#66: The only productivity hack you need
We all love a bit of productivity porn. What could be wrong with learning about how to get better at getting things done? Well, quite a few things, as it happens. Seeking out the latest productivity tools and techniques can be a way to mask the anxieties you have around your work. To avoid the pitfalls, you need to look inward and think about how you go about getting stuff done. Gather round, friends, and let's dive in.
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.
Hi there, friend. I’m wondering. If you’re a regular listener to this podcast, what is it that keeps you coming back? Or, if you’re here for the first time - welcome, and I’m wondering what it is about the podcast that led you to decide to invest 20 minutes or so listening to this episode? Now, when I say ‘I’m wondering’, I’m not completely at a loss here. I know, because I receive lovely emails from you to say so, that people enjoy this podcast for various reasons. Sometimes it’s solidarity - you know, the reassurance that other people struggle with the same things that you do, which means that you’re not as alone and isolated as you sometimes feel. Sometimes it’s the comfort of having another person - that’s me - identify and dissect the issues and anxieties you face around things like productivity, procrastination, impostor syndrome, and the rest of it. Sometimes it’s the practical suggestions for how to work through your own mental roadblocks. And/or other things too. I’m wondering, though, whether there’s something else that brings you here, too. Something that’s more difficult to talk about - because it’s sort of a shameful secret, but also because it’s difficult to express. Avoidance.
I got thinking about this yesterday, when I spent several hours assembling IKEA furniture. I’m speaking to you from a much nicer, bigger desk - one that has nice matching sets of drawers, and room to swing a cat. Only joking, of course - I don’t swing my cats in my office, although they do sometimes swing themselves. I’m also speaking to you from a much less cluttered office, although admittedly that’s because I moved the clutter to a different room until I decide what to do with it. Anyway. I surprised myself with this DIY escapade. I went to IKEA only a few days ago - and here I am already, having unpacked and assembled everything. This is not like me. The Kallax unit that we keep our shoes in was approaching its 3-year anniversary of sitting in its box on the upstairs landing before I took the plunge and put it together - I did that yesterday, too - I was on a roll. Now, I’m not exactly a ‘why put off till tomorrow what you can do today?’ sort of person, so my little frenzy of home-office assembly is rather out of character. What’s going on? Have I had a personality transplant? Did I fall out of bed and wake up as go-getting, non-procrastinating, super-productive person? I don’t think so. I think the real explanation is much less exciting than that, and much more … well, depressing. You see, I’ve been putting together ideas for my next book, and for the past week or so I’ve been struggling. I just can’t work out, yet, which ideas to put where, and that’s leading me to question the entire project. Maybe it’s not as interesting as I first thought it was, I’ve been thinking. Maybe I have nothing whatsoever to say at all. Maybe the only ideas I have about this topic are boring or obvious or things that other people have already said, probably much more competently than I ever could. You know the sort of thing. Now, I’ve been around the block enough times to know that this is a completely normal part of the creative process and that there’s nothing to worry about at all. But that doesn’t make it any more comfortable. It’s uncomfortable because nothing’s really flowing at the moment. Writing, right now, doesn’t involve actual writing at all. It involves thinking, walking down conceptual dead-ends, trying and failing - yes, failing, remember last week’s episode about how important it is to normalise failure - trying and failing to think of how to proceed. And so, faced with day 6 or day 7 or day whatever-it-was of sitting down to write while knowing that I wasn’t going to get anything written, it turns out not to be completely non-mysterious that assembling a desk and two sets of drawers and - just for good measure - a Kallax unit should have been an attractive prospect. Anything to feel the sense of progress that my writing wasn’t giving me. But here’s the interesting thing. It mattered, I think, that the furniture I was assembling was for my office. It was stuff for me to use when writing. That made it feel like I wasn’t really procrastinating while I was putting it together. If I’d been - I don’t know - putting up the wall-mounted cat furniture that is still sitting in its box downstairs, I’d have had a foreboding sense of ‘I should be writing’. But not with the office furniture. Assembling that, I had a sense that although I wasn’t actually writing, I was investing in my writing. The thought that was going through my head, although I didn’t explicitly articulate it, was ‘Doing this today will make writing easier tomorrow’. The thought that maybe I could solve the problem with my writing project - or at least move the needle a little bit (now, where did that ‘move the needle’ thing come from? Other podcasts, I think. Probably Andrew Huberman) - that thought that a new desk could solve my writing problem was really seductive. Making a desk was a nice, easy thing to do! Or, at least, it was something I could do with the aid of a nice IKEA instruction booklet, which told me what to do and when, and allowed me to see at any point how far along the process I was and when I had finished. Much, much, much nicer than sitting there puzzling about my writing woes, which involved not knowing how much progress I was making or whether I was making any progress at all. Because that’s what working on my writing project involves at the moment. Just sitting there. Trying and failing to have ideas. Worrying that maybe it’s all bollocks anyway. And, despite the fact that sometimes this is all you can do with a writing project, it feels like doing nothing. You know what we all think of doing nothing, right? It’s a terrible thing to be doing. And what’s more, all types of doing nothing are bad. So, sitting there pondering about what to do with your writing project is just as much ‘doing nothing’ as scrolling through nonsense on your phone, or lying in bed all day, or calling in sick so that you can binge watch Netflix. Seriously, our horror at the idea of doing nothing really stands in our way sometimes. I talked about this back in episode #19: Not writing is an essential part of writing. Doing something is more comfortable than doing nothing - even if the something we end up doing (like building a desk) is less effective at helping us make progress than the right sort of doing nothing. And, I think, that leaves us vulnerable to the idea - the myth, really - of the quick fix.
I’m going to talk about the idea of the quick fix in a moment, but first, here’s what I think gives rise to the sort of vulnerability I’m talking about here. The sort of problems I try to address in this podcast - procrastination, feelings of inadequacy, underproductivity, guilt, shame, and the rest of it - are often complicated, in the sense that they emerge from a whole tangle of anxieties, expectations, comparisons with others, and relentless self-criticism. That means it can be hard to pick them apart - to work out exactly where they come from and what could make them better. But it’s also hard just to experience them. When something happens that causes us, say, to procrastinate, we feel bad. It’s not merely that we’re facing the problem of not getting things done as a result of our procrastination. We also feel like we’re a bad person because we’re procrastinating. Now, broadly speaking, there are a couple of approaches we can take to dealing with that. First, we can just do the thing that we think we should be doing; in other words, we can strive to live up to the standards we’re setting for ourselves, because it’s falling short of those standards that’s making us feel bad about ourselves. So, if we’re feeling bad about ourselves because we’re procrastinating, we can feel better by stopping procrastinating and doing the thing we’re avoiding doing. Or if we’re feeling inadequate because we haven’t published in the right sort of places, then we can feel better by publishing in those places. If we’re feeling guilty because we can’t spend 12 hours straight engaged in superhuman laser-sharp concentration, then we can spend the next 12 hours straight in superhuman laser-sharp concentration. And so on. That’s easier said than done, of course. So, as an alternative, we can look inward and try to unpick the difficult feelings we’re having. Why, exactly, are we procrastinating, or feeling inadequate, or guilty, or whatever? Are those feelings based on anxieties that we don’t need to have? Are our expectations of ourselves reasonable? Are the comparisons we’re making between ourselves and our peers fair and relevant and helpful? Is there maybe another way of viewing ourselves and our behaviour that we’re missing, a way according to which we’re not quite as awful and inadequate as we’re telling ourselves? Questions like these are important, and engaging with them in a serious and sustained way can, over time, reduce our need to procrastinate, and help us feel less inadequate, and all the rest of it. But it’s uncomfortable to do this. It requires us to sit with the uncomfortable feelings we have. To let ourselves feel our anxiety. If only there were a way to solve these problems that didn’t involve all this staring into the void. A way that worked right away, like upgrading our minds to a new, more efficient, powerful, and productive operating system.
Enter: the quick fix. You know, the shiny new thing that promises to magic our problems away. Sometimes it’s a new app that promises to stop us procrastinating. Or a method of dividing up our time that will make us more efficient. Or a podcast episode promising science-backed techniques to help us focus. Or, as was the case with me yesterday, assembling new office furniture that would get the words flowing. What’s the problem with things like this? The problem is that, often, they’re not much more than a distraction. Even though we should know better, we buy into the romantic promise that this new app or technique will overhaul our tired, disappointing personality and turn us into a productivity powerhouse. Why do we buy into it? Well, what’s the alternative? The alternative is facing our anxieties head-on, sitting with them, holding our head below the water and toughing it out until we manage to solve whatever the problem is. That’s hard to do. Capitalism doesn’t help here. Facing our anxieties and toughing it out isn’t particularly marketable. Installing a new app or buying a new type of journal is. Getting the job done often requires simplifying our working environment - unplugging the router, leaving the phone out of reach, swapping the laptop for a pen and paper - but capitalism wants us to add more. More apps, more techniques, blah blah blah.
Now, don’t go thinking that I’m a complete luddite who is suspicious of all techniques and technology that promise to improve our productivity. Some apps really do make it easier to focus. Some science-backed techniques really work (I’ve talked about a few on previous episodes of this podcast). And I really did need new office furniture. Even those tools and techniques that don’t work long-term can work for a while, when their novelty value spurs us on to get things done. I had a very productive couple of days when I first discovered the pomodoro technique, and then it got less effective when I ended up being much less enthusiastic about the ‘work for 25 minutes’ part than I was about the ‘take a break’ part. But that couple of productive days before I petered out were still important progress. Even so, there’s a real danger with these approaches - ‘productivity porn’, as they’re sometimes called. The danger is that it’s possible to feel like we’re accomplishing something just because we’re researching which productivity app to install, or listening to a podcast episode, or - in my case - building a new desk. Doing things like that can feel like investments in our future productivity, when often they’re just new forms of procrastination, new ways of introducing distance between where we are now and where we want to be, new ways of avoiding the thing that makes us anxious. This is what I was talking about at the start of this episode. Are you listening to this episode as part of a genuine attempt to improve your life? Or, are you listening because it’s a way of not doing something that you know you really should be doing?
Hang on, though: how would you know? You might think you’re listening to this or installing a new app or buying a nice new set of pens as a way of improving your life. But what if you’re just kidding yourself, and you’re in the grip of avoidance behaviour after all? This is a tricky question. Our motivations aren’t always clear to ourselves. But here’s a way you can get a feel for what the answer might be. Think of the way you’ve approached trying to make improvements to the way you work over the past 6 months or so. How much time and energy have you devoted to exploring new tools and techniques - you know, apps, podcast episodes, articles, new time management strategies - versus looking inward and trying to understand your own anxieties and behaviours as they relate to your work? If you’re spending much more time and energy on shiny new tools and techniques than you are on trying to understand yourself, then perhaps that’s a sign that these shiny new things are distractions from a problem you need to address, rather than things that are genuinely helping you move forward. And perhaps another question to ask is, over the past 6 months or so, are you using new tools and techniques in a way that builds over time, so that you’re still using things that you discovered 6 months ago - or do you tend to flit from one thing to another, desperately chasing the promise that maybe this next thing will be the magic wand you’re looking for? If it’s the latter - then, again, consider the possibility that these things are not helping you as much as you like to think they are.
So, here’s a hack for you, if you can call it that - something to help you procrastinate less, get more done, feel better about yourself, and all the rest of it. But it’s not the sort of hack that is going to sell any apps. There’s two parts to this hack, two things I want you to get comfortable with this. The first is: get comfortable with feeling uncomfortable, because it’s uncomfortable to let ourselves feel our anxiety and our guilt and our fear, but allowing ourselves to sit with these things is necessary in order to understand them and eventually conquer them, or at least work around them. You don’t need to reach for a ‘Beat your anxiety with this one weird trick’ article every time you feel uncomfortable. Just feel it. Get to know it. The second part is: get comfortable with doing nothing. Sometimes, as I’ve said, writing involves doing nothing. Solving difficult problems involves a lot of doing nothing. It’s when we feel like we need to be doing something that we reach for those shiny new productivity apps and tips. Just let yourself do nothing. You might find it helpful to frame it like this: ‘I’m going to sit here, and I don’t have to write anything, but I’m not allowed to do anything else either’. Sit there and stare at the screen, and count that as writing time. (I need to take my own advice here, of course.) Or if you can’t sit there and stare at the screen, try another sort of doing nothing. Some are more conducive to solving your problem than others. I talked about this in episode #20: Don’t just write it - ferment it!
Less is more, friends. Good luck, and speak soon.
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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