Are you an overambitious scheduler and a producitivity geek constantly trying to get more efficient, fit more in your schedule, and keep doing more and more? What if I told you that’s counterproductive in itself.
Hello and welcome back to the deep dive series on the Being Meraklis podcast. I am Shwetha Sivaraman, your self-awareness coach, here to help you ask the right questions. In today’s episode, we are going to break down a book on productivity and reflect on a question to deep dive and be more mindfully productive in our day to day lives.
Earlier this year I felt seen by a book that found it’s way in my hands quite by chance. I’ve forever been an overambitious scheduler and a productivity geek constantly trying to get more efficient, fit in more in my schedule, and keep doing doing and doing.
But like the book rightly said “productivity is a trap.” I found myself caught up in a vicious cycle, where the more I became efficient, the more items landed in my to-do lists. No amount of #TimeHacks or #DeepFocus or #DistractionFreeHours helped me process to-do lists thoroughly enough to reach the elusive paradise island of no more tasks to complete.
There are 3 Problems of chasing this elusive efficiency
1. No amount is ever enough
The author calls this “The Efficiency Trap”
“Rendering yourself more efficient – either by implementing various producitivty techniques or by driving yourself harder – won’t generally result in the feeling of having ‘enough time’ because, all else being equial, the demands will increase to offset any benefits. Far from getting things done, you’ll be creating new things to do.”
That definitely defines my last decade of existence.
Try as you might to be to more efficient, you never see the bottom of that to-do list.
Sacrificing the present for an unknown & uncertain future
Eventually the do-do-do cycle leads to a system breakdown. You reach a point where you could do no work let alone more work. Of course, this is a vicious cycle that keeps going on a loop adding more and more pressure to do to arrive at some elusive future destination. But at the cost of taking away energy and attention from the present moment and what is right now.
The author says it beautifully where he says,*“The trouble with attempting to master time is that it ends up mastering you…..It wrenches us out of the present, leading to a life spent leaning into the future, worrying about whether things will work out, experiencing everything in terms of some later, hoped-for benefit, so that peace of mind never quite arrives.”
We constantly pressurise ourselves to arrive at some utopian destination and waiting to feel at peace when we get there only to realise there is no destination or arrival in the offing. Rather, we squander away our precious peace of mind today awaiting for this illusionary destination where we’ll feel at ease and not rushed.
We never pause to live in the present and keep gearing up for some future that will pass us by just as today’s present passes us by, without a moment’s notice.
3. Restlessness
The problem with this never-ending rush to do more is that over time we forget how to do nothing. The restlessness becomes ingrained in our nervous system. I used to have this phases where I’d get anxiety or panic attacks if I’d completed things on a my todo lists some weeks and my calendar was all empty.
The body forgets what its like to do nothing and relax and that causes its own challenges in terms of our stability and composure.
So, here’s the question for all of you listening in, the next time you find your productive streak rushing in to do more in a day, ask yourselves, “To what end are we really rushing?”
To what end? Why is doing all these things important to us? What are we hoping to achive when we complete it? Is it really urgent to do them all right now? Or can a few things wait if its not acutely important right now in this present moment? Rather than being paranoid about doing it all, can we we pause, breathe, connect with ourselves, and do what’s most important with all our presence, involvement, and attention.
The Meraklis Way I keep talking about.
Won’t that be a great way to live this one wild and precious life like Mary Oliver’s The Summer Day poem goes? At least that’s what I’m aspiring to do this year.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down*
*into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,*
*how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,*
*which is what I have been doing all day.*
*Tell me, what else should I have done?*
*Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?*
*Tell me, what is it you plan to do*
*with your one wild and precious life?*
Take time to deep dive, reflect on this questions time and be productive more mindfully. The thoughts in this podcast are reflected from the book 4000 weeks by Oliver Burkeman. Would you like me to share more such reflections from the many books I read? I’m curious to know if you enjoy this format.
This is Shwetha Sivaraman signing off until we meet again, hoping you have a fabulous week ahead.