I Hate The Cult Of Productivity

Dec 22

Takeaway Points:

Productivity Culture focuses more on what influencers can sell you than if doing more work is actually good for you. People hesitate to stop and ask why they need to be “doing more.”
Often, there is a finite amount of work to do and it’s not actually possible to be “more productive,” meaning that trying to always be productive isn’t necessary.
Long term success when it comes to accomplishing goals and mastering skills is more about having the right skill sets, building sustainable practices, and finding work that is meaningful to you, regardless of how productive you are.

I hate the cult of productivity.

I’m someone who’s had a job since they were 12 years old. I got a job at a local golf course, as a caddy, in order to make some pocket money. That first summer was awful - I was too short, too small to carry most of the golf bags, hazed by many of the older caddies.

As a result, I only made a few hundred dollars all summer despite regularly showing up to hope for work, and I spent it all on an iPod (one of those old chunky ones, you know?). I ended up staying with that job for 10 years, to the point where I was essentially the longest lasting caddy at the club. I could consistently make a lot of money during the summer season, which resulted in me being able to buy pretty much anything I wanted in high school. I bought video games when I wanted, always had a tank of gas in the car I borrowed from my parents, and went out to the movies a lot with friends on the weekends. I graduated with $5000 in the bank because I simply didn’t have anything else to spend it on.

I’ve always been a hard worker as a result. My parents taught me the value of money from a young age - I could only earn a small allowance by helping out with chores around the house, and I made an extra $10 weekly by mowing a neighbor’s lawn. I saved up money for months to buy myself a Nintendo 64 (again, back when that was a big deal).

After college, I became a personal trainer, I developed a successful business, and to this day am often involved in balancing multiple jobs and developing multiple side projects at any given time. I’m always someone who’s worked a lot - and I do it not just because I can, but because I genuinely enjoy doing so. I’ve been lucky to find work that’s meaningful and valuable to me, and I enjoy doing most of it - certainly every job will have its ups and downs, and phases where you don’t like what you’re doing, but overall those downs have never held me back from truly enjoying my work.

I share all this because I want to emphasize and point out how ABSOLUTELY BONKERS productivity culture is.

Productivity Culture

Productivity culture is a kind of offshoot of self-help/self-improvement culture, which I discovered in the usual process of falling down the fitness/self-improvement rabbit hole that makes up my usual Youtube algorithm fare.

The premise is pretty simple - it’s supposed to be about tips, tricks, and methods for enhancing your productivity, making you a better worker, and so on. Most of this stuff is the pretty standard stuff a lot of people who have been into self-improvement have heard of - Flow, Deep Work, and other self-improvement books that are tangentially related to productivity, as well as work management methods (checklists, apps), memory improvement techniques (flashcard making and review, etc.), and occasionally the good old “life hacks” and other time-savers.

Most of this stuff is pitched in a really overblown way (“how I remember every single thing I read”, “how I work 10x as fast”, “how I work 80hr weeks”, etc.) that’s often pretty self-evidently exaggerated. You’ll see productivity gurus talk in one video about how they work constantly and never take days off, and then several videos later they’ll talk about how they have a video game problem and regularly have to force themselves to get back to work.

There’s another insidious angle to all of it, which is that these videos often tend to lead towards product promotion - fancy desktop gadgets, digital productivity courses, books to read, and so on - all of which, of course, they have affiliate links for. These videos don’t really let on that they’re little more than glorified product advertising, pitching each and every useless little doohickey as the key to unlocking the power of your productivity - a claim which becomes pretty weak when you stop and ask why the last 99 doohickeys they lavished praise on don’t seem to have worked.

Do We Need Productivity Anyway?

I’d like to ask an even deeper question - what is productivity after all? Is it important?

When we talk about productivity, we have a vague sense that working harder and being more productive is a good thing for some reason, but I’m not really clear on why that even should be a good thing.

To be fair, there are plenty of people out there who are just generally interested in these methods. I certainly found a lot of value in reading books like Flow and Deep Work the first time around - however, once I’d read them, I got basically all the value I was going to get out of them. There’s rapid diminishing returns to spending a lot of time being into “productivity” as a concept because I think it’s a pretty shallow field, in a general sense. There’s a few standards that need to be followed, and after that I don’t see much benefit to a lot of the pointless stuff that’s out there.

I think a lot of people read into the concept of “productivity” with whatever they think they’re missing, when it comes to their own career success. If you’re struggling to study for a test, you could think that you’re not productive because you find the material boring and exhausting, or because you’re more tempted by other stimuli in your environment. If you’re struggling to put out good work in your workplace, it may be because you lack the skills needed, or the guidance, or any of a number of other potential variables. But rarely is the problem that people just “don’t know how to work hard enough” which is what the cult of productivity tends to imply.

Past a certain point, being more “productive” doesn’t mean anything in most jobs. Many jobs are not constantly “all on” in nature - they revolve around natural cycles of “work to do” and “not work to do”. If you’re paid as a freelancer, by the hour, then this can suck because you’re only paid for the actual time spent on task. If you’re paid as an employee, however, you’re not SUPPOSED to be paid for only the time spent on task - you’re partly being paid for just sitting around and being READY to perform a task.

For example, I once worked as a caddy - I was only paid for the time that I was carrying a bag around the golf course, but in order to get that bag in the first place, I had to show up at 6:30am on a weekend and wait around anywhere from 0-5 hours for the chance of getting that bag. Could I be more “productive” during that waiting time? Not really. You were expected to do nothing - and so they kept vending machines, arcade games, and seats around in the caddy shack so that the caddies could relax until they were needed.

Another time I worked as a delivery and install worker for a fitness equipment manufacturer. Each morning, you showed up at the warehouse and got the list of orders that you were fulfilling for the day - then you and your partner gathered all the inventory needed, loaded it into your truck, and went around delivering it. During that job, large segments of the work involved periods where orders were slow, and so there was less work to do, or segments where your partner was driving and you were sitting in the truck, meaning that you didn’t have anything to do but talk. Sure, you had to work hard when you actually arrived at a house and had to haul the equipment up and down stairs and set it up, but that made up a relatively small part of the job, especially when you were delivering longer distances.

In fitness coaching, I work hard on Sundays taking client calls and on Mondays preparing new client programs - and most of the rest of the week, I have less work to do aside from minor admin tasks and writing blog posts like this one.

In game design (and by extension any kind of software design, really), often you have a task at hand - you complete the task, but your boss doesn’t want to schedule a phone call for a few hours or a day or two to really clarify what to do next, so in the meantime you’re effectively getting paid to sit around. Sometimes, you’ll be waiting on an engineer to finish up a feature before you can start working on testing it or providing feedback on it, so you’re blocked until someone else is finished with their work.

In short, in most jobs, there’s not an infinite amount of work to do. You have a certain amount of work to do within a certain time span, but being more productive doesn’t actually mean any tangible benefit to you, and possibly not even a tangible benefit to the company either. You can’t just “do more work” when there’s not actually anything else to do.

This is all on top of the fact that historically, we’re currently the hardest worked and least paid, statistically, that we’ve ever been.

Is Productivity A Bad Thing?

Productivity can probably even be a bad thing. Being extra productive, in many cases, doesn’t provide any tangible benefit for you.

Sometimes, it could possibly benefit the company you work for - but that’s kind of a weird thing to take pride in, unless you’re gunning for a promotion (in which case, promotions are generally going to be a lot more about internal office politics anyways), or you work in a career where you’re paid by commissions or profit sharing (which isn’t hella common anyway). Productivity can be a valuable thing if you’re doing something like starting your own business, where you’ll often need to put in a lot of hard ground work in order to get it moving.

I’ve certainly worked, quite a lot, over the past decade, in terms of developing my own business. Sometimes, I’ve overworked myself. Many times I’ve been very productive, and many other times I’ve been terribly unproductive. In general, I find that these phases tend to go hand in hand - I would often push myself super hard, try to do everything myself, burn myself out a little, and then make up for it by being tremendously unproductive for a few weeks and sinking myself deeply into some new video game or hobby, only to have that cycle repeat.

I’ve written in the past about how I don’t think hard work is actually important, and in reality, it’s more about intelligent, consistent, sustainable work that produces the best results. It’s a lot more about NOT being hyper productive - holding yourself back, giving yourself the rest and recovery that you need, and avoiding burnout - that leads to success in the long term. Hard work may provide extra results in the short term, but this is rarely a meaningful benefit.

The Anti-Productivity Culture

The even funnier counterpart to productivity culture is an equally prevalent and similar, and yet completely counter kind of culture - the anti-productivity culture.

People in this niche tend to be wealthy individuals who talk about how, yes, they did need to put in a bit of old fashioned hard work in the beginning in order to get their businesses off the ground, but then focused on things like automation and delegation; using the power of the computer to automate as much of the business as possible, hiring people to take over the rest, and then reaping huge profits while retiring early to run around and do whatever they want - making tons of money, naturally, without needing to work at all.

Hilariously, I suspect that these two strains of social media culture probably have a lot of crossover in terms of the people who subscribe to their ideas. Both are sub strains of the self-help/self-improvement culture, and both are about self-actualizing into being the better person that you want to be. Both sell you a kind of vision of the future in which your work enables you to transcend the normal humdrum of work, either by turning into a perfect work machine or a perfect millionaire slacker, and escape the normal crushing grind of the typical 9 to 5. I wonder if some people follow both and fail to recognize the cognitive dissonance.

Tying It All Together

I hate the cult of productivity. What most people need isn’t the ability to magically be more productive - as I’ve written about before, I don’t even really think laziness is that real. Instead, I think it’s a lot more likely that people just have crappy work, crappy bosses, and so on. People enjoy meaningful, well-structured, well-paid work, and will push back if they find their work demeaning, insulting, confusing, unnecessarily taxing, or poorly-compensated.

Cult of productivity types can have a message that resonates with a certain subset of the population - people who feel that they need to be better at certain tasks or goals - but the reality is that the very generic productivity info that this cult centers around, is less likely to actually help them achieve those goals than it is to help empty their pockets to line those of the influencer. Certainly, there are ways that many of us CAN be more productive, but I don’t think there’s any necessarily meaningful reason that we SHOULD be.

Long-term success in life is rarely about productivity or hard work. It’s about having the right skill sets, the right ideas, being in the right places at the right times, and being able to get along culturally with the right kinds of people.

When it comes to the mastery of closed skill sets (language acquisition, learning a new instrument, learning to draw, etc.), then productivity can be a meaningful goal - there are certainly ways that you can improve and iterate on your practice in order to get the most out of it. However, this is rarely what people talk about when they talk about “productivity” in a general sense, and that’s a huge part of the problem.

As always, I’m critical of a lot of influencers and movements on the internet, many of which seem not to measure up to the hype. I’ve watched a lot of productivity videos on Youtube out of morbid curiosity, and am generally 0% more productive than when I started. In fact, I’m generally less productive - this year, I took the path of the anti-productivity guru, and focused on working less - and generally, made more money in the process.

In short, I hate productivity culture.

About Adam Fisher

Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging and coaching since 2012, and lifting since 2006. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.

During that time he has coached hundreds of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around bodybuilding and powerlifting, in which he’s competed.

Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cats or feeding his video game addiction.

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