What is the point in productivity? What if the answer depends on our relationship to productivity?
If your life story was told through your to do lists, mental or physical, what would it say?
It can feel easy to be caught up in doing. Lives can be reduced to daily, weekly, monthly to do lists. Productivity is promoted as a virtue, often with little reference to what is produced, only the act of producing.
It can feel easy to get caught in measuring ourselves by our productivity.
What did I do today?
What is in my calendar?
What didn’t I do today?
How long did I do that for?
If we perceive ourselves only through productivity’s periscope, what do we miss out on?
What may productivity for pure productivity’s sake be distracting us from?
Productivity and purpose perhaps?
There is a Japanese proverb that says ‘Vision without action is a dream and action without vision is a nightmare.’
At the same time does everything we do need to have a clear vision or purpose?
I was once told that design thinking frames how we think in 2 ways:
Build to think
Think to build
While arguably both have purpose, thinking or building, what about the times we are experimenting or trying something new with no idea what may come of it, merely following intuition or curiosity?
Nonetheless, it seems that productivity plus purpose is not the panacea.
Productivity. Friend? Foe? Overlord?
We are always relating to something. This blog has recently written a lot about the subject-object move. When it comes to productivity are we subject to productivity or is it an object you choose to relate to? When are the times you are subject and object to productivity?
When you think of productivity, what is your relationship to it?
If productivity was a person in your life who would they be? What role would they have?
When you feel productive what does it look like? What are you thinking and feeling?
How does that compare to when you do not feel productive?
For me, I notice productivity can feel like a self-justifier, I can point to productivity as a proxy for self-worth. The problem is, the only thing to sustain that is more productivity, or to nurture a genuine connection to my self-worth. If so, what role does productivity play then?
Productivity with presence
Initially writing this, intentionality seemed to be the foil for productivity. The ‘how’ we go about being productive (because we do not always know the why or purpose of that productivity).
We may not even know the how, not clearly, or at least it can be hard to write some useful examples.
Underlying intentionality is presence, we almost always cannot be intentional if we are not also present to the thing.
What do we need to be present to our productivity?
So perhaps presence is what we need in how we then approach productivity. With presence we can choose how to be productive (or not productive, which can be really productive). In fact presence is part of the subject-object move.
And, if not being productive can be really productive we come back to our relationship to being productive.
What makes productivity important to us? (If it doesn't, what does that mean for you?)
I have no doubt that productivity can be valuable, in our nature we are creative, we produce, so long as we are present to our producing to know when we are subject to it, so we can choose when, what, if and how we want to be productive?
What is the point of productivity for you?
When, where, how and for the sake of what do you want to be productive?
What would be different if we were all present to our productivity?
