The quest for achieving peak productivity is now akin to a religion, one consisting of high priests (time management gurus, life hack specialists, productivity coaches, headlining management professionals), various teachings (apps, tools, approaches, methods, reminders, workstation re-designs, forms of discipline), and millions of willing aspirants (early adopters, workshop participants, testifiers, devotees). A search for “how to be more productive” yields, at present count, 40,900,000 results.
—ANDREW TAGGART
DO YOU REMEMBER THE push to set aside “quality time” with your kids back in the 1990s? I was just out of high school at that time and remember seeing that phrase splashed all over women’s magazines at the grocery store, and hearing it discussed on talk shows. One of my college professors shortened it to “QT” and would say things like “My office hours end at three today. I’m due for a couple hours of QT with my kids.”
This whole thing was a relatively short-lived fad. In 1997, Newsweek published a cover story called “The Myth of Quality Time.” I became a parent about a year after that article appeared, when quality time had mostly fallen out of vogue. It was a ludicrous idea for me anyway. My fiancé was overseas with the military in Bosnia when my son was born. I was a single parent. Out of necessity, my son came with me everywhere, even to the office when he grew to be a toddler. There was no difference, for me, between quality time and normal time. When I had a moment to read with him or play a board game, I seized the opportunity.
Even though people rarely talk about quality time these days, the concept behind it survives. The idea that you can design an hour with your kids that’s so excellent and impactful that it makes up for frequently staying late at work is an unspoken principle in many homes. That idea started in the workplace, where managers have long believed that they can create an environment that increases the quality of work.
Back in the early nineties, when families were still enthusiastic about the idea of quality time, the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild was spending her summers observing the work and home lives of the employees at a large American corporation. Many of them talked to her about quality time, and Hochschild said the intent was to transfer “the cult of efficiency from office to home. Instead of nine hours a day with a child, we declare ourselves capable of getting the ‘same result’ with one more intensely focused total quality hour….Our family bonds are being recalibrated to achieve greater productivity in less time.”
I totally understand the guilt a parent feels when they repeatedly say, “Go play in your room. I need to get this done.” I know how crushing it can be to finally walk in the door in the evening, anxious to see your kid, only to find that he’s already in bed. It’s no surprise that we would try to solve these problems at home by using the same techniques that seem to work so well in the office.
In truth, we have brought home much more than just the idea of quality time. Most of us have worked hard to make our homes as efficient as possible, and that has caused problems of its own.
We bring more and more of our work with us when we leave the office, structure our off-hours around the computer and the smartphone, and design our lives to better accommodate our jobs. Perhaps to make us feel better about it, we bring a little of home into the office. We celebrate birthdays at the workplace and bring our kids to work (as I did), work out in office gyms, shop for holiday presents from office computers.
This is not all bad news, of course. The blurring of lines between work and home isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There are advantages to this strategy. Perhaps writing a report at home means you can spend a couple extra hours with your loved ones. Maybe the colorful paintings and lush green plants at the office help relax you and spur creativity. Perhaps you’re fighting with your partner and the office feels like a refuge from the hostility at home.
In the final accounting, though, it’s not an even trade. We know a lot about how people from all over the world view their jobs, and so we know that much of the traffic between work and home has been one-way. In other words, in the battle between the office and the living room, the office has mostly won.
When it comes to life philosophies and personal habits, the past few decades have seen us internalize what we’ve learned on the job and apply it to our daily lives and intimate relationships. You can find telltale signs of the office in our kitchens, our living rooms, even our beds.
I wouldn’t want us to bring our personal habits into the office, of course. I don’t want my employees to keep their workspace as cluttered as their kitchens, and I definitely don’t want them calling me to chat about their cousins and BFFs. That would be very inappropriate. But it’s also inappropriate to run your personal life as though you’re adhering to an employee handbook.
While CEOs and executives structured their businesses around the concept of constant growth, we began to do the same with our lives. We now believe it’s possible and even laudable to be constantly improving and tweaking and changing. Not in the long term, mind you, but on a daily basis. We make checklists for our eating and our exercise and our meditation. We create digital reminders to write in our journals or read a book.
We’re not generally interested in growth that happens over time, either. Instead, we search for shortcuts, buying books that promise we’ll master Spanish in five hours. I was strolling through a bookstore recently and saw an entire rack of books dedicated to learning at lightning speed: 30-Second Psychology, 30-Second Economics, 30-Second Genetics.
I want to be clear, from the start, that I think it’s good to look for opportunities to improve yourself. That’s a wonderful impulse. But, as with technology, the problem is not in the tool but in its overuse. Improvement is healthy, but not every moment of your day should be leveraged in an attempt to make you a better person. If you’re searching for the fastest way to learn guitar because you also have to squeeze in yoga and keto cooking recipes and homemade charcoal facial peels, you have left no time to simply be the person you are. You are leaving no space for rest and contentment.
In 2016, the self-help industry was worth nearly $10 billion in the United States alone. By 2022, it’s expected to be worth more than $13 billion. Many people believe their lives, minds, and bodies can be hacked, tinkered with, and improved in a never-ending search for peak productivity.
Why just make a cake when you can search through Pinterest and find the best cake recipe with the cutest decoration ideas? Almost no one searches for a “good workout routine,” instead looking for the “ultimate workout.” We want the fastest, most efficient method for reaching our goals, hopefully guaranteed by as many five-star reviews as possible.
“What I see is that we’ve taken the bourgeois virtue of hard work, or productivity,” writes the consultant and trainer Andrew Taggart, “and applied it to ourselves with ruthless persistence.” The word ruthless is well chosen here, since I see people exhausting themselves in this pursuit of constant improvement and the most efficient life possible, often based not on what they really want but on a list they read of the things successful people do every day.
Schedules, apps, eating plans, expensive devices…anything that we believe will save us a little time and make us a little better. One of my friends keeps four journals: one for running, one for eating, one for daily tasks, and yet another for gratitude. Individually, the intent of those journals is good; taken together, it’s simply too much.
Oftentimes, all these little tweaks and hacks aren’t even more efficient. Consider the challenge of taking notes, for example. If you’ve attended a college course recently, you probably saw a teacher facing a room full of open laptops. Most students take notes with their computers, and many working people do the same. We bring our laptops into meetings and continue typing while listening to a conference call.
If your goal is rote dictation, then typing into a laptop is definitely more efficient. Many students type so quickly that they can record nearly every word a professor utters. But we’ve known for years that using electronics to take notes is not the best way to understand what you’re hearing or retain the information.
Let’s put aside the possibility for distraction and the temptation, when using a laptop or tablet, to quickly check your email or surf the internet. A study out of Princeton and UCLA also found that even when the computer is used only to take notes, it’s still inferior to writing in longhand when it comes to comprehension and retention. The report was titled “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard.” Students who used their laptops did poorly when asked conceptual questions, despite recording more of what was said. When students write in longhand, they process the information they hear and record it in their own words. Those who use a laptop might be able to transcribe a lecture verbatim, but they simply don’t learn as much.
Professor Susan Dynarski of the University of Michigan wrote an op-ed in the New York Times in 2017 explaining why she bans all electronics from her classrooms. She admits this policy may seem extreme but says, “The research is unequivocal: Laptops distract from learning, both for users and for those around them. It’s not much of a leap to expect that electronics also undermine learning in high school classrooms or that they hurt productivity in meetings in all kinds of workplaces.”
This, essentially, is the danger of making efficiency a goal in and of itself. We can become so focused on doing things more quickly that we lose sight of what’s actually being accomplished. If you’re getting down every word a professor says but understanding very little of the lecture, you’ll have a tough time passing the class. So what is the real goal? Quickness and efficiency, or thoroughness and deep understanding?
I always take notes in longhand now, but since I love trees, I don’t use paper. I found a tablet on which I write in cursive, and then it converts my longhand notes into text in a Word document. I never get a full transcription of what I’ve heard, just the gist, but the act of having to decide what to write down helps me remember the material.
I make decisions constantly about what’s important and what’s really being said. Therefore, my notes are more personal and more helpful, in the long run, than the more complete notes I would take with my tablet. Less productive, since I’m literally writing fewer words, but more useful.
“We adopt the illusion,” Andrew Taggart says, “that personal productivity is itself the end of suffering, or is itselfhappiness, when in actuality, the aim of personal productivity is to enable the work-society to continue….The truth is that we are its tools.” In other words, we use laptops because we think recording 80 percent of what’s said is inherently better than getting only 50 percent. We strive to achieve peak productivity but forget that it’s taking us further from our ultimate goal—learning.
I don’t believe that if left to our own devices, we would naturally seek to work long hours and search for peak efficiency in everything we do, including doing laundry and playing games and reading novels. There is a wealth of historical data that suggests we prefer a balance of leisure and toil. But we have been convinced through more than two hundred years of propaganda that inactivity is the same as laziness, and that leisure is a shameful waste of time.
If you think I’m using the word propaganda metaphorically, you’re wrong. Let’s dial it back to the 1920s for a moment. The battle over work hours was still being fiercely fought throughout the industrialized world, but the workers were winning. The punishing days of the nineteenth century were far behind us, and workdays were getting shorter and shorter in most industries.
There seems to have been a realization among employers that they couldn’t win a direct fight, so they used more subtle tactics learned during World War I. Employers realized they could borrow strategies from the War Department in order to motivate the production line.
A young Austrian immigrant had spent the war working for the Committee on Public Information (CPI), engaging in what he called “psychological warfare.” The Cornell graduate was tasked with building public support for the war in the United States and overseas, and he was very good at it.
Edward Bernays would later say he learned an invaluable lesson while at the CPI office: The tactics he’d used during war “could be applied with equal facility to peacetime pursuits. In other words, what could be done for a nation at war could be done for organizations and people in a nation at peace.” This slight man with his dark, sunken eyes, high forehead, and generous mustache is probably not familiar to most people today, but he changed our lives irrevocably.
Bernays is now known as the “Father of Spin.” He helped make it fashionable for women to smoke in the late twenties by rebranding cigarettes as “Torches of Freedom” and symbols of feminist strength. His 1928 book, Propaganda, was hugely influential and put into practice by many men in power. “Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country,” Bernays wrote. “In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses.”
Workers were manipulated to feel shame for even wanting to take time off. Company names became almost synonymous with country. Europe may have family crests, but America has company logos. In the 1920s, employers began putting up posters that scolded those who invested less than full effort while on the job. “Waste, carelessness, mistakes, loafing,” one poster read. “Help us stop them before they stop us.”
Another showed a soldier receiving a commendation in front of an unfurled American flag and read: “The efficient worker is always honored. His merit is recognized by all. Stand out from the crowd!” Yet another features an enormous clock backed by a skyline of smokestacks. “When the Call Comes, Answer Present,” it urges. “When you are ‘Off’ someone else gets on to your opportunity! A day off may lose you much.” These were daily affirmations created by employers, drilling in to workers’ minds the principles that most benefited the company.
Employers also discovered they could pit their workers against one another to vie for promotions and raises, thereby encouraging people to stay longer than their coworkers and put in more hours than their “competition.”
Somehow the same characteristics used to describe a good employee came to also describe a good husband or sister or friend: reliable, stable, hardworking, independent. The writer Maria Popova told the BBC: “The most pernicious thing [is] this tendency we have to apply productivity to realms of life that should, by their very nature, be devoid of that criterion.”
Popova reports that she used to enjoy taking a camera with her everywhere and taking photos of what she saw. Now that she feels pressured to leverage her photos on social media, the camera “has become its own burden.” I understand her dilemma. I love to walk but sometimes when the sole purpose of my jaunt is to meet my step goal, I dread leaving the house. What was a joy sometimes feels like drudgery because I’ve turned a pleasure into work.
Again, it should go without saying that it is natural to want to improve. We are biologically programmed to quickly become impatient with the status quo and to push for better things. But we’ve pushed it too far. What’s more, we’ve lost sight of the fact that productivity is a means to an end, not a goal in and of itself. One time-use expert told Juliet Schor, “We have become walking résumés. If you’re not doing something, you’re not creating and defining who you are.”
This compulsion to approach our lives in the same way we approach a project in the office is what helped make busyness a status symbol. In 2007, Tim Ferriss wrote The 4-Hour Workweek, which is full of instructions on how to cut down your work hours. I would enthusiastically support that idea, except that his goal is not to increase your free time but to leverage it.
In a blog post about his daily schedule, he says, “The goal was never to be idle.” In his “off time,” Ferriss does interviews and writes articles and trains in hiking or archery or martial arts. Everything he does is seemingly intended to help him reach ever-increasing goals with ruthless efficiency. He posted a rundown of a typical day, and his schedule includes eating, working out, writing, taking an ice bath, and then relaxing after eleven p.m. Ferriss says he does his “best writing” between one and four a.m.
Ferriss is just one of many people who hope to suck the marrow out of every moment of their day, to never waste time that could be spent moving toward a new achievement. A shortened workweek is something I endorse; torturing every minute in order to make every moment productive is not.
I’ve mentioned that social status became dependent, in the late twentieth century, less on wealth and more on busyness. That trend began in the 1990s and has only intensified since. Social media has fed this obsession with performative busyness. I say “performative” because sometimes the purpose of an activity seems to be solely to take pictures and post them or write about the experience in a blog post.
As a result, people are more likely to attend events and engage in activities that will look good on their Instagram feed. I was recently in a national park and stopped to admire a little clearing in the trees, lazily crossed by a slow-moving brook. There were two squirrels playing chase around an ash tree, and wild indigo swayed in the breeze. The scene was so beautiful that it felt unreal.
My first instinct was to take a picture, but I chose not to because I wanted that moment to be more precious than an Instagram post. I had come to the park to enjoy the sunshine and the landscape. I wanted to escape from work, not turn my hike into an extension of my professional branding.
That anecdote makes me sound relaxed about all this, but that’s misleading. For most of my adult life, I have thought that if I’m not making pesto from scratch, I could at least do some yoga, and if not yoga, I could at least write a quick blog post. In many ways, I make decisions based on how the choices and outcomes might affect my résumé of life.
For many of us, this drive to leverage every moment eventually gave rise to an obsession with life hacking and a pursuit of ever more complex, arcane, and counterintuitive methods to accomplish what we probably know how to do already. Not only should we fill our off-hours with photo-worthy pursuits, but those pursuits should be awe-inspiring. If we can’t get our friends to “like” our hobbies, then what’s the point?
John Pavlus wrote a piece in 2012 called “Confessions of a Recovering Lifehacker.” Pavlus had a crisis of the soul upon discovering how much time he spent reading articles about tweaking every aspect of his personal and professional life. “Maybe all the time I spend looking for better ways to do things is keeping me from, well, doing things. It’s like running on a treadmill: you might get in really good shape, I guess, but you never actually go anywhere.”
Pavlus asks if life hacking is, in truth, a way to focus on small, measurable tasks instead of asking ourselves big, hard questions about what we do with our time and what our larger priorities are. A woman I know frantically shakes her arm every hour while working on the computer, so she can fool her Fitbit into thinking she’s taken 250 steps. I guess she’s hacking her exercise, but it’s not making her healthier.
Isn’t good health the goal of wearing a Fitbit, not getting a certain number of steps? I ask myself that whenever I find myself walking in circles around my kitchen, staring at my watch so I can stop as soon as I reach a certain number of steps.
In many ways, I think we’ve lost sight of the purpose of free time. We seem to immediately equate idleness with laziness, but those two things are very different. Leisure is not a synonym for inactive. Idleness offers an opportunity for play, something people rarely indulge in these days. I mentioned that golf courses are offering new methods to make the game go faster, but there are actually many sports we no longer have time for. ESPN published an article in 2014 with the headline “Playground Basketball Is Dying.” “The courts are empty,” the piece says. “The nets dangling by a thread. The crowds that used to stand four-deep are gone, and so are the players.” The movie The Sandlot will soon be an anachronism, since the number of kids playing baseball has fallen by millions.
Sports are just one example of this phenomenon. Recent surveys have shown that membership has declined in PTAs, unions, churches, environmental groups, and political parties. Nearly half of people say they don’t like joining any groups at all, and more than half say they don’t have time, even if they wanted to.
The point is, we engage in busyness that is mostly goal-oriented and designed to create a public persona, rather than hobbies that are merely intended to enrich our lives. Even parenting is often centered on amassing achievements and résumé-fillers. The social psychologist Harry Triandis points out that when a culture is focused on individuals and not on communities, people tend to emphasize achievement over affiliation. And the sociology professor Philip Cohen told the Economist, “Parents are now afraid of doing less than their neighbors. It can feel like an arms race.”
Child-rearing often requires a slower pace because children can’t always be forced to do what they’re told at the pace we prefer. I remember hurrying my son along through a store, telling him to stop staring at the toys and “pick up the pace.” In protest, he threw himself down in the aisle and started crying.
Speed and efficiency are, by their nature, antithetical to introspection and intimacy. The kind of social consciousness required to get to know another person intimately and to understand the emotional landscape of a community requires time and focus, two things most people don’t think they have.
But time and focus are essential in our relationships. Scientists have found that in order to understand and empathize with other people, you must be capable of introspection. And as a 2009 report points out, the “type of introspective thought process necessary for understanding culturally shaped social knowledge is slower and requires additional time compared with the rapid multitasking, and parallel processing” of smartphones and laptops. We are looking for faster and faster ways to reach our goals, and so the skills that require time and patience—the social skills—are eroding.
Another by-product of the “time is money” mind-set has been the dramatic increase in distraction. Psychologists say modern society often suffers from a split consciousness or “absent presence,” in which we are never fully paying attention to what we’re doing or saying. This also has its roots in the nineteenth century, because that’s when populations began to move from rural areas into cities.
People living in villages and on farms generally interacted with a limited number of people. They only kept track of one to two hundred people, so remembering birthdays and personal quirks was fairly simple. When people migrated into cities en masse, that number of interactions exploded, and people began to experience what’s called “urban overload.”
The sociologist Georg Simmel spoke in 1903 about our tendency to conserve our “psychic energy” by filtering out what we see and hear, keeping our human interactions as superficial as possible. Not only was it impossible to remember personal details about all the people we encountered on the city streets, but it was psychologically draining to try.
The sense that we are overwhelmed and must protect ourselves from intimacy has been exacerbated by technology. Computers and smartphones added information overload to the mix, and a constant pressure to respond to others followed. That intensified the conviction among many of us that chatting with others was just too much to handle.
Our attention is now nearly always divided, because we seem to be always working on something. Our hobbies have become goals. Our homes have become offices and our free time is not free. These are some of the changes that have occurred over the past two hundred years. That doesn’t necessarily mean all of the changes have been bad or harmful. The question we must answer is: Where is the line? How are we helping ourselves, and how are we hurting?