine the larger principles that you want to one day abide by: I don’t take projects that require me to miss dinner with my family. I only work with people who treat me with respect.
In other words, you can create a framework to both make worthwhile long-term goals and make tough decisions in the moment. Declining to attend the 8 p.m. meeting could get me branded as someone who isn't a team player, but I still need to draw this line. Both options come at a cost, but one is aligned with your priorities rather than someone else’s.
I recently quit a job that wasn’t right for me to return to full-time freelance writing. It was a very carefully thought-out decision. I had money saved, a small windfall from a film option of my book, and the promise of freelance work from editors and clients I’d worked with before. Before taking this job, I’d earned my living as a freelance writer for more than two decades, and I’m currently in the midst of two interesting and decently paying freelance projects, in addition to building an audience for this newsletter.
So I’ve been surprised to realize how much my financial uncertainty—which had previously just been a normal fact of my life—has upset me.
This is due in part to larger economic forces that have made middle-income writers like me all but extinct. Buy me a beer and I’ll rant to you at length about that. But the other side of it was, I got used to not worrying about money. I got used to picking up tabs, donating to charities, booking nice vacations, and buying concert tickets. I got used to knowing that I was earning enough to retire one day.
I stayed true to myself, and the price has been really high.
Reading Real Self-Care has not solved this problem, but it has reminded me that, whatever the ultimate consequences, I made the best decision I could. Even in my most panicked moments, when I ask myself if I made a terrible mistake, the answer I come to is always the same: no.
Real Self-Care, like Four Thousand Weeks and Stolen Focus, doesn’t offer simple solutions, and certainly no guarantees. The book is a call to live on your own terms, but also forgive yourself when you falter because you’re up against a lot.
Even if we have to keep playing the game, we can at least keep the game from playing us. We can accept other people’s disapproval. We can do work that is not fulfilling but pays the bills. We can hang out with friends and family in our unrenovated kitchens. We can let our hair grow shaggy and neglect to get our eyebrows shaped. …
Okay, I can do that stuff. You probably have other ways to not maximize your life. I’d love to hear about them. How do you practice real self-care?
So thought provoking. Back when I was in thick of raising a family, my mom told me her grandmother once said she felt bad for modern women, that before there were laundry machines, no one expected her to do much except the laundry every Tuesdays. Or bake bread on Friday etc. That kind of focus, a lifestyle of NOT multitasking sounds great and I personally strive towards implementing in my own life.
Sara, this is at the heart of everything. I share many of these views, and have also made some tough though satisfying decisions about work and money and life. My favorite part is getting used to others' being disappointed (their problem), which can turn into a personal challenge to practice until it feels ok, like being the "bad" kid (guessing many reading this were raised to be pleasers, high achievers, "good girls," perfectionists, that kind of thing). There is freedom and dignity in taking back your agency and saying no, fuck that, I'm a grownass woman, and I will be and do what my heart says, not what an anxiety-ridden, greed-arranged society sweeps people up into believing they "should" be. Thanks!