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Sorry, But You’re Never Going To Be A Productivity Machine
When did we stop treating ourselves like human beings, anyway?
Have you noticed something odd about the way we talk about productivity, lately? Do you ever feel like you’ve got two brains inside your head — one for normal human life, and one for “maximum productivity?”
This article is partly a typical reaching out of one person to others and partly an open letter to myself. At age 24, I’m a certified member of the gig economy. Like many other creatives, I have embraced my identity as part of the “self-help generation” with at times unhinged abandon.
Consuming article after article and ebook after ebook about writing, working, making, and living at maximum productivity has had a pretty profound impact on the way I approach my life.
More importantly — and this is where you should start to pay attention, my dear readers — it’s had a powerful impact on the way I approach myself. I’m willing to bet that the same holds true for a lot of you, too.
So, when did we stop treating ourselves like beautifully fallible human beings — complete with our time-wasting, daydreaming, off-drifting imperfections — and start acting as though we’re merely organic machines made of separate parts?
