Tools for Thought

Productivity bashing as a meme is getting boring. Having dabbled in it myself, I know whereof I speak. It’s not uncommon for bloggers to experience an identity crisis after writing extensively on the same topic for months, but that’s no reason to indulge in self-immolation. A more adaptive response is fuller self-examination.

The word “productivity” has been overused and misused for years, especially in an age of “life hacks” that span from extended travel and income automation to novel applications of binder clips. More specifically, productivity has become synonymous with self-actualization, which troubles some writers with faux-humanist or New Age proclivities. But the frequent misuse of a word doesn’t necessarily cancel its usefulness. What called for is greater precision with language.

Work and production

The real root of people’s frustration with the word “productivity” lies in the English language’s absence of a word that addresses the full spectrum of work. There are fundamentally two types of work:

• Work that has personal or social value
• Work that has economic or exchange value

Notice that when people use terms like “work-related” or “work life,” they invariably mean work in the latter category. But work is simply the energy expended to realize an outcome — any outcome, whether it’s throwing a party, starting a company, doing a cross-country road trip, completing a client presentation, or reaching one’s ideal weight.

The two poles encapsulate a spectrum of fulfillment, rather than mutually exclusive modes of existence. We get an education (what the Greeks categorized as a leisure activity) to increase our job prospects. We often get personal satisfaction from projects completed at work. Many of us hold the ideal of monetizing our hobbies or passions in order to spend our days doing what we love.

Why killing your job won’t kill your dissatisfaction

From Twitter, last May:

Me: Article writing. Sigh. Wishing I could blog full time. Gawker or GigaOM, please buy me out!

Gina Trapani, four hours later: Some days I dream of quitting my job and becoming a full-time blogger. Oh, wait.

It’s tempting to imagine that other people or external situations are the source of our discontent. When people do manage to extricate themselves from their day jobs, they often wind up transferring their discontent to other agents: not enough clients, too many clients, bad clients, a bad economy and so on. But the enemy lies within.

Life is multidimensional. A job is only one aspect of our work, and one aspect of our lives. There’s no such thing as a “dream job” if it’s meant to be the lynchpin for a fulfilled existence. Work on your job, work on your health, work on your marriage, but stop trying to get everything out of any one of them. Even the best things in life are unhealthy in excess.

The lazy workaholic

The workaholic is the classic “one-dimensional man,” bereft of identity beyond a single area of focus. Workaholics avoid confronting many life issues by throwing themselves exclusively into one. Since they’re continually in motion, they can never be accused of being lazy by those who use activity as their metric for productivity.

True productivity involves realizing and recognizing all values that contribute to a meaningful existence. Meaning doesn’t bestow itself on a person; it has to be actively discerned and defined through a continuous, cyclical process of thinking and doing.

Areas of focus

Setting goals without meditating on values is a reliable way to concentrate one’s life too narrowly. One way to counteract the tendency to overidentify with one aspect of life is to create a list of all aspects that have meaning, which in this case we’ll call areas of focus. An example would be:

• Professional
• Health
• Marriage
• Family
• Friendships
• Learning
• Community
• Financial Independence

This is just one possible array of values among many. Some people might subsume “Marriage” into the larger category of “Family.” Others will see romance as a significant enough component to keep marriage separate from general family issues. Some people don’t value civic participation, so “Community” wouldn’t appear on their list. For some people, “Learning” will be too broad of a category for a specific field of interest, like painting; so “Art” might be a more accurate focus area. Some people don’t need “Financial independence,” but would be content with a balanced checkbook and zero debt, so “Finance” would be a more accurate label.

Areas of Focus should be an authentic, personal list that reflects what you’re willing to spend time and energy on. Don’t put down “Community” if you’re not active in the community, or don’t plan to be.

The litmus test, other than your intuition, is your project list. Look at each of your focus areas and ask yourself, “Do I have any projects about this?” If the answer is no, you have two options: work out what projects you need to fulfill the area of focus, or ask yourself if it really matters to you. The Areas of Focus list is a great tool for identifying blind spots in your project list. Review your focus areas whenever you feel like your actions are out of alignment with your values.

(Photo credit: jordan.meeter)