Today we're going to explore some of my thoughts on I Didn't Do The Thing Today by Madeleine Dore.
Cultural Measures of Value
One of the first big points that Dore explores is our cultural obsession with productivity as the main form of value that we bring to the world1. This stems all the way back to [[Puritan]]'s and the [[Puritan Work Ethic]] which viewed the best good you could bring to the world was hard work. That has left us viewing a good life as one that means we make a good living and have a respectable high-paying job2.
Of course, respectable changes based on cultural values. So your respected job one year could be the profession that everyone detests the next year. If you hang your self-worth on what culture thinks of your work, you're in for a huge letdown when culture turns it's back on you source of meaning.
We make our days busier in the hope that we will one day be recognized for our efforts, all the while leaving ourselves with less time for things we really want to do or the people we want to spend time with.3
Most times we don't even know what "more productive" means. It's simply some nebulous idea that we should be doing more4, accomplishing more, making it to the next 30 under 30 (or whatever decade) list. We'll know it when we see it...we're sure we will.
Productive Routines
Since culture views our best life as one that's productive, we hunt for ideal routines and "tricks" to help us improve our productivity5. We obsessively read about the 5 am routines of someone and try to emulate it, without acknowledging that we don't get to bed until 11 pm because there are kids that need a pick up from work. We may decide to buckle down and do better next week, but we're really just being far to hard on ourselves about following an idealized routine.
Most of these people don't have their ideal routines together as much as they say6. They also have kids to take care of, or they have access to some financial resource you don't so they can pay someone to pick their kids up. We only ever see the highlight reels though, which never includes the missed soccer games, or the days they did nothing.
It's entirely possible, likely even, that if you got close to that routine you idealize you'd realize that it's a terrible idea and doesn't bring any fulfillment7. It looks good on paper, or on a screen, but in practice it's terrible and no one can keep up with it all the time.
Responses to Productivity as Value
Quiet Quitting
One way to respond to this expectation of never ending productivity is called quiet quitting. This is when you show up to work and just do your job. You don't stay late. You don't go the extra mile. You simply do the amount of work needed in the day and then don't worry about it.
This flies in the face of many managers, who expect you to stay late because "we're a family". I had an experience with that in 2021. After months of being told I was family as soon as something hard came along in the business I was let go because I was a contract worker and it was easy. I had even recently put in a bunch of long days as the sales team had promised dates for site drops that were never reasonable, but I was expected to fulfill with my team.
We recently saw this with [[Elon Musk]] asking for hardcore Twitter employees. Somehow the expectation that employees would work lots extra because he wanted them to and it may harm their families was seen as a viable option. As I said, hardcore napping is what I'm into.
Gary Vee has built an entire job based on telling you that you're not working hard enough. That it's better to have been born with nothing so you can work hard and "earn" your position. He says this without ever acknowledging that his start was in a family business that was a 3 million dollar business. He didn't start with nothing, but the story that he wants you to believe is that he just did everything with hard work and no help.
Contrary to Gary's assertion, research shows that scarcity is a huge trap8. When we have nothing we spend so much time simply trying to figure out how to eat or find a roof over our heads we don't have the bandwidth to make "higher level" decisions, like where we get the most value in our efforts. Scarcity means all you can do is put one foot in front of the other, and try to catch everything before the next financial crisis happens9.
It seems baffling to me that culturally we expect people to put in extra all the time for no more reward but getting the priviledge to continue to put in "extra". Employers like Musk want to lionize this type of work because it helps them earn more money, while employees languish and have been convinced that it's all their fault because they're not working hard enough.
No More Wishlists
A second big thing we can do is to stop making wishlists10. We all do it. That list that you look at in the morning with dread because you know deep down you'll never do it. You've set a huge hurdle to your feeling that anything worthwhile was accomplished in a day11.
I think of Linus from LTT on Youtube saying that he doesn't hire the bestest employees, he hires good employees and then gives them the time they need to do the best way they can. When the shirts are almost to production but the person leading the project says they don't think they should accept the final run and need to start over he says okay and starts over. It doesn't matter if he's throwing money away, he starts over because that's what it takes to do the job right.
Maybe you should grab a single task and do it. Spend the time it needs to do it really well, then grab another task.
Forget planning 3 tasks for your day, plan one, heck plan half of 1 and if you finish it, do the other half. Actually, maybe just grab a coffee instead.
Busy Doesn't Mean Productive
One of the final ways you can get away from productivity being the only value you bring to the world is deciding that you're not going to fall into the trap that being busy means you have any value at all. Being buys doesn't mean you did anything valuable12 it's merely a way to pretend that you're bringing any value to the table.
I admit that I'm terrible at email. I'm also barely on social media and my phone is almost always muted. I'm pretty hard to get in touch with...even if you're my friend. For my three day a week job I have Slack open, but it's not allowed to send me notifications. I resolve issues in Github and deploy things and let those resolved issues speak to my productivity.
I'm anything but "busy" most days...at least in obvious ways that would show people I'm busy without doing much. Constant chatting and email is merely a substitute for butt in seat time as a way to show you're productive. It wasn't true that if you were sitting at your work station you were working, and it's not true that you're doing anything just because you sent messages and responded quickly.
In fact, I figure that if I'm always replying to messages quickly I'm not digging into hard problems and I'm not doing anything of actual value.
What are you going to do this week to abandon "productive" culture?
Further Reading