I'm too excited about this book coming out. If you haven't heard, I'm working on a follow up to Anxiety Report called Take Care. The plan is to have it out in February 2025, ideally. Pending all the publishing nonsense. It will come out on Sixth and Center Publishing, and I'm thrilled about how it's turning out so far! For now, here's a quick excerpt from it:
4/15/2024: Today was one of those amazing rare days where everyone decided to cancel. And what I mean is all of my appointments cancelled today. ALL OF THEM. I was rolling in it as each cancellation came rolling in. Oh, you have this meeting? No you don’t. What about this one? Nope. It freed up so much time for me. The combination of this and the end of term week where all my classes are off my schedule, and I feel like a new man.
Honestly, though, this kind of week is eye opening. I know I’m a busy dude. I know that my schedule is jam packed and too rigid. I know that I have to be ok with cancelling/rescheduling things throughout the week because if something gets shifted, it’s over. But I’m also reminded that I struggle with time off. And all of that made me start thinking about productivity culture a little bit.
It’s killing us.
Productivity culture, or this whole idea of “hustle” is truly ridiculous. What is the message? That if you work harder and harder, it pays off? I’m not saying that hard work doesn’t pay off. But that’s actually not the message. SMART work is what should be paying off. If I can work less hard but more efficiently, why wouldn’t I go that route? As long as the quality is there, who cares how much I work? The messaging behind productivity culture is all wrong. It should be about improving processes, better efficiencies, and just making everything work more smoothly.
And some of us are doing it a certain way because we believe that we’re supposed to do it a certain way. When I started writing this book, I opted to type it from the start rather than handwrite it. Why? Well, I had originally decided to handwrite Anxiety Report because I thought it would be easier. And it was hard, because writing a book is HARD. But you know what? It wasn’t efficient. Because what I ended up doing is handwriting the entire book, then going back and typing it anyway. Stupid, honestly. But an exercise in creativity that taught me something important; creativity and productivity aren’t the same thing. But creativity may create more work that’s entirely unnecessary for the same output.
I guess my rambling point here is that productivity culture focuses on the entirely wrong aspects of work and life in general. We shouldn’t be measured by our output but our impact and our quality of life. We MUST live lives well lived. That’s it. That’s our only obligation to ourselves and anyone else.
If I do good for others along the way? What a great fucking side effect.
Observation: I don’t think cancelled plans are THE reinforcer…but they’re pretty close.
Comments