“Productivity” is About More than Just Your Performance at Work

I’ve been hearing an increasing amount about what’s wrong with capitalism. Which I think is great, because my most-favorite economic system has its share of modern implementation problems that need solutions. But I hear a lot of complaints about productivity and self-help, like…

• “Productivity was made up to support capitalism.”
• “We are forced to be productive by the capitalist system.”
• “Humans don’t need to be productive to have value.”

It drives me up the wall.

I understand why people express this sentiment. Most modern productivity advice seems to be designed to get already overworked employees to put in even more hours. Even books that are ostensibly about how to rest and relax still assume you are learning how to rest and relax because it will somehow make you better at work. Yikes.

No doubt this is a consequence of the fact that the primary source of funding for psychological research into productivity comes from the HR departments of Fortune 500 companies.¹ But just because our corporate overlords would like us to use productivity knowledge to serve their profit machine, doesn’t mean that’s the only application for the knowledge.

Productivity Predates Capitalism

First, consider that productivity was important long before economics was an area of study. Unproductive hunter-gatherers didn’t find enough food and starved to death. Unproductive warriors were not as adept as their enemies and were stabbed through the chest. Unproductive nations were conquered by other nations. Productivity is not a concept invented to oppress people, it is an acknowledgement of a basic reality about organic life: to continue living, we must constantly perform work to ensure we will continue to live, or we will die.

But we’re lucky enough to be born in an era of human progress where, for the first time in human history, most of us are living above the survival level. How does productivity affect us when our very survival is not endangered by our lack of it?

Well, most societies are structured such that people are forced to continue working, regardless of whether the society has enough to provide for everyone. This is what gives rise to a lot of the complaints about productivity — it’s ridiculous to breathe down the neck of a store cashier about how many people they cash out per hour when a Universal Basic Income program could easily provide a life of dignity for everyone without affecting the quality of life of people at the top.

The blatant injustice in our economic system gives her manager’s huffy questions about “productivity” a sinister context.

But productivity advice can be helpful for you, not just for those at the top of the system.

See, everything out there about “productivity,” from productivity hacks to self-help books to kitschy human resources suggestions, is really just about how to help you achieve your goals. The cashier’s manager wants her goal to be to cash more people at work per hour, but she has the freedom to make a goal out of whatever she wants.

Maybe she wants to quit her job and travel the country in a camper van. Productivity advice can help her figure out how to organize her camper van search and get the best deal on a camper. Self-help can help her stay motivated, make a realistic financial plan, and eventually, assertively tell her boss why he’s a terrible boss when she puts in her two weeks notice. Productivity advice can also help her organize the tedious process of applying for Medicaid with the state (because partially employed camper van travelers don’t have employers to provide insurance plans).

Productivity can be about more than making your boss happy.

Productivity Would Still Exist Without Capitalism

Even if we lived in a just society where everyone was afforded a life of dignity, regardless of economic value, productivity and self-help literature would still have a place in society because we need a purpose for our mental health.

We humans don’t thrive when we sit around doing nothing. When we make nothing of ourselves, we suffer psychologically. It’s important for our mental health to aspire to things (and occasionally achieve them) regardless of their “external” value. Therapists encourage us to celebrate the victories in our life, whether they’re running a 5K or just walking around the block that day, because that taps into our fundamental need for accomplishment.

Even in an economically utopian society, productivity and self-help would still exist because people would still want to achieve things. We would still want to take care of our mental health or start food gardens or learn how to play the guitar. We would still want to grow.

People assume I’m a productivity writer because I want to help others succeed at their white-collar software engineering jobs or something, but nothing could be farther from the truth. My love for productivity and self-help was inspired by the realization that if I mastered myself, I might be able to escape the modern-day hell known as a “9 to 5.”

Even before I reached employment age, I knew I wasn’t cut out for 9 to 5 life and that I had to come up with an unconventional way to make money.² So I read productivity and self-help books like my life depended on it.

My hope, is that you come away from the productivity hacks intending not to use them to make your bosses happy, but to improve your life the way you want. Be that to build a camper van by hand or just finally plant a few tomatoes in the backyard. As Uncle Iroh said in Avatar The Last Airbender, “Who are you? And what do you want?”

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1: I have no formal citation for this claim. This is purely an anecdotal claim. While it is based on having read hundreds of books and seen countless instances of HR departments commissioning studies cited in those books, it’s not a formal statistic.

2: I know this sounds dramatic to most people who work 9–5 jobs, but I’m just not cut out for it. You can blame mental illness, you can blame my autism sensory issues, you can blame it on character flaws of mine, but the cold hard reality is that putting me in one building from 9 AM to 5 PM every day for 5 days a week is a great way to destroy my mental health. I can read 100 books a year, I can write 5 articles a week, I can build an entire camper van by hand (and do it again), but I can’t sit in an office 40 hours a week in slacks. I’m a great fish, but fish can’t climb trees.