The Vulgarity of Productivity

Two months ago, my wife was diagnosed with brain cancer. I will forever remember the moment when she called me from the hospital to tell me that they had found a tumor. This was followed by an odd greasy sensation in my mind; the word tumor was picking up currency and ricocheting off the walls, picking up more words along with it: Wife. Love. Life. Science. Medicine. Death. Our son.

My thoughts were already racing, latching onto the idea that cancer is very treatable these days, we can beat this, and if I can just provide enough support, she’ll be fine. Trickles of hope flashed at the periphery as the blueprint of a plan started to take shape.

But then all of a sudden, the stakes were made clear to me, and my mind crashed headfirst into the worst-case scenario. The momentum of the plan violently stalled and I had to fight to re-focus on the rest of the conversation.

As I write this, my wife is recovering from a successful surgery and she is now poised to go through a combination of chemo and radiation. But that red-letter moment in my life continues to command attention and inform my still smoldering and evolving worldview.

For the longest time, I have held that some workplaces are so wrapped up in productivity, often bolstered by the craven need for metrics, that quality and substance seem to have been completely excised from business activity. Indeed, sometimes it appears better to produce a useless thing than to spend more time thinking issues through. The result is often a neurotic workplace, in which people are stuck producing nonsense and lackluster managers are more likely to reward the production of a nonsense thing, as it’s evidence of why the respective employee deserves to be paid, than merit the idea that good thought takes time. For the employee, nonsense things help them fill their time until they can check out.

This snippet of work life helps to demonstrate that people typically are focused on maximizing short-term accomplishments as a demonstration of their worth, and to demonstrate that they can multitask in moments of madness to do do do, go go go, and show their workplace why they deserve to ascend the corporate ladder. For the record, I’m not opposed to this—work does need to get done—but this behavior in the long term does not benefit a person or a company.

Upon reflection, my response to hearing the awful news from my wife has left me feeling that the nonstop, go go go, do do do that many professionals feel is actually a survival mechanism. My mind desperately tried to throw a plan together as a means for me to stay functional and prevent me from being at the mercy of my emotions. In the face of issues, or worse, a crisis, there is nothing worse than inertia. To stay sitting in the house while it burns down around you is not a comfortable feeling. So maybe the reason why many of us struggle to turn off our nonstop planning is really us just trying to survive the onslaught of perceived assaults against our well-being. It took a real crisis for me to figure this out.

But how could work be assaulting your well-being? Work provides for your well-being, financial stability, and in the U.S., health insurance. Therefore, any insecurity at work lends itself to feeling like those things are in jeopardy. Why would people feel insecure at work? Because they’re stuck in go go go, do do do mode; they're trying to survive.

Survival mechanisms are only effective in the right context—that is, briefly experienced during a moment of peril to promote survival. An elevated frequency of these mechanisms in what should be relaxed and innocuous situations quickly starts to look like an anxiety or stress disorder.

It goes without saying that workplaces should not be reinforcing neurotic notions of productivity, but anytime you find yourself in that crazed state of mind, desperate to produce, sit back and examine the issues. If all issues are always of the utmost importance, you are probably burning out and locked in survival mode. If your workplace makes no distinction between day-to-day issues and crises, then they’re not doing their employees any favors.

Just remember that you also have control over how those issues are experienced.

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