Whenever we pluck the fruit of creativity from the golden tree our other hand plucks the fruit of destruction.

Robert A. Johnson

The body is bad at productivity. But we’ll show it what to do. Eyes open. Brain on. We are pretty good at ignoring hunger and tiredness and sadness if we really try. Yes, okay, there’s burn out, but that’s really a temporary thing. You can always start being productive again.

Tim Ferris showed us that there are ways to get productivity wrong. Being efficient, he says, is “getting good at a certain task, whether or not it is important.” Efficiency is the wrong way to be productive. Instead, we must be effective, and do what’s important.

We can be good at linking our happiness to the success of our business or the results we achieve at our job. At the end of the quarter, or the year, we know exactly how much we’ve produced. We know if we did a good job or a bad job. Guilt and shame can be very helpful in letting us know that we didn’t produce enough. In some cases, we weren’t efficient or effective. But that’s good to know. Next year we’ll put more effort in. We’ll step it up. We are very good at feeling guilty.

In 2022, I spent some time in El Salvador. My plan was to take a break between jobs. I’m not sure where that idea came from. Maybe I was a little burnt out. But instead of doing nothing, I reminded myself that I need to be productive. Any little quiet gaps in the day, even when I thought I finally had nothing to do, I always managed to open my laptop and find something.

Some days you wake up and you’re really not feeling it. Our energy does seem to wax and wane. But with the rise of productivity tools like Notion, we are good at always improving how productive we can be. Maybe we learn how to use tags to organize our thinking and quickly find old notes. Maybe we use large language models so we can finish our work faster. We are very good at finding new tools that we can use to our advantage. I’ll admit, it can be tiring to be machine-like, and there’s always the worry that the machine can do it better. But I think it’s fine for now, as long as our productivity is going up.

We are really good at being productive, rational and orderly. These things seem to fit together nicely. This is the public face that we present to others. We turn up on time, say the right thing and get all of our work completed to a good standard. Of course life is made up of opposites, and there is another side to this squeaky clean image. Sometimes we can’t help bursting out with a rude remark, a filthy curse word or do something dirty and gross. But we are very skilled at hiding that sort of behavior. That type of thing isn’t going to help us to reach our goals, or be a better person, so it’s really best not to talk about it. Ultimately, we are in charge of ourselves and the decisions we make.

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We’re very good at productivity these days, that’s clear. But we can put down the efficiency and effectiveness and see that there’s always work to do. And work can be fun. Work is just what we can do during the day with our time and energy. In fact, we can’t help but work. We are natural workers. Sleeping and eating just happens. Work just happens too.

Once you finish feeling bad about how productive you were this year, get to work.