making peace with productivity culture

developing a bodily wisdom for the way you work best

I've been wrangling a difficult relationship with being productive in the workplace. This internal war was silent, an internal, quiet storm brewing inside of me. Save for the evenings and my weekends, which I fiercely safeguard as mine, I feel like much of my working hours were bent on getting me to worship a god that isn't mine: productivity.

So what does being productive look like for me at work?

• It is the cup of Americano I have every morning. If I look deeper, it really just is the faith I have in my daily cuppa to power me through my mornings.

• It is the deep, levelled breath I take as I straighten my back whenever I commence a new task. It is telling myself “I can do it,” throughout the day.

• It is having a constant eye on the clock (do you know Toggl?) for it is routine to track the time I’m spending on each task. It is the relief I feel when I work as fast as I should, and guilt when I am too slow. 

• It is having a full five days’ worth of work assigned every week. It is expecting myself to perform at my peak, eight hours a day, for a consecutive five days a week.

• It is keeping to deadlines and trying to perform at my peak when I'm on my period (fatigue, migraines and cramps). It is ignoring that the work week rarely ever accounts for the female biology, and we make up half the population.

• It is trying to get as much done in the next two minutes at your desk, even when my bladder is crying for the toilet. It is to maximise every single minute that I have, especially if I am in the prized state called flow.

• It is telling myself that I can do this. That I got this. That I can keep trying again. 

Don’t get me wrong - being productive is necessary for any business to thrive. And for individuals who seek to reach their potential, unlocking the conditions that boost one’s productivity can result in personal and professional flourishing. However, what I was not prepared for was how dehumanising it can be to consistently be optimising for efficiency, even in a job that fulfils you and satisfies your intellectual curiosities (read about my ideal first job here). And it really doesn’t feel great to feel like I was worth nothing more than the quantity and quality of my outputs. I constantly felt that I was not good enough, even though I was already trying my best. 

Jet once shared that our careers take up 2/3 of our waking hours – effectively the most productive hours of our day, five days a week. And that really struck a chord with me. In The Three Marriages, David Whyte wrote, "work, like marriage, is a place you can lose yourself more easily than finding yourself. It is a place full of powerful undercurrents, a place to find ourselves, but also, a place to drown, losing all sense of our own voice, our own contribution and conversation." In the past year, I spent more time working than I did on my creative outputs and thinking for myself. To avoid getting swept away from it all, I decided to put on my big girl raincoat and rain boots to navigate this internal storm.

First, I needed to outgrow my fixed ideas of what it means to be productive. Being productive at school is worlds away from being productive at the workplace. Four years at university is a long time - long enough for me to develop a rather fixed idea of how one can be productive. Back then, I was mostly working autonomously, with lots of control over how and when I worked. 

Now, being productive meant working efficiently in teams, within defined working hours, and completing tasks assigned to a high standard in as little time as possible. The objective is no longer to learn for the sake of learning, but rather to learn quickly to maximise our profit margins. Okay, I can do that. Once I’ve come around to accepting that this was a new game I’m playing, it’s like an internal barrier has disappeared. Building habits tailored to working effectively at the workplace became times easier.

Second, I needed to remind myself that efficiency gains come with experience. Sure, there will always be expectations (whether externally- or self-imposed) to accomplish what my seniors were able to. In Paul Graham's How to Do Great Work, he writes that the one benefit that older people have over younger people is the benefit of knowledge and efficiency, which naturally lends to greater productivity. 

I wished I had the wisdom to give myself grace and avoid drawing blind comparisons between the quality of my work with someone who came before me. With experience comes the ability to distinguish between expectations that are reasonable from the unreasonable. And then negotiating deadlines to ensure that when I get down to business, work doesn’t feel rushed. Over time, I’ve learned where my limits are, and am practising being kinder to myself when I’m having period cramps or migraines. I’m also having earlier nights, simply because a poor night’s rest can knock my energy out of the park. 

Lastly, and most importantly, I needed to address my relationship with writing. The very act of writing, as it is for many writers, is a source of joy, retreat and salvation. And because what I write and then share publicly with this world is an expression of what I think, feel and believe, my work ethic is one that I have tended to with much care and love in the past many years. A key aspect of this practice is slow writing – which is exactly what it sounds like. However, my day job involves lots of writing. Therefore, it is unsurprising that being expected to write quickly and efficiently had initially left a bad taste in my mouth. 

But writing well and being able to do it quickly is a precious asset. Therefore, a year on, I'm writing for myself to preserve the sacred place it has in my life. During working hours, I will be efficient. After working hours, I will ponder, meditate and mull over every word I pen for Dear Spring for as long as I like. And learning to strike this balance has brought so much light into my life in the past month. I feel significantly less stressed, and a lot more excited to improve my technical skills at work.

Things do get better. I’ve learned that it is easy to work more efficiently when an environment is built to incentivise it. It has become a lot easier for me to enter the state required for deep work at will. I’ve become better at multitasking, when a year ago I would’ve cried from frustration and overwhelm. In the first six months at work, everyone I spoke to for advice said that I will get the hang of it over time. And indeed, intentional practice combined with colleagues primed to perform at a high standard, it’s only a matter of time. 

✿

At the end of the day, productivity is learning how you work best. There is a lot of talk about optimisation and ‘sweet spots’ in this cult. Amidst all the advice out there, I find that over time and after sufficient iteration, you just develop a bodily wisdom for the way you work best. And for me, that’s embedding purpose into the mundanities of work, focusing on connecting and uplifting others, and ensuring I pour time and attention into the craft that rejuvenates my spirit (writing) outside working hours. 

warmest,
shiying