On Productivity

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for me, is the sleepiest place in the world. This is not even remotely close to a fair description of a bustling and growing East African city, but I don’t claim to be objective here in the least. Whenever I am there, my days seem to slow down by orders of magnitude. It consistently messes with my sense of possibility to just… not be tied to my electronic devices all the time, and especially, not to have access to blazing-fast Internet at any hour of the day or night.

By contrast, in my life in America, every waking moment feels full of latent possibility. No matter what I choose to be working on in that moment, I feel the low-lying pull to work on something else, at least in part because I can. I don’t mean to romanticize the hard realities of a developing nation, but I do pay attention to what it does to my sense of possibility in a day to have to curtail my work because of a random power outage, or Internet outage, or simply attending to a family obligation when I am in a more communal atmosphere. It’s near impossible for me to get much writing done when my little cousins poke their head in every 7 minutes asking me to play with them, or have been sent by older adults to check on me. My uncle in particular doesn’t seem to believe in introversion; on my last trip to Ethiopia, he observed (probably rightly) that I spend too much time alone. #introvertlyfe

For all the frustrations it can bring, my life abroad, particularly in Africa, is where I have done some of my best writing. I took a horrible vacation to Morocco once (the horrendous parts of the trip were my fault alone, on the whole, Morocco was a lovely country), and over the course of an 8 hour train ride to Fez, I wrote some of the best poetry I think I’ve ever produced. Being away from Internet, for me, dramatically reshapes my sense of possibility. My days feel smaller in scope, but also narrower. And that narrower scope limits what I feel I need to accomplish, and it therefore becomes easier to pull forth the writing that I know I must produce. We know this from the properties of light, but a narrower focus is necessarily sharper, more powerful. Think laser beams.

Yet, I live the majority of my life in the United States. And because I live here, my sense of what a “productive” day means frequently gets distorted. I want to internalize once and for all that there are other ways to measure time well spent besides the ugly and corporate-sounding measures of “productive.” I am a slow writer. I am generally prolific, but I understand my writing process to be similar to the process of refining precious metals. You have to produce a whole lot of dross and go through the fires of hell to produce even a small amount of silver. For me, a “productive” day of writing might be one where I don’t even generate new content. I just finished reading a 900+ page novel (shoutout to Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84) and afterwards, felt inspired to write. That’s what my writing day looked like today.

“Productive,” in our capitalist nation, of course, is tied to labor and money. Most often, I am expected to measure the worth of my days quite literally, by what I have earned over a time interval. The sense I get is that a day that has been “unproductive” is one where I haven’t conducted any revenue-generating activities. Unfortunately, most of the things I love most in life do not make me money, and some of them likely never will. While I need money to live, and I certainly do engage in revenue-generating work in order to support myself, when it comes to my value, I just refuse to measure my life by how much time I’ve spent doing activities that bring me money. I don’t value money like that in my life, and I probably never will. Jesus’ admonition to not gain the world at the expense of my soul rings loud in my ears every time I even consider shifting my values.

I want to silence the voice in my head that tells me I’ve wasted a day if I haven’t been “productive.” I have worked over the past 5 years to unlearn some of what made my college years successful (I had to fight realllly hard not to put air quotes around that word). As a result, I have gotten worlds better at weighing the costs of success and determining how much of that life I truly want anymore. I have developed self-care routines that are inviolate now; getting 8 hours of sleep is no longer negotiable to me, but deadlines… are. I drink coffee only very rarely now, and purely for enjoyment of the flavor, not to fuel late-night work marathons anymore. I’ve gotten much better at pacing myself on tasks, and I accept that it’s not a failure to not get everything done in one day. I refuse to work on weekends and therefore don’t. I try to go at least one consecutive 24 hour period a week without checking my email or spending time on my laptop or phone. Sometimes I do literally nothing at all, which I’ve learned isn’t something to consider a design flaw in my life, but what most people call “rest.” I have gotten more comfortable saying no to invitations (sometimes even obligations) if it means I won’t get the rest I need, and sometimes, I add an extra 20 minutes to my alarm in the mornings. #Kanyeshrug

The point of all of this is that I am internalizing deeply that I an worthy of care, and I value that more than I value my own productivity. I don’t care as much about the results that has for my business, because I currently don’t have any shareholders to disappoint. Right now, it’s just me. And if my profits are lower than they otherwise might be if I engaged in more productivity hacks, then oh well. And maybe I’m overcorrecting for a few years until I get these self-care lessons down pat, but I know myself and I know that I need that. The older I get, the more I realize the power of not just being a lifelong learner, but in some ways, taking as long as it takes to unlearn some of the values that I no longer choose to hold. My life is mine to craft, to create, and as I do so intentionally, I know I still have a lot left to unlearn.