Productivity is not always about effort but about personal satisfaction. That’s why, sometimes, the simple fact of taking care of ourselves and giving ourselves what we deserve at a given moment is also a way to be productive and achieve daily goals.
True productivity is not always in achieving a large number of daily goals. Not if we lose our quality of life, health, emotional satisfaction, and psychological balance in each work achievement, so copywriters use ChatGPT and students use essay helper.
We are a society that has always been led to believe that “the more you do, the more you are worth, the more you produce, the more status you acquire.” Perhaps it is time to rethink this concept.
Let’s look up the word productivity in a dictionary. We can find definitions such as ‘the amount of production that a person can generate in a given amount of time and using a given level of effort or energy.’ This idea is easy to understand; however, in real life, few words cause us so many headaches and anxiety.
You can get up at the crack of dawn to complete your workday and go to bed in the wee hours of the morning after completing hundreds of tasks. Yet, even so, you may still feel that the day was not productive at all. Often, not accomplishing what we had set out to do mentally causes us to suffer.
Productivity is not about mathematics but about making 100 sales, getting five new customers, or packing 200 boxes per hour. In reality, this term belongs more to the realm of emotions and subjectivity. You are productive when you feel good about what you achieve every day, whether a lot or a little.
True productivity comes with personal satisfaction
We find a very metaphorical passage in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass. It is the one in which the inhabitants of the Red Queen’s country are forced to run very fast just to stay at the same point. Thus, those who wished to advance in order to reach a particular place had to run faster than the others.
This image established what is known as the Red Queen hypothesis, which allows us to understand that to survive in a given scenario, we must invest more resources and energy than the rest to be efficient and thus guarantee our success or progress.
Something similar happens in the area of productivity. It is not enough to do the same as those around us, we must produce more, faster, and with higher quality. This is the only way to position a company in the market and the only way for workers to prove their worth. Therefore, it is not enough to be busy; we must be “very busy” to give an image of absolute efficiency.
We internalized this idea very early on, and it led us to believe that the more hours we put into that job, occupation, objective, or task, the more valuable we were and the better image we had of ourselves. However, we discovered it sooner or later: being always busy does not bring happiness but inoculates us with dissatisfaction and suffering in many cases.
True productivity is not in how many things you do but in how you feel
True productivity for a writer is not measured in the number of pages written in a day. Rather, it is how satisfied you feel with what you have written, whether it is 20 pages or 5.
Nor should companies measure their productivity in the number of hours worked. Sometimes you don’t need to be in an office for 10 hours to achieve your goals; sometimes, half that is enough.
Work psychology knows that for human capital to be productive, it must feel satisfied. Motivation, a good working environment, companionship, satisfaction, and employee appreciation get the best out of the person and significantly improve the final productivity.
Emotions are those psychic tendons that drive a job well done and the desire to surpass ourselves to achieve greater goals.
Sometimes, doing nothing is also productive
Sometimes, there come moments in our lives when we are forced to stop, to slow down. However, we are so used to filling our time with tasks, goals to achieve, and schedules to meet that putting our lives on pause is a challenge and even a problem.
It is because we have been led to believe that being busy is synonymous with productivity. We have been convinced that time is money and that we must make the most of it by doing things (whatever they are) for at least 25 hours a day. Suddenly, when our reality enters a state of calm, when nothing else is asked of us but to be and to be, something seems wrong with us. We are not being productive!
And yet, we can be. Because sometimes, doing nothing is the best thing you can give yourself. Resting, leading a more leisurely, curious, contemplative, and calm-colored life, is therapeutic.
Giving ourselves what we deserve when we need it, even if we find it hard to believe, is real productivity at certain times. All of this can have an impact on our physical and mental well-being. Let’s keep it in mind.
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