The downside of productivity tools
Productivity tools are designed with the assumption that you can better cope with your business and life by being more efficient. Your Google calendar, Evernote, Trello, Asana, To do lists, Pocket, Notion, Slack, are all apps that help you organize, record, and communicate. These external brains offload all of the stuff floating around so you don’t have to remember it all, which helps you do more.
I’m all for getting shit done (and I use all the above tools), but busy and productive are two adjectives that I don’t want engraved on my tombstone.
The downside of most productivity tools is that they marginalize the importance of slowness, downtime, and spontaneity. They assume that you should have lots of stuff to do, and you should juggle them instead of cutting back. A calendar doesn’t optimize for a fulfilling life: it doesn’t come loaded with pre-populated blocks of time that instruct you to spend time with friends and family. It doesn't notify you when you’re not doing enough of the things you love and having too many meetings with clients (business idea: maybe it should!)
There are indeed some tools that don’t rush you and do provide you room to think. For example, apps that allow you to send your email at a future date (Boomerang, etc.). Delaying the email gives you room to reflect without rushing a response, and saves the receiver the anxiety of opening your potentially annoying email on the weekend.
But most of the time, we’re in a struggle with many of our tools. Cancelling meetings, ignoring responses, anxiety over a missed email or Slack message, beating ourselves up for booking too many meetings in one day, uncertainty about where to store/organize a certain piece of information, FOMO about articles and podcasts and books we have in lists but haven’t gotten around to yet, and so much more.
I used to feel guilty about some of this stuff myself. When I quit my full-time job, the first few months were tinged with the inescapable feeling of productivity guilt. This was in no doubt due to years of planning agendas for 1-1 catch ups, tracking data on Salesforce, constantly checking my Gcal, and thinking about how to most efficiently splice up my day. An empty calendar became the cause of a lot of anxiety.
I can’t pinpoint exactly when I moved out of this frame of mind and when I started caring less. My best guess is that it was when I began to prioritize play (exercise and hanging out with a friend > sending that email) and perhaps when I began to do more creative work (writing). Lots of reading and thinking and traveling with no destination in mind. Meditation likely helped a lot, too, since it basically gets you comfortable with doing nothing.
The cult of busy-ness is partly how we’ve come to work in the last century, and partly a design-flaw of the technology that we surround ourselves with. It’s worth considering the downsides of both.
Recent events give us a good opportunity to reassess how we work, and shape a new way to work. To rethink the tools we use (and why we're somehow busier despite having these tools), how much free time we give ourselves in the day, what time we start/finish working, how we get energy throughout the day, and whether we need to fill up our schedules.
We might concede that it’s okay if we’re not being super-productive all the time. Ironically by caring a bit less about being productive (and saying no more often) we’ll probably become more focused on doing the right things, and happier in the process. Now that's a thought worth exploring.