#61: Your productivity standards are like a 1980s fad diet
You know better than to vow, after chomping your way through your fifth slice of chocolate cake, that starting tomorrow you're only ever going to eat salad and you're going to run 10 miles before breakfast every single day, forever. After all, nobody could keep that up, right? Be realistic! But plenty of you are setting your sights on productivity goals that are just as unrealistic. Come for a chat with your imperfectionist friend and have some sense lovingly knocked into you.
Episode transcript:
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.
How are you doing, friends? I’m ok-ish, but unfortunately I have a case of glue ear, which occasionally I get when I’m run down - for which I blame the mountain of marking I am currently trying to scale. So, I have that buzzing in my head that in my younger days I used to get after leaving a nightclub or a gig. Everything sounds far away. The last time I had this was a couple of years ago and - here’s another overshare for you - I got whipped into such a frenzy of middle class hypochondria by well-meaning friends online that I worried that my hearing loss was due to a condition that runs in my family and which almost caused my dad to lose his sight. That condition - which I’m going to avoid naming because I don’t want anyone to read anything medically authoritative into what I say here about it - requires urgent treatment with a big dose of steroids. I had my hands too full with kids and work to make a trip to A&E, but I did have some steroid pills lying around that the vet had prescribed for one of my cats. I necked the whole lot while waiting for a GP appointment. When I got to see the GP, I told him what I’d done, and I think he very generously refrained from laughing his head off and calling me a first-class muppet in the course of telling me that I was basically fine - although he was wearing a mask and I couldn’t hear properly, so who knows. Maybe you’ll find it helpful to remember that the next time you’re embarrassed about having done something silly or need to have a difficult conversation with someone. At least you don’t have to say to a doctor, ‘I couldn’t hear properly so after telling some people on Twitter about it I swallowed a month’s worth of my cat’s steroids’.
Right. I promise I’m not currently under the influence of cat steroids, dewormer, flea treatment, or catnip. So, assuming you’re still listening and still willing to take advice from me after what I’ve just told you, let’s get on with today’s episode. It follows on quite nicely from the last episode, in which I tried to persuade you that self acceptance is a positive thing and isn’t going to hold you back - on the contrary, in fact. I’m going to stick vaguely with that theme in this episode - although it’s not a sequel or anything like that, so don’t worry if you haven’t heard the previous one yet. First though, I want to flag that I’m going to be talking in this episode about weight loss and having an unhelpful relationship with eating. I’m going to do that in order to draw analogies with how we approach areas of our lives that don’t involve focus around food. I know that those who have at any time struggled with eating disorders might find these topics uncomfortable or upsetting, so if that’s you, perhaps this isn’t the episode for you.
A few days ago I listened to Dr Rangan Chatterjee’s interview on his Feel Better Live More podcast with Jessie Inchauspé. She’s Glucose Goddess on instagram. She’s a biochemist who has amassed a large following on social media due to the information she shares about the effects of various foods on blood glucose, and her evidence-based ‘hacks’ - her term - to help people continue to enjoy yummy carbs while avoiding the sorts of wild fluctuations in blood glucose levels that leave us lacking in energy, craving unhealthy treats, and which are bad for our mental and physical health. Towards the end of the interview, she talks about why she thinks her work has been so well-received. She says, quote, ‘It feels fresh and nice and it’s no longer an extreme diet, it’s not like “cut out entire food groups”, it’s like, ok guys, I think we’re over diets … so what about we use all this recent science and we find these principles that are easy, that have a big impact on our physical and mental health, that are not very hard, don’t cost any money, how about we do that? And people seem to be happy with that approach.’
When I hear this, I thought, this sounds right. Everyone knows restrictive diets don’t work. They don’t meet people where they are. There’s the ideal-world advice - never eat chocolate, don’t drink alcohol, only eat fresh organic ingredients, no ultraprocessed foods - which is maybe great in theory, but probably impossible to stick to long-term without developing an obsessive fixation on food that is just as problematic, albeit in a different way, as washing your fifth slice of chocolate cake down with your eighth glass of wine, night after night. And so what Jessie Inchauspé is doing is saying that you can carry on enjoying your treats, but you add a few easy behaviours which reduce the negative health effects of your treats, and don’t stress about it if you’re out for dinner and you can’t follow her advice. The sorts of helpful behaviours that she talks about include things like eating your veggies before the rest of your meal, drinking a glass of water containing a spoonful of vinegar before eating, and adding yogurt to your chocolate cake.
Ok, why am I talking about eating and diets? Well, this approach takes acceptance (in this case, acceptance of non-ideal eating habits) as its starting point, recognises that any attempt to improve health by doing things that are restrictive, exhausting, or expensive are doomed to failure, and instead looking for creative, low-effort, low-cost ways to thrive without relying on large-scale change. This approach makes sense when we’re talking about eating habits, but where else in our lives might it be applicable? I think it’s widely applicable, especially to the sorts of things I know you struggle with every day - writing, trying to balance work and family, impostor syndrome, the inner critic, and all the rest of it. Much of the time, high-achieving people who demand a lot of themselves - that’s you - approach their lives in the way that people in the 1980s would approach the latest stupid restrictive weight loss plan. And you take this approach even though you’d probably laugh at the idea of trying to stick to a stupid restrictive weight loss plan, because of course it’s not going to work, and of course the only thing you ultimately lose when you try it is your peace of mind.
Let me tell you about how this has played out in my own case, which I know from hearing similar stories time and time again is pretty representative of a lot of people who listen to this podcast. I am an absolutely huge faffer. Not just when it comes to getting any writing done, but especially when it comes to writing. I’ll tidy my desk, play sudoku on my phone, Google search how washing machine technology has developed over the past few decades (seriously, I did actually do that last week), and a hundred other things before I get down to what I’m supposed to be doing. Until a few years ago, there was just no way I was going to accept this aspect of myself. I would confidently label myself lazy and weak and useless. And, I would regularly make promises to myself that I was going to do better. Tomorrow I would get up when the alarm went off and get straight to work, no faffing, no procrastinating, I’d be absorbed in what I wanted to get done until it was finished, and then the next day I’d do exactly the same thing again, and again, and again, forever. It didn’t matter how unrealistic it was. Whether it was realistic or achievable for me in particular wasn’t even on my radar. And when tomorrow came and I failed to transform into this focused go-getting alien, I wouldn’t ask why or try to understand what was going on. I’d just say mean things to myself and then make the same promise again: tomorrow was going to be the day. I’d mean it this time. Nothing whatsoever had changed, no lessons had been learned, but never mind that - tomorrow I’d be a different person.
It might sound like I’m exaggerating here, but I’m really not. And I’m not the only one either. Beating ourselves up about how lazy and useless we are, and constantly comparing ourselves to those annoying superstars for whom overachievement seems to be effortless, are great distractions from thinking sensibly about how to get to where we want to be from where we currently are. In fact, if you’re like this, you’re not thinking about where you currently are at all. You’re in denial. Despite the fact that it’s staring you in the face, you can’t recognise that it’s just how it is that you take a while to get going in the mornings or that opening your writing project makes you feel anxious or that you’re ambivalent about the goal that you’re supposedly working towards, because you refuse to accept these things about yourself. What’s the point? You’re going to be different tomorrow anyway.
Thinking about ourselves and our productivity and progress in this way is a lot like thinking about food and diet in a disordered way. Coming to the end of an unproductive day and promising that we’ll do better tomorrow while saying all sorts of horrible things to ourselves is rather like finishing off a huge chocolate cake and promising, while full of self-hatred, that we won’t eat anything at all tomorrow. There’s something seductive about doing this, isn’t there? Tomorrow hasn’t happened yet, after all. We haven’t fucked it up yet, the way we’ve just fucked up today. Tomorrow is full of promise. Even the world’s most productive people haven’t done tomorrow yet. We’re all starting with a clean slate, and all the rest of it.
And yet … that’s not how it works, is it? Even if you do absolutely ace tomorrow, and maybe even the next day, the chances of you still going strong a month from now are vanishingly small. At least they are if you’re going in to tomorrow without a plan for how to effect and sustain the changes you want to make, and armed with nothing more than your desperate promises. We know this is how it works with diets, right? Nobody cries over eating too much cake one day and goes full-on flawless healthy eating the next. Not without something major happening. Because it’s about more than just food. The same goes for your productivity: if you finish the day feeling bad about yourself because of how little progress you’ve made, your problem is about more than just how many words you’ve written or how many items you’ve ticked off your task list. It’s about emotions, anxiety, uncertainty, self-doubt, and all the rest of it. You don’t engage with any of that when you’re single-mindedly doing the ‘tomorrow is another day!’ thing.
So, this is why Jessie Inchauspé thinks people view her approach as ‘fresh and nice’. She’s not trying to get people to stop eating the stuff they like, she’s saying ‘great, carry on, but just do these other things too’. There’s not any hint of ‘you’re unacceptable as you currently are and you need drastic change’.
What would it look like if we took something like this approach to our productivity? If, instead of saying things like ‘I need to cut out procrastinating and get more done every day’, we just accepted that we spend a lot of time faffing and that we’re probably never going to be as productive as we are in that elusive ‘tomorrow’ that never comes. What ‘hacks’ might be useful here? I’m going to suggest a few just to get you started.
Here’s one. If you’re someone who ends the day saying things like, ‘What a complete waste of time today was, I’m a terrible person, I’m going to be an absolute workhorse tomorrow, I’m going to have written 3000 words before my morning coffee is cool enough to drink’, just stop. When you do that, you swing from one extreme (depressing underproductivity) to another (superhuman success). And that misses out on all the good stuff in between. What you’re really wanting is just to be able to make steady progress, right? And to feel ok about how the day has gone when you’re getting ready to go to sleep. So, how about ending the day with the following question: ‘What is the absolute minimum I need to do tomorrow in order to end the day feeling like I haven’t completely wasted my time?’ That’s not going to be writing 3000 words first thing - instead, perhaps it’s going to be just opening the Word document you’ve been working on and reading through the last couple of paragraphs you wrote. Perhaps it’s answering that one email that you’ve been ignoring. Perhaps it’s just looking up a reference. And if you’re thinking, ‘But that’s only going to take 5 minutes!’ - that’s the idea. It should be easy and attainable. Once you’ve done it, you can carry on and do other things if you like - but that’s optional. If you don’t do anything else, you still get to finish the day with your peace of mind intact. I talked about this idea in more depth in episode #9: Cancel your productivity anxiety - feel free to dive into that if you want more on this.
Here’s another suggestion. If you feel like procrastinating, do it. Knock yourself out. Seriously. Guilt free. You have my permission. There’s just one condition. Be curious about what you’re doing. Ask yourself, as you carefully remove the hair that is wound around the workings on the underside of your vacuum cleaner or unnecessarily scrutinise your childhood home on Streetview, ‘What benefit does this activity bring for me?’ Be genuinely curious to find the answer to this question, and to understand your current behaviour as part of who you are. You might find it helpful to journal about this, if that’s not too burdensome when you’re trying diligently to faff. Perhaps the answer is that you’re feeling anxious, and so what you’re doing is a form of self-soothing. Perhaps you just don’t know where to start with the task you’re meant to be doing. Perhaps, given the high expectations you’ve been placing on yourself, you already know you’re going to fail, and so you might as well fail doing something vaguely fun rather than something stressful like work. Why am I suggesting you do this? Well, two main reasons. One, it’s a distraction from the nasty things you usually say to yourself while you’re procrastinating. And two, it gives you some insight into your behaviour, which you can use to help give yourself what you need. So, for example, if you’re procrastinating because you’re feeling anxious, it’s worth thinking more about that and whether there are things you could be doing to manage your anxiety more effectively. Or, if you’re procrastinating because you don’t know where to start with the task you’re meant to be doing, then maybe working out where to start on the task, rather than the task itself, is what you should be doing next.
And here’s another suggestion. Celebrate your successes, big or small. And let’s note that, for our purposes here, maybe it’s not appropriate to judge the ‘size’ of a success by its importance in the grand scheme of things. I mean, sometimes you need to do that, but we’re talking here about how to make progress a little more pleasant for yourself. Here’s an idea. When you’re rewarding yourself for a success, judge the size of the success by how tempted you are or were to avoid doing the task that led to the success. Perhaps you have been dreading sending a particular email, and then you send it and it only takes you 30 seconds. It can be tempting, in those circumstances to dismiss what you’ve just done, even if it took a lot of anguish and bravery to do it. I mean, it took 30 seconds - what was the fuss about?! Stop being a drama queen! But that attitude is dismissive of the stress that you felt, and it’s a mistake to dismiss that stress - it’s been stopping you get stuff done, after all. And, of course, you know you wouldn’t respond dismissively to another person who worked themselves up to doing something they were afraid to do. If you’re stressed, take it seriously. Recognise it and accept it. And then when you overcome it and do the scary thing, reward yourself, no matter how much or little time it took. Reward yourself how? A cup of tea. A nap. A walk. Listening to a podcast. Reading a novel. Whatever.
I think that a common theme underlying all these suggestions is: there’s value in recognising and accepting yourself, and in trying to understand yourself. Much more value than dismissing your efforts and yelling at yourself to do better. We probably can’t hope permanently to stop yelling at ourselves, as I talked about in episode #24: Your inner critic is not a video game boss. But perhaps you can turn her volume down for five minutes at a time while you reflect. If you want to flourish, meet yourself where you are, in all your procrastinating, snooze-button-hitting, anxious glory. Why not take 5 minutes, after this episode, to brainstorm a few more strategies you can use to this end, in addition to the few I’ve suggested here? I’d love to know what you come up with - tag me on Twitter and let me know. Until next time!
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. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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