There’s a profound difference between 3 seemingly similar ways to spend time:
- sitting around and making things, either alone or with people you want to be around, which is a fundamentally human experience
- sitting/standing around and making things with people you’ve been ordered to work with, on things you’ve been ordered to make, on a full-time work schedule set by someone else
- performing all the capitalist ceremonies of the previous bullet point, but you’re not even making anything yourself
All 3 get muddled together in discussions and in subjective experience, and in any case most people only experience the 2nd or 3rd one for large swaths of their lives.
It takes a while, post-retirement, to let go of all the nonsense from those ways of being, and instead to return to the simpler and more human acts of chopping wood, carrying water, and making things for their own sake.
— Redditer ScoobyDoobyGazebo on how deeply “people don’t understand the grasp work and productivity has on their lives.”
Completing tasks, no matter how inane, made me feel productive—and through the years I’d convinced myself that I needed to be productive at all times in order to achieve broader life goals. Never you mind the fact that most of those tasks have no real importance and frequently represent phony work.
—This wonderful, first-person account on Living a FI describes what it takes to deprogram the stay-busy mindset that plagues ambitious people who crush their todo list (but miss out on life). Anyone else give yourself a nightly performance review of whether or not you got enough done that day? Yeah. This one’s for us.
When you focus on maximizing productivity, you inhibit creativity. In many ways, productivity and creativity are at odds.
Productivity is all about getting stuff done more efficiently: completing tasks and projects to meet your obligations and be successful. Capitalism relies on ever-increasing levels of human productivity. It always asks: What is the most value you can bring with the least amount of time and effort?
I’m a big todo list person. I run my life on my todo list. I love writing down tasks, putting a date on them, and then checking them off. Deadlines are motivating. I am a productive person! I GET STUFF DONE!
But I can’t todo list myself through this liminal space, this being in between the past and future.
I really tried. I put every passing interest on my todo list, because hey I’ve got time to do it. The problem is, when I assign myself the task of exploring a curiosity: it becomes a obligation, with weight. A great way to kill a lighthearted interest is making it into a project with deadlines.
So except for necessary run-our-lives things one must do, I’m clearing the todo list. Very scary. I’m trying something new, which is to take notes, versus assign tasks (no “I should” allowed). Notice the things that catch my interest, and literally take a note. That’s it.
Then, trust the stuff that I’m really interested in will emerge and move me to action, without a deadline or a checkbox.
Do things without a deadline or a checkbox?! Very very scary. Let’s see how this goes.
