By Hyunjin Lee, Co-Editor-in-Chief
When you read the words productivity, productive, and efficiency, what images are conjured in your head? Endless hours of non-stop studying? Floating from one obligatory task to another without breaks? Checking off every single item on your to-do list before bedtime? Never procrastinating?
Well, these are the images conditioned into our minds to be associated with productivity by our Western culture, our society. In the highly individualistic society that we live in, we succeed by doing better, by working harder, studying more, practicing, and achieving more than the person next to us. The emphasis we place on productivity, the need to constantly churn out results and products like machines (humans aren’t robots for goodness sakes!), prime us to demonize productivity. In some sense, especially for students, productivity becomes that idol we place on a pedestal and we rotate our lives around it, doing everything to keep our productive furnaces going.
For some, including me, that means sacrificing sleep, coming up with excuses as to why we can’t hang out or go somewhere, and maybe overthinking every opportunity we missed for doing more work. The list of negative side effects of intense productivity goes on and on. Perhaps what rang an alarm bell in my head regarding my obsession with productivity were some instances from this past year. When I found myself reading or doing creative projects that I love to do, I came to the uncomfortable realization that I didn’t feel comfortable or necessarily relaxed doing these things. And isn’t the point of doing fun activities to relax and to take a break from our demanding schedules? I realized that in the back of my mind, I was scolding myself, “Why aren’t you practicing more cello? Why aren’t you writing that essay instead?” Eventually, I came to the conclusion that my mindset and the way society has cultured me to view productivity and idolize productivity, has turned me into someone who can’t even enjoy simple things without feeling guilty about the “more productive” things I could be doing instead.
However, unending productivity is NOT the solution to greater happiness and satisfaction. And more often than not, I know from personal experiences, non-stop productivity doesn’t even yield the quality of work you want. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word “productivity” as of 1899 meant “rate of output per unit.” Doesn’t this definition sound like something fit for machines? Then why should we, humans, be pushed for higher and higher productivity rates each day? After all, we aren’t electronic devices that can chug out larger and larger outputs of math problems per minute, or programmed to produce greater numbers of tasks finished per day.
It’s time we stop being crutched by this concept of “productivity,” being workhorses to the yoke of society and our negative conceptualization of productivity.
In some ways, I suppose productivity is like a hedonistic treadmill, a treadmill of productivity. No matter how fast we run, how many hours we sacrifice studying or working towards some goal, it seems like we are never content with where we are. Oh, you finished your history notes early? Congratulations! Work ahead now and do the notes for the next chapter!
It will be difficult to radically alter our view of productivity, especially one so deeply ingrained into us. But like most things, every step matters. It can simply start with our acknowledgment of a negative idealization of productivity. As James Clear, author of “Atomic Habits” says, “being productive is about maintaining a steady, average speed on a few things, not maximum speed on everything.”
