How to Be Productive, By Someone Who Isn’t Particularly

“Do you think I sit around doing nothing? I haven’t had a chance to sit around and do nothing since the day I arrive in Camelot. I’m too busy running around after Arthur – ‘Do this, Merlin!’ ‘Do that, Merlin!’ – and when I’m not running around after Arthur, I’m doing chores for you, and when I’m not doing that, I’m fulfilling my destiny!”

Merlin S2 E2, ‘The Once and Future Queen’ (2009)

 

Look at all the work you’re not doing because you’re reading my blog instead! Terribly kind of you.

And so we’ve reached October. The leaves are beginning their yearly chromatic transformation, I’ve started wearing my warm coat on a regular basis, and the new academic year is well and truly underway. Done with are the course admin, timetabling hiccoughs, and introductory lectures: from now on it’s down to the real business of doing what’s necessary to obtain a degree. And that means finding the willpower to actually spend one’s time doing work instead of throwing it away on some less-than-crucial, secondary endeavour like, I don’t know, writing a weekly blog.

If you’re expecting this post to be a list of highly practical hints and tips for maximising motivation and avoiding procrastination, I’m afraid you’re going to be rather disappointed, O Understandably Mistaken Reader. For one thing, I’d hardly be the best person to ask for such a list; I very much doubt that I have any more skill at maximising motivation and avoiding procrastination than your average twenty-first-century arts student. More importantly, however, what I actually want to do in what follows is challenge the understanding of productivity that such a list would imply, were it to be this post’s major component.

Have you ever had a conversation in which you’ve asked how someone’s day is going and he or she has replied purely in terms of what he or she has got done during it so far? I have. Often. “How was your morning?” I ask, and my friend replies with something to the effect of, “Not too bad – quite productive; I wrote a bit more of my essay and replied to a whole bunch of emails.” Or, “What have you been up to today?” I ask, and my friend replies with something to the effect of, “Ugh. Nothing. I’ve just been bingeing on The Littlest Elf¹ in my room. I feel so unproductive.”

From the way we talk about it, it would appear that getting things done – academic work as a first priority, but also admin, household tasks, society-related obligations, and so forth – were the primary measure for the meaningful worth of a day. Never mind our physical, mental, or spiritual wellbeing: what matters is whether we’re getting things done. And productivity, defined in this sense, is upheld as the goal for which we should be striving, so that all day long, we’re either getting things done or feeling guilty for not getting things done. I’d consider it a sinful side effect of the setup of university life: few contact hours and mountains of work to do outside them, coupled with our first steps into real responsibility for looking after ourselves, and more extra-curricular opportunities than we’ve ever encountered before,² together result in us having both abnormally large amounts of time to do things, and abnormally large amounts of things to do. Thence springs the notion that we need to be deploying the former as efficiently as possible to get done the latter, and the feeling of failure if our efficiency is less than it could be.

I call the getting things done mindset sinful because I think it’s idolatry. Getting things done becomes the most important thing, the thing against which I measure myself, the thing according to which I define my life and in which I find my assurance that I’m doing all right. Cue the alarm bells: Productivity, in this sense, has become my god.³ Every decision I make based on the ultimate goal of getting things done to the greatest extent possible, represents an offering at her altar. Every time I talk about my day as if its value were contained in how much I get done, represents a nod to the praise of her name. Every time I feel guilty for procrastinating simply because I haven’t got done as much as I could have, and consequently resolve to procrastinate less in future, represents a repentance at her feet.

Like all idols, though, Productivity, in the end, proves to be nothing. The following chunk of Isaiah is an address to idols:

Set forth your case, says the Lord; bring your proofs, says the King of Jacob.

Let them bring them, and tell us what is to happen. Tell us the former things, what they are, that we may consider them, that we may know their outcome; or declare to us the things to come.

Tell us what is to come hereafter, that we may know that you are gods; do good, or do harm, that we may be dismayed and terrified.

Behold, you are nothing, and your work is less than nothing; an abomination is he who chooses you.⁴

Can Productivity explain the past or the future? Can she bless me for my dedication to her, or curse me for my lack of it? Can she actually do anything? Or is she, like all idols, something I have created within my own mind as an insultingly inferior alternative to the one true living God, who alone knows all things, sustains the existence of all things, and holds all things to account? Productivity is nothing, and her work is less than nothing, and an abomination is the one who chooses her. And in this scenario, I’m afraid that’s my very own sinful self. I too really would be less than nothing and worthy of ultimate punishment without God’s phenomenal grace to forgive me through the death of my Saviour Jesus Christ.

So what does it look like, having identified the sin and repented of it, to tear down and annihilate my altar to Productivity? Well, for a start, it’s certainly not about doing less work and procrastinating more: Proverbs, for instance, has plenty to say about laziness, and none of it’s positive.⁵ That’s not, of course, to say that a failure to get things done must be symptomatic of laziness: such an attitude actually upholds the status of getting things done as a measure of worth. Productivity is an uncaring master to serve: she demands results, and doesn’t care a jot about the nuances of the situation. As just one example, a very good friend of mine suffers from a chronic illness and is forced, some days, to spend almost all of her precious little energy simply on keeping herself functioning⁶ – but there’s no room for that in the getting things done mindset. To strip Productivity of her deity in my imagination, we need to detach the issue of where the worth of any given day lies, from how much has been got done during that day.

God’s purpose for us, after all, isn’t that we achieve tasks, that we tick off a to-do list, that we efficiently fill our time with activities the world considers valuable. It’s that we become more like Christ Jesus. Check out the following chunk of that old favourite of mine, Romans 8:

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.⁷

Today, or any other day, is not a good day because I got things done, or a bad day because I didn’t. If our good and our Christlikeness are one and the same thing, as is made clear in the above verses, then a good day is one in which I go to bed as a person who is a bit more like Jesus than I was when I woke up. How much I got done is suddenly irrelevant; it’s much more a question of whether I did what I did in submission to God’s purpose of conforming me to the image of his Son.

In the end, after all, productivity is only as valuable as the thing that’s being produced. One can be as productive as one likes, but if what one is producing is worthless, what does the vastness of the quantity in which it is produced matter? What God, in his grace, is interested in producing in us, is Christlikeness; that’s what will last, in the end. So let’s leave aside our obsession with getting things done, repent of our idolatry of Productivity, and focus on better knowing God that we might become more like him; that, my friends, is How to Be Productive in the only way that really matters.

Footnotes

¹ I used The Littlest Elf as a generic term for a piece of entertainment in ‘Catch-Up Culture’ last month; it’s fulfilling the same role here.

² My university now has over two hundred student societies, https://www.exeterguild.org/societies/, so it’s not exactly hard to find ways to fill one’s time even outside of academic, administrative, and domestic necessities.

³ I here flesh out an idea I first expressed in ‘Ten British Authors Who Shaped My Childhood’, in the box on the right under ‘2015’, then ‘September’. Goodness me, that was over a year ago now.

⁴ Here’s the whole chapter, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah+41&version=ESVUK, though you’d perhaps do better to flick through a paper copy of the last third or so of Isaiah and look for all the bits that talk about how pointless idols are. I picked this particular chunk more because it showed up a couple of times during my week and so was coincidentally on my mind than because it’s categorically the best passage for the purpose.

⁵ We had a copy of the Good News translation at home when I was younger, and I especially liked Proverbs 26:13: “Why don’t lazy people ever get out of the house? What are they afraid of? Lions?”

⁶ The illness in question is lupus, which I hadn’t heard of myself before she told me about it, so, on the off-chance that you might be in the same boat, here’s your daily dose of extra-curricular education, courtesy of the NHS: http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/Lupus/Pages/Introduction.aspx.

⁷ I love this chapter so much: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=romans+8&version=ESVUK.