“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)
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.
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