When productivity is wasted time

Last weekend, I was rushing home from errands and hurriedly turned my key in the front door lock. It stuck in the cylinder. So I turned harder. As the deadbolt clicked and the door opened, the shoulder of my key snapped in the lock. I was left holding a metal stump, and I was furious. Now I had to deal with an inoperable lock on top of everything else on the to-do list. After unloading the groceries and watching some instructive YouTube videos, I broke out the WD-40 and pliers. It took a while to free what was left of the key, and as I worked, I wondered. Was this a metaphor for something? I'd been so focused on hurrying to the next activity that I'd almost locked myself out of my own home. My quest for productivity had nearly left me out in the cold.

Yep, it was definitely a metaphor.

For months, I'd been doing little else than working on something. When I told myself to slow down and take a break, I'd fear it meant somehow losing precious minutes. If I spent a couple of hours on a weekend reading a novel, I felt a little guilty. It had gotten to the point where in my head, a kind of productivity police officer was routinely citing me for wasting time. The officer was the type to point out that I should be working on my own novel instead of reading someone else's. Or clearing out my office email inbox. Or deep cleaning the refrigerator. The officer was on duty 24/7, compelling me to check my phone when in line at the dry cleaners instead of staring into space and letting my thoughts roam. And in rare moments when I found myself utterly free - like when an obligation was canceled or I found myself alone in a miraculously quiet, empty house for an hour - the officer urged me to get busy, ASAP.

The productivity officer's arrival and increasingly long shifts seem related to my sense of time moving too fast. That in turn engenders a scarcity mindset, which then only exacerbates any compulsion to produce without thought. In one of my favorite books by Heidi Julavits, her meditative, deconstructed diary called The Folded Clock, she writes, "Once, the day was long. It was bright and then it wasn't, meals happened and school happened, and sports practice, maybe, happened, and two days from this day there would be a test, or an English paper would be due, or there would be a party for which I'd been waiting, it would seem, for years. Days were ages... Not any more. The 'day' no longer exists. The smallest unit of time I experience is the week. But in recent years, the week, like the penny, has become a uselessly small currency. The month is, more typically, the smallest unit of time I experience. But truthfully months are not so noticeable either."

She reflects on her early diaries, when she would start every entry, "Today, I..." The focus was on what she did during that day. But rarely why. (Mine, which I can hardly stand to read, are eerily similar.) From a young age, something within us marks the passage of time with activity, and as time accelerates, we may continue to mark the days, weeks and months in much the same way. Then we start to miss the why, which is the currency of true value.

Maria Popova, the brilliant philosopher-writer, has written, "There is something odd about this notion of time as property. We are asked to give things time; we speak of taking time — time off of something, time toward something. But how do we give or take this fine-grained sand that slips through the fingers the moment we try to cup it? Perhaps time is not so much the substance in the hand as the substance of the hand..."

I feel that slipping of sand through the fingers. And I believe Popov is right, it's about me, not the sand. Time is not a thing we own but the thing that defines us (and technically that destroys us too). Measuring and scoring time with to-do lists and "today, I..." misses the notion that time is being. We can try to own time, but it ultimately owns us. Where we have agency is in choosing how we experience it. What matters is the why of our days, and why is often answered staring into space rather than checking another box. When we know the why, we redefine our relationship with time and understand things that in turn make us more productive.

It's counterintuitive. In trying not to "waste" time, I sometimes waste an opportunity to be sparked by something outside my immediate activity. When I'm preoccupied with productivity, I don't pause long enough to experience the things that give me the inspiration to produce, like reading a great writer. Or looking at art. Or breathing a little deeper. Instead, I find myself wearing the blinders of focus that slowly erode my field of perspective. From that myopic place, my productive moments are diminished. My fear of wasting time ends up wasting time.

Manoush Zomorodi came to talk to my team at work last year. She has explored the science of how spacing out unlocks our most creative and productive selves. I find this to be deeply true. When I let in the diversions - the good book, the lunch with a friend, the movie, the moment of free association - nothing is wasted. Something is created. Or released. There's new fodder for the compost heap of ideas that is my brain. Later if I allow enough organic material into the pile, my work is richer. And I know why I'm doing it. So my own experience, in addition to the science, backs up these merits. I just haven't come to embrace this lesson fully and without guilt.

So I have a few tactics to try to address the issue. If you, like me, struggle to allow slack into the system, maybe you'll find these helpful. Or if you are working three jobs just to get by and productivity is a matter of survival, they are still doable because they don't take loads of time or any money.

The first is to make time to dump my stream of consciousness thoughts in a cheap spiral notebook (fancy journals make me self conscious that much of my content is drivel.) The creativity guru Julia Cameron advises you fill three pages first thing every morning. But I find that any amount helps, as often as I can do it. It's like an assignment to space out. The entries do not begin, "today, I finished my PowerPoint deck," in the way my old diaries noted, "today, I turned in my English paper." They take a break from that kind of marking of time. All my best whys have come through this exercise.

Some people can do this without pen and paper, with meditation. I admire that.

Another method is to allot some time to not being productive. You can even (ironically) put this on a to-do list, if that works. Next to buy paper towels and prep for Friday's meeting can go, write three pages of random thoughts or take twenty deep breaths with eyes closed. While taking the twenty deep breaths, if something on my to-do list is consuming my thoughts, I visualize putting it away in a box, wrapping the box with very sticky packing tape, and putting it up on a shelf for a little while. This makes space for more interesting thoughts.

The most important thing I try to do is be present to the people around me. The worst toll of a compulsion to be productive is not just what it does to your time, it's what it does to your brain. It can make you absent to the wonderful person across the table or next to you, because your head is elsewhere. You can lose not only the chance to be inspired, you can lose a human connection.

Here's what I know (and need to remember): the quest for productivity kills my productivity. The slack in the system - the time to reflect on the why - is in fact the very thing that makes me more productive. It is also the key to connection with others. It is not the thing to wrench in the lock on the way somewhere else, but the very thing that turns the bolt and opens the door to the timeless place that is truly home.