A Productivity Anti-Hack That Actually Makes Sense
Video game cheat codes don’t work in real life
Conversations about improving productivity tend to be framed in terms of systems: easy tricks, simple habits, everyday tweaks, hacks. To be productive, by this logic, means being wise to the implicitly universal mechanisms that make productivity possible, then summoning the discipline to put them into place. Through this mystical cause-and-effect, a compulsion to be industrious becomes conflated with virtues like attentiveness and proactivity.
Psychologist and author Kathleen Smith points out out the error in this line of thinking.
In a post published by Forge in June, Smith writes: “The truth is that productivity is often more about regulating stress than it is about living a thoughtful, responsible life. So many of us use being busy, or what I call “anxious doing,” to calm ourselves down.”
Smith continues:
When you use productivity to manage anxiety, it can become difficult to be more intentional about how you spend your time. This is because turning off your “anxious doing” requires you to put up with some distress. You’ll have to let people do things less efficiently than you might. Or watch other people succeed at things that you don’t value. You also have to learn that…
