New year, new me. So, back on the productivity bandwagon?
The term productivity and how it’s used online is toxic – to me at least. It perpetuates this sense of guilt if you don’t use every second of the day to be ‘productive.’ I feel like I can’t walk to my office, because it would be 15 minutes faster to take the bus – even though walking helps me prepare for the day and gets in some good movement for the day. I can’t listen to podcasts for fun – I need to be learning something. I can’t drive without a podcast on – otherwise it would be wasted time. Time is money!!
Efficient, effectiveness, busyness
The context in which this came up (again) is the critique of a girl boss Instagram page, which had a picture of someone’s intentions journal with a GIF superimposed onto the picture saying ‘let’s get this bread.’ The problem, as my friend and I agreed, is that you can’t conflate intentions with earning money. More generally, you can’t conflate intention with productivity.
‘Productivity’ was kind of triggering when I was applying to grad school. I was preparing to present at a conference. I was writing statements. I was emailing people for references. I was researching linguistics departments. The work I was doing would only be deemed ‘productive’ if it produced a result, which in this case would have meant an offer for grad school.
That’s the problem with ‘productivity’ – it’s only productivity if you have something (tangible) to show for it – a manuscript, a craft, an acceptance, money, etc. So if you’re working on something like grad school applications, the value of what you’re doing lies not in the time and effort spent, the intention, or what you learned by doing the work, but in the external validation. Grad school is competitive, and no matter how good of a student you are, your application might suck, the person you want to work with might not be accepting grad students, the department might not be looking for someone with your specific research interests, the department might not feel you’re a good fit. Whatever it is, there are many moving parts and the result is out of the applicant’s control. That’s one problem with the culture surrounding the word productivity – whether or not there is a product as a result of your work, is not always in your control.
The other problem is that often, we expect the product of our labor to be money. The harder we work, the more money we hope to get in exchange. You can’t be deemed successful in our society until you make or have a certain amount of money. This results in the pressure to work all the time, whether that be working overtime at your job, picking up extra hours at a second (or third) job, to get a side hustle, to spend your free time making more money. Any time spent not working and not making money is wasted and not productive.
Now that I’m in grad school, the pressure is as strong as ever to be productive all the time. To be fair, in order to just manage the baseline work for courses and TAing, you have to manage your time very well. In order to do any more – read papers out of interest, develop research projects, attend extra reading groups – you need to manage your time really well. This easily translates into pressure to work in the evenings, on the weekends, and during holidays. While the pressure might not be directly related to earning money (there’s not much hope of earning much money for the duration of grad school), the pressure is still to produce papers, presentations, posters, awards, grants, etc.
I’m not sure I have the power or influence to change the economic structure of this country or the world, but as someone who spends a lot of time thinking about language, I have been considering how using the word ‘productive’ (e.g. ‘Hope you have a productive day!’) contributes to this toxic culture of all work and no rest.
