#9: Cancel your productivity anxiety
We get into a vicious circle when we’re anxious about our productivity. We get anxious about falling behind, our anxiety interferes with our work, and then we worry about falling even further behind. We tell ourselves we’d feel better if only we could work a bit faster - but instead we end up watching cat videos on YouTube. It doesn’t have to be like this. Your wise, imperfect friend is here to tell you how to break the cycle.
The blog posts mentioned in the episode, which summarise some of the research on the role of daydreaming in writing, are:
Kaufman, S. B. and Singer, J. L. 2011: ‘The origins of positive-constructive daydreaming’, Scientific American, 22nd December.
Kaufman, S. B. and Singer, J. L. 2012: ‘The creativity of dual process “system 1” thinking’, Scientific American, 17th January.
Here’s my Twitter thread describing the first steps I took towards cracking my own productivity anxiety.
Episode transcript:
Do you feel bad about yourself when you're not productive enough? If you do, you're sabotaging your productivity and, more importantly, you're making yourself miserable. It's lose-lose. Here's how to stop.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hello, imperfectionists. Do you ever feel as if you have to run just to stay in one place, that you're always in danger of falling behind, that if you pause to catch your breath, just for a moment, you'll only make things worse for yourself because you'll just have to go faster when you dive back in? This is a really common problem with academics when it comes to our research productivity. I see all the time with my clients, and I've felt it myself. We end up in a vicious circle of what I'm going to call productivity anxiety. We start off by having this feeling of falling behind, and that makes us feel anxious; our anxiety leads to us being less able to focus on our work, and that leads us to feel that we're in danger of falling even further behind. And so the cycle begins again. More generally, it means that every aspect of your work just becomes steeped in anxiety, stress, frustration, self-loathing, and a feeling of inadequacy. To avoid all that negativity, we avoid work, we procrastinate, we find excuses not to jump into it. And that, of course, just makes it worse.
So how do we break out of the vicious circle of productivity anxiety? Well, first of all, a couple of reality checks for you. First, you're never going to catch up, there's always going to be more you could be doing. Even if you tick off everything on your to do list today, you'll still be struggling to get through it all tomorrow. Academia just isn't an industry that lets us switch off. Burnout, stress, anxiety, and other mental health struggles are rife. You know this, you've seen the articles about it. There's a culture of overwork. We even joke about it when we email our colleagues at nine o'clock in the evening. And there's a culture of excellence in academia, striving for excellence in every aspect of our jobs. That just feeds the perfectionism that we already feel. We live in a culture where aiming for 'good enough' is not good enough.
The second reality check is: you're not going inhumanly slowly, and you're not lazy, incompetent, a bad person, or whatever else you like to tell yourself, despite the fact that it might seem that way. A big problem here is we get so caught up in beating ourselves up about not going fast enough that we overlook the real problem. And the real problem is the anxiety and the vicious circle it creates. You can't just push through that and force yourself to do more and more work, at least not long term. That's not a solution, you'll just destroy yourself. What you need to do is break the cycle. And to do that, you need to take your foot off the accelerator, even while every part of you is screaming that you can't afford to do that. You need to re-establish a connection with why you're doing what you're doing in the first place. And I know it feels scary. But if you want to speed up, you need to slow down first, as my own coach, Rumbi, once said to me.
Now, we'll come to how to speed up in order to slow down in just a moment. But first, let's address this idea that our self-worth gets bound up with our productivity. Obviously, there are reasons why you might need to be more productive. Academic jobs are thin on the ground, at least good and secure ones. So, especially if you're not employed in a permanent or tenured job, you'll feel a pressure to publish as much as possible, and you'll always have your eye on those people who are doing a little bit more than you or going a little bit faster. But just stop for a moment. Let's ask, when did 'I need to publish more to be competitive in the jobs market' become 'I need to publish more in order to like myself'?
What I think we need to do is separate the following two beliefs that become kind of really intimately connected. The first belief is 'I need to keep producing in order to be competitive in the jobs market', which might be true. And the second belief is 'I need to keep producing in order to respect myself'. That second belief is nonsense. Despite what you tell yourself on a daily basis, you probably don't actually care as much as you think you do about productivity. I mean, just think about it for a moment. When did you start to care this much about productivity? Think back to why you got into your discipline in the first place. What attracted you to it? What did you like about it? What drew you to the life of a researcher? I bet the answers here don't include, I wanted to publish as much as possible as quickly as possible. More likely, and what I hear from my clients when I talk about this with them, is what attracted them to their discipline in the first place is a genuine interest in it. And values like creativity, curiosity, discovery, and communicating new and interesting ideas. And all these values are about the process of engaging in research. They're not about the end result. They're not about how many papers you end up publishing and where you end up publishing them. So if it's the case that, now, you care a great deal about productivity, then somewhere along the way, your values have shifted. And it's time to ask yourself whether that shift represents what you really care about. Because valuing yourself in terms of your productivity is really quite bizarre.
To make this clear, just think for a moment of your favourite novelists, poets, artists, musicians, and so on. Do you judge their worth by how much they produce? Does it even occur to you that Emily Bronte, J. D. Salinger, and Harper Lee all published only one novel, or that while Renoir, Turner, and Picasso produced thousands of paintings, da Vinci, Vermeer, and Bosch produced less than a hundred. I bet you don't hold this relatively low output against them. You've probably never even thought about it before I mentioned it just now. The fact is, you know that how much these people produced is completely unrelated to how good they are at what they did. Productivity as an index of worth, is something peculiar to academics. It just doesn't make sense outside of academia. And it only makes sense to you because, over a period of years, you've internalised this pressure to produce without really questioning it, and your values have grown around it, without you really noticing. The often quoted 'publish or perish' maxim, which is probably enough to raise the heart rate of any of us, has somewhere along the way become equivalent to 'publish or hate yourself'.
Now, to break the productivity anxiety cycle, you need to reconnect with why you're doing what you're doing. You need to slow down if you're ever going to speed up, and that means taking the pressure off. The chances are that you probably have an unrealistic conception of what working hard looks like, and that a lot of the things that you're telling yourself you shouldn't be doing are actually necessary parts of the writing process. Writing doesn't always mean, well, writing. The process of writing involves not only getting words down on the screen, or on a piece of paper, but also things like thinking, chatting, walking, daydreaming, staring into space, and doing something else that's completely unrelated to your research.
Probably this is big news to some of you. I know that for many years, there was a part of me that believed that if a colleague told me they just spent the day writing, that meant they got up in the morning started writing, and literally hadn't stopped until it was time for bed. Now, I only need to think about that for a moment to realise that that's just not true, that nobody can write like that. And not only does nobody actually write like that, you know, non stop words on the page from the beginning of the day to the end, but it's not the best way to write anyway. There's empirical evidence that focusing away from a cognitively demanding task, just as you do when you're daydreaming or going for a walk, helps us complete that task better and more creatively. There's a couple of blog posts in the Scientific American summarising the research in this area. I'll include links to those in the show notes for this episode.
For many years, I have had huge anxieties around writing. And much of these I think arose from the fact that I have ADHD, but I wasn't diagnosed until a couple of years ago. And so what started out as difficulty concentrating snowballed into something much bigger as I beat myself up about my inability to concentrate, called myself lazy, avoided work, and just generally made the problem worse. I've improved a huge amount since last summer when I started working with my coach on this problem, and I tweeted about the initial stages of the process and what she had me do. I'll link to that thread in the show notes for the episode too. But, in general, what that process involved was shifting the focus away from the output, from targets that are framed in terms of how many words I got down or how many articles or chapters I got written.
What exactly slowing down means for you is going to depend largely on the particular anxieties you have and on the sort of work that you're doing. But as a first step, I want to offer a fairly simple way to reset your expectations of yourself. At the start of a typical working day, what do you tell yourself that you need to achieve that day? Now, when I ask my clients this question, they come up with targets that anyone except them can see are just preposterously ambitious. They tell themselves things like, I need to spend 10 hours writing and reading and note-making with only brief breaks to eat, drink and go to the loo. Or I need to spend the entire day writing in a flow state, or I need to achieve as much as I've achieved on my most successful day ever, or even a little bit more. I know I can do it, because I've done it in the past. I'm guilty of this last one myself. When I was doing my Masters in the 1990s, there was a four-week period during the Christmas break between 1996 and 1997, where I had four essays to write, each of which had to be 3000 to 4000 words long, and I actually managed to write an essay a week and get top marks for all of them. I have never been that productive before or since. But even pretty recently, you know, 25 years down the line, I was telling myself that I could recapture what I had in those four weeks and reproduce it to get my book finished or to get whatever else it was finished. I kept focusing on that golden month of productivity, even though I tried dozens of times to recapture it, and had failed dismally.
The lesson from this is, if you have an anxiety about productivity, the chances are that the targets you're setting yourself at the start of a typical working day are ridiculously, unattainably, high. And you're really not helping yourself by trying to stick to those targets when you consistently fail to hit them. But anyway, take a few minutes to write down what they are: what are the sorts of things you tell yourself at the beginning of the day, what do you tell yourself you need to achieve?
Once you've written that down, have a think about a different question. On a typical working day, what is the absolute minimum that you have to achieve in order not to feel bad about yourself? To get a sense of this, think back to those days when you fail to hit your own ridiculously high targets, but you've ended the day with a thought along the lines of: 'oh well, at least I did x'. Now what is x in those circumstances? It might be something like, at least I spent 30 minutes writing, or at least I read through my notes, or at least I opened the document so that I can start writing it tomorrow, or at least I answered a couple of emails that I had to answer.
For those of us who suffer from productivity anxiety, the start of the day target is very different to the bare minimum target. If you think about this for a moment, this is kind of bizarre. Our bare minimum targets show us how easy it is to feel satisfied with ourselves, you know, you have to do almost nothing, certainly less than an hour's work in order to end the day thinking 'oh, well, at least I did x'.
Why is it that despite it being fairly easy to feel satisfied with ourselves, or at least not horrendously dissatisfied, we continue to sabotage ourselves with unrealistic targets that just make us feel bad when we don't hit them? Perhaps you wouldn't want to settle for the bare minimum target every day, because in the long term, you just wouldn't get enough done. But that doesn't mean that your only alternative is your usual unrealistic start of the day target. There's a middle ground here.
Here's a suggestion. Work out your bare minimum daily target: your 'oh well, at least I did x' amount of work. That's your new target for every day this week. Write it down. This is how it's going to be. You work until you've hit that target. And once you've hit that, you're done for the day. Now you're allowed to do more if you want to. But you're not allowed to feel bad about yourself if you don't do more, and you're not allowed to change the target. Do that for a week. The next week, you can make a modest increase. And what counts as modest here is going to vary depending on the example but it probably means stopping short of doubling the bare minimum target. So for example, if the bare minimum target is 'write for 30 minutes', a modest increase would be something like 'write for 35 minutes', but not 'write for an hour'.
While you're doing this, while you're working towards your bare minimum target, keep a notepad next to you and journal how you feel. Every time you have a negative thought about yourself, write it down. Every time you feel bad, write down how you're feeling. This is an incredibly useful exercise. You probably don't realise just how negatively you're talking to yourself when you try to work. When you've finished your work for the day, write down three positives about how it's all gone. That could be anything from 'wow, I worked for half an hour longer than I thought I would' or it could just be something like 'yay, I've stuck with this exercise for another day'. One thing you might like to include there are any positive feelings that you have about the work itself. I know that your work makes you feel anxious, but while you were doing it, what did you read that interested you? Did you have any interesting insights, no matter how small? What were they? Write them down, because you will forget if you don't.
The idea here is to focus away from the end product and away from the anxiety, and to highlight what you have done rather than what you haven't. The aim here is not to be more productive, it's to feel better about yourself. It's to reconnect with what you enjoy about what you do. It's about separating how you feel about yourself from how much you produce, because it's just research. It's just a job, no matter how intricately it's bound up with your sense of self-worth at the moment.
If you work on all this, you'll probably find that increased productivity will follow. But it can't be the target, because making it the target just injects it with even more anxiety, and that's just what you don't need. It's a little bit like the hedonistic paradox. You know, the idea that deliberately setting out to achieve happiness is self-defeating, and that we achieve happiness (if we do) as a by-product of doing other things. It's the same with productivity. If your primary aim is to produce more, you'll just make yourself anxious and you'll produce less. That's the vicious circle of productivity anxiety.
You can break this circle. I've done it myself. And if I can do it, after years of swimming against the tide of undiagnosed ADHD and the anxiety that follows from that, so can you. You are not what you produce. Thanks for listening.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use, and please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful - you can take a screenshot on your phone and send it over to them. For more information and updates about me, the podcast, and my coaching, or just to get in touch and say hi, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com - or follow me on Twitter @AcademicImp or on Facebook @AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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