Worker productivity is measured by comparing the number of hours worked to the output produced during that time. Currently, American worker productivity is growing at the fastest pace since the boom years of the 1990s.
Many people have written articles about how important productivity is and how to be more productive. Last month, many articles discussed how the current fast rate of productivity growth is a good sign for the economy. Plenty of others have opined that an individual’s productivity doesn’t necessarily correspond with their health or well-being and that wages don’t increase as quickly as productivity.
I’m not qualified to talk about economics or the labor market, and living a healthy and well-balanced lifestyle is the last thing anyone should take my advice on. So, I’m not going to discuss any of those things directly.
Instead, I’m going to talk about my personal productivity obsession. I’m unhappy when I’m not being productive and “getting things done.” I make a list every day, and I finish everything ahead of schedule. I’m a productivity tornado, and as far as I can recall, I’ve been that way since my first brush with business failure in 2001 and it only got worse with subsequent business crises, economic downturns, and COVID.
There’s nothing like being constantly on edge to make a person get busy. Even when I take “me time,” I only feel okay about it because I was up at 3:00 am and finished everything on my list before most people were awake. My interpretation of the “American Dream” is that if you’re always working you can have it all, eventually.
As I’m getting older, I’m coming to see this obsession with productivity as a curse. Being hyper-busy has, over the years, taken a toll on my relationships and health. Maybe I’m no good at “working smarter.”
Lately, I’ve been getting better at relaxing, but I’m still pretty bad at it. For example, I do Yoga videos, but I do them at 1.5x speed. The question I’ve been asking myself is whether I regret all the time I’ve spent productively building and running businesses and writing books over the last 25 years or so. My answer is absolutely, but also absolutely not. It depends on the day.
I sacrificed a lot in the name of being a harder worker than most people, and I suspect I’d be doing just fine today if I learned to surf (or play pickleball) rather than learning most of the programming languages I’ve learned. On the other hand, it’s satisfying to try to do difficult things and to (sometimes) succeed.
I often teach and mentor people who are just getting started with their careers. Although I have my own ideas about whether anyone should go down the path I took, I also don’t want to discourage anyone from pursuing their dreams. The most important thing I’ve learned, however, is that it’s important to reevaluate your dreams now and then, and this includes even the precious “American dream” of hard work and productivity being the key to success.
I consider myself a recovering productivity junkie. Until the last five years or so, I felt worthwhile only if I was checking things off my list. Although I never practiced yoga at 1.5x speed, I usually felt impatient during classes and often multi-tasked by thinking ahead to my day or solving problems rather than paying attention to what I was doing.
Something profound shifted when I began a serious meditation practice, first weekly, now daily. I don't think it's a coincidence that my entire outlook has changed. I still create a daily to-do list with check boxes, but it serves more as a hedge against forgetfulness than a way of measuring my worth. Greg McKeown's Essentialism podcast and Oliver Burkeman's book "Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals" have been influences as well.
I your reevaluation goes well!