An ode to productivity

also why I’m not going to stop chasing productivity

I. Popular Psychology Practitioners hate productivity

Popular Psychology Practitioners detest productivity. Their attempts at stigmatising the word have been pretty successful in the recent past. They tell us to not make our lives about work. They showcase Iceland’s experiments on 3-day weekends and remind us how miserable our lives are. They portray the companies where we work as diabolical and their existence as the sole reason for our mental health issues. They get upset if we don’t join in on the hate against Musk and his 16 hour work days at Tesla. They expect us to protest against this productivity madness - by working less, by quitting jobs, by permanently abandoning the chase for productivity. 

I vehemently disagree with this popular stance on productivity. This post is dedicated to exploring how chasing productivity might be what you need more of in life by busting some popular myths on productivity and understanding the science behind it.

II. The myth that High Productivity = Long hours at work 

People associate staying in office till 8pm and pulling multiple all-nighters with productivity. That’s not what being productive means at all. Productivity is about maximising your output to input ratio.

Let’s take the case of 2 people, Person A and Person B. They both work at Office K.

To the outsider O, Person A seems more hardworking and productive. O gets this feeling because they see A on their work desk beyond 7pm on most days. Person B, in contrast, is out of office by 6pm everyday. O feels that B is always in a rush to get back home whereas A’s devotion to the company makes them put in such long hours of work almost on a daily basis.

Here’s what O doesn’t know. Person A comes in after 11am on most days. They often take 2-hour long lunch breaks. They spend time between meetings either on Linkedin or with their friends in the cafeteria. 

Person B, on the other hand, arrives at the office by 9am everyday. They spend time between meetings working on their tasks. They too take breaks but manage to get back to their tasks in good time. Overall, they may spend less time in the office but actually get more work done.

A closer look at how people spend their time at work can reveal stark differences. Productivity is not about spending 10 hours in the office whilst discussing people’s dating lives. It’s about managing your time well and in a focused manner, not filling up long hours with bits and pieces of disjointed tasks. 

III. The myth that Productivity feels Exhausting

Most people I know pick ‘Some’ and ‘All’ as their responses to this question. They look forward to Fridays because the weekend will finally give them time for some much needed respite. Yet these people feel more exhausted on Sunday evenings (after 2 days of supposed rest) than on Friday nights (after 5 days of work). Mondays always dawn a little too fast on them. During the week, they would have pushed all their tasks to the weekend. During the weekend, the same list gets pushed to the new week. Once the new week begins, their now rapidly ageing list gets pushed to yet another weekend. You know how it goes.

Productivity is not exhausting, the struggle to be productive can be. Many feel that their rigid 9-5 job structure is what holds them back from being their most productive selves. But those guys are the same ones who make a complete mess of the 2 full days they get every week to do whatever the hell they want. They postpone recuperation and productivity for the weekend but their weekends sap their energy rather than replenish it. And when Sunday arrives to usher them back into work, they want to protest. They want another chance at productivity on their own terms but their time has run out, they need to wait for another 5 days for their next chance which would likely go under-utilised again.

Answer the following question honestly for yourself. How do you really feel after putting in a day of good, solid work? The days where you doubled down on your task list and *got shit done*? Or the days where you wanted to chill in the cafeteria for a little longer but instead marched back to your work desk and met that deadline well in advance instead of having to pull an all-nighter? Don’t those days feel fantastic? If you don’t remember what that feels like because it’s been too long, take my word for it. Productivity feels fantastic.

IV. Why productivity feels so good

We’re going to delve into the science of productivity and its archenemy, procrastination a little bit. It won’t be too hard to follow, I promise, so stay with me. 

How familiar are you with that pumped feeling one gets after doing even as little as 5 minutes of workout? You feel good, you feel that you want to do more, you feel like you suddenly have a lot more energy. You feel motivated to face life. Dopamine is the molecule in our body that is responsible for motivation. It also is responsible for a few other things but we’ll talk about that in another post. What kind of motivation does dopamine facilitate? All kinds. If you want  to do something really big in life -  make lots of money or become the next American President, you need dopamine. But dopamine is not just responsible for the big goals, we need its help to do really basic stuff too such as sleeping on time or eating on time or watering plants. If you decide to go to the toilet to pee instead of doing it on your bed, that’s dopamine in action. What does this mean? If you’re low on dopamine, life is going to be tough. Check out this really old but super interesting experiment that was done on rats. They found that baby mice low on dopamine die of starvation within 4 weeks of being born. Depleted of dopamine, these mice chose to starve and die despite food being made available to them. That’s the kind of horrible stuff that can happen when you’re low on dopamine. 

Dopamine and productivity are connected. To be productive, you need motivation to work. Dopamine is what helps you feel motivated. When you have enough dopamine in your system, you are motivated to do work. When you do the work, there’s a fresh release of new dopamine. This makes you feel good and you want to continue to feel that way so you are motivated to put in more work again. This is what a virtuous cycle of high productivity looks like. 

People try to find shortcuts for dopamine release and this never goes well. Let’s take Instagram, for example. Watching reel after reel on Instagram gives you instant and large dopamine hits. We all know how an entertaining reel makes us feel good instantly. But it made you feel good for doing 0 work! Your brain will now refuse to do work because it’s figured out a way to gain pleasure without doing any work. It’ll encourage you to watch more reels because it understandably wants to continue to feel good at a low cost. And the scrolling begins. This works for a little while, maybe 30 minutes, maybe an hour. Issues crop up when our brains realise that they are incapable of releasing such large amounts of dopamine continuously. Before you know it, it’s been 3 hours on Instagram. Your head feels heavy and your stomach feels empty. You’re craving more dopamine, you want to get back to reality but your body is battling so much fatigue. And so you do the only thing you can do - you procrastinate. You postpone work and scroll.

For the unfamiliar, procrastination, in simple words, is our tendency to put things that are good for us off for later and instead do things that give us instant pleasure immediately. Procrastination is basically a problem of poor impulse control. Procrastinators feel like and frequently end up following every impulse that comes their way - a new video, a new thought, a new article, a new second article, a new IG reel, a new startup idea. The behaviour of a procrastinator is eerily dog-like. Ever seen a cutie puppy chasing every smell, every sound, every fly, every squirrel? Humans too are impulsive creatures. But to make something out of our lives, we need to be able to curb our impulses. We need to learn how to delay the feeling-good to after actually putting in the work. Unfortunately not all of us are born with the gift of being able to do this (heard of the famous Marshmallow test?). What’s worse is that even if you were able to do it when you were younger, that does not mean that the trait will hold out even when you’re older (see how the Marshmallow test got debunked). If you want to know more about how the brain of a procrastinator works (probably while procrastinating), watch the best video that I’ve come across on it so far here. 

To sum this up, is watching a few reels on Instagram such a big deal? Yes, it is, because it drains your dopamine. And what happens without dopamine? That’s right, no motivation. And what can happen to us without motivation? I won’t go there (Hint: think back to the baby mice experiment). 

V. What about a break? Can I take one? 

I already explained in Section I how being productive is not equivalent to slogging away for long hours. Productivity and working hours are strongly linked up to a certain point after which the relationship breaks down. What this means is that rest is critical for productivity. It also means that productivity is critical for rest. In simpler words, you need to be well rested to produce high quality work. But too much chilling is going to get in the way of you doing good work, and also reduce the quality of your chilling!  In my case, when my body needs the rest that it has earned after doing some good work, I do take rest. I do chill and go out and meet people and watch a movie every once in a while. The important thing to keep in mind is how you rest, not how much. The key to high, good quality productivity lies in the way we engage with leisure time. Rest is meant to replenish our resources, especially our dopamine before we get back to working again. Instead, many of us engage in leisure activities that deplete dopamine instead of ones that help recharge them. Even day long breaks that use up your dopamine reserves scrolling past your social media poison of choice will leave you feeling drained. But short breaks of 5-10 minutes spent meditating or walking in sunlight or generally without engaging in cheap dopamine can do wonders for your energy. 

In fact, I’ve a lot more free time today when compared to my procrastination-laden years (more on this later). How’s that possible? How is increased productivity leading to more free time? That’s yet another amazing outcome of chasing productivity. It sounds ridiculous but it’s true. When we’re able to be more productive, we’re able to gain more leisure time. This is because high productivity is also about high efficiency which means that over time you learn to do the same work not only better but also in shorter amounts of time. This frees up more of your time for leisure. 

VI. Why I don’t plan to stop chasing productivity 

I, for one, have low dopamine levels in general which in other words means that I have very low motivation. I also have high procrastination tendencies. I struggle to get up, I struggle to work, I struggle to do anything that requires effort. I’ve had this problem since I was a little girl. For example, as a kid, I never understood why beds had to be made every morning if we plan to sleep on the same bed that night. To summon all my motivation (which is low to begin with) to do a task that I will have to undo 12 hours later made no sense to me. When I was in school, if I took what was supposed to be a 10-min break from studying, I almost never got back to it on the same day. As an adult, at my first job, I noticed that once I stopped working, I struggled to restart. 

Everyday is a productivity battle for me. For example, It’s good for me to finish writing this post now because I’ve already been sitting with it for 2 days. My writing on Substack is supposed to be strictly a side thing. I should ideally finish this draft and get back to my other tasks as soon as I can. Instead, I have taken 5 quick breaks in the last 5 minutes. All of them were Instagram breaks. I watched Deepika Padukone’s skincare routine. I also watched a lady who I don’t know drive her car whilst lip-syncing to a song I don’t know. I can totally get into sharing all the other kinds of trash I watched but the reminder is going to be painful so I’m not going to. 

Is any of the stuff I watched useful for me to write this post? No. Even though I know this, why am I still fighting the urge to go back and watch another one of Sheena Melwani’s hilarious reels? This is what fighting procrastination looks like. Writing this post is good for me in the long term yet I’m dying to do things that provide me with instant pleasure. 

How do I combat low dopamine and high procrastination? Well, I try to be as productive as I can. 

Remember the question I asked you in Section II about Monday blues? My answer to that question today is None. It has been that way for over 2 years now. Up until 2019, I too was highly prone to the Monday blues. I too would find myself wondering every Sunday evening where my weekend went. My Mondays also always dawned a little too fast on me. But that's just not my life anymore. My weekends travel at the appropriate speed now. I get lots of time to rest. I also get some work-adjacent stuff done. By Sunday evening, I feel excited about getting Monday and the new week started. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like all my days go perfectly well but that was never the aim either. I still have a day or two every now and then when a severely obese todo list does tandav on my head at which point I order a biryani to solve my procrastination troubles (it only makes it worse and now you know why). But those days are rare now. I go to bed on most days feeling happy at the way I’ve spent my day. 

VII. My ode to productivity

We’re told nowadays to not chase productivity, that life means so much more than just being productive, yada yada yada. We’re told to not make our lives about our work. My experience tells me otherwise. Making my life about work is what helps me lead a good life. It is probably what will help you too. That’s what all the science and evidence is pointing to at least. 

My life only changed for the better ever since I organised my life around productivity. My new, resurrected life probably makes popular psychology practitioners deeply unhappy. They may think that I’m only hurting myself by relentlessly pursuing productivity. I don’t care. Productivity feels fricking amazing, it makes a lot of sense that it feels fricking amazing, and if you can get it going, I fully expect that you will find it fricking amazing. 

We humans have an understandable preference towards externalising blame. We find it easier to blame the weather on days we feel like skipping gym, our partner on days our mood is irritable and our children on days our car keys go missing. The same pattern shows up even in our work narratives. All around, I see people tell each other how their companies are to be blamed for the way they manage their time. I see people associate their feelings of work dissatisfaction with ‘capitalist’ gaslighting. I see people scoff at productivity enthusiasts while themselves struggling to get any work done. 

It’s easy to blame capitalism or the government for everything that’s going wrong in our lives. Guess what’s not easy? To manage your time well, to put in the work day in and day out, to cancel that Netflix subscription, to initiate that difficult conversation, to not open Instagram when that meeting is done, to own your mistakes, to make a serious commitment and follow through with it. It’s not easy, but it pays off, in spades, in terms of mental health, if not money (but, probably, money too).

So here’s to giving working-your-ass-off a real shot? 🥂

VIII. Okay I’d like to try this whole productivity thing. Where do I start?

I’ll tell you soon in an upcoming Unpopular post. In the meantime, go do something productive :P