“Productivity Culture” isn’t living up to its promises

A youtube channel for productivity geeks.

Between March 2020, and June 2021, Youtuber James Scholz hosted so-called ‘study with me' live streams on his youtube channel - seemingly numbingly boring videos of himself sitting down to do nothing but study for hours at a time. In the midst of this growing phenomenon, there were a few things that made James Scholz's streams recognisable: the comfortable yellow lighting; the nostalgia of an old, too-large-for-this-world PC monitor; endless sticky notes on the walls; and the somewhat aloof presence of Mika the ginger cat. The most recognisable, however, was just how long these study sessions lasted. 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, 15 months straight.

I was one of the hundreds of thousands of viewers who watched the youtube videos. Stuck at home completing my own university degree remotely, hoping to keep myself accountable for study at a time when libraries were closed and lectures were contained to the same small screen on which I would also follow news, watch movies, and browse social media. So I turned to streamers like James Scholz to provide an experience that I sorely missed (and to see Mika, of course). These videos became the virtual equivalent of going to the library with your friends; they created a sense of accountability and connection we coud share in that was, for a while, lost. James Scholz is not the only Youtube streamer who does this type of thing, but the cosy setup and sheer number of study hours was so impressive that many people tuned into Youtube for the show. The channel had its own community.

Studying alongside James Scholz in his videos with thousands of others, I was, to some extent, impressed by his work ethic. Yet another part of me felt disappointed that this had become my measurement of time well spent: ceaseless hours in a brightly lit room, staring at a screen whilst listening to Youtube videos. Boredom. It began to feel like the culmination of many things that had been brewing in my mind about productivity, the ‘hustle,' and what it all meant.

A book for recovering productivity geeks.

These are some of the questions that Oliver Burkeman tackles in his 2021 release Four Thousand Weeks, the title referring to the number of weeks the average person lives. Burkeman is a long-time writer for The Guardian, having spent over a decade under the now-retired, self-improvement-geared ‘This Column Will Change Your Life'. His new release, unsurprisingly, has a clear, authoritative, but still relatable and occasionally humorous tone that comes from someone who has spent years thinking and writing about productivity. In Four Thousand Weeks, Burkeman wants to reframe productivity culture into a more meaningful exercise in considering what to do with the smallness of our time spent alive. To argue his point, Burkeman takes inspiration from a wide range of sources but feels most comfortable in the company of contemporary psychology and old philosophers.

Burkeman, myself, and many others, became enraptured by the productivity sphere when we first encountered it; I with James Scholz. Ideal morning routines, time tracking, mega-effective note taking systems filled our minds. What once felt exciting, however, started to wear off after a while. We found reasons to stop waking up at 5am to do a workout and meditate before classes: we're exhausted and need sleep; it's too much work; it doesn't matter anyway. And after trying and failing and trying again many of us are now tired of the early mornings and the guilt.

Young people are perhaps not so much products as they are (somewhat) willing participants of online cultures; Youtube, Twitter, Twitch, Tik Toc, etc. Many of us have encounter productivity culture, follow it, and find it valuable; after a while, however, the diamond stops glistening and we find that we are left with a stone in our hands. The stone might be useful for some things, like one piece of a stony pathway, but it is not a diamond.

Oliver Burkeman, a self-professed long-time follower of productivity and hustle culture, shares in Four Thousand Weeks about his own journey with finding the stone and how we might let go of our idea of the diamond. It is the ultimate book for the recovering productivity geek.

Productivity gives the false impression that we can do everything we want; we can become an all-conquering person, never again succumbing to the limitedness that time imposes upon us.

The perils and joys of procrastination.

The key to better time management is, according to Burkeman, to realise that all worries about life stem from its brevity. Life is too unsettlingly short; we must make as much of it as we can. If I am spending too much time on social media, watching streams, or in a low-paying non-descript job that I have no interest in, then I feel like I am wasting that time, and time is immensely valuable.

We also feel like we are losing time on the things we don't do: the experiences we didn't share in and the ambitions that we haven't had the time to get to. That cause that we care about - the environment, caring for our elders, getting involved in our community - but we are too busy to get involved in each day.

Oftentimes, it feels like this stems from that one fire-breathing dragon that we never seem to get control over: procrastination. Procrastination is also a heavily featured character in Four Thousand Weeks, where Burkeman suggests that to get over it we must realise that it actually exists in two forms: the good and the bad.

The good kind of procrastination is what we channel in order to live our lives as we want to live them. That is, we procrastinate - or rather, choose not doing - certain things. It is, after all, by not choosing to do some tasks that we choose to follow others, ones that give our lives much more meaning: developing our hobbies; bonding with loved ones. Not doing good procrastinating results in thinking that you can get everything done, trying to do everything, and endlessly falling into the endless tasks that you now have convinced yourself need to be done. We have to use the good kind of procrastination in order to get on with our lives.

The other kind - the one that more accurately describes what I am doing when I sit for hours on my phone when I had actually planned to study or read that ridiculously long article I've been putting off - is less helpful to us. It also has to do with time. More specifically, the inability to accept the finitude of time and our own limited capabilities. I might be procrastinating because, actually, if I were to face this task I would be confronted with the fact that I have a limited amount of time to do it and it is undoubtedly not going to turn out exactly as I want it to.

There is also the other ‘positive' of endlessly procrastinating: if the end product is not something I am happy about, I can just say that I didn't have enough time for it rather than having to deal with the idea that it might be saying something about my own capabilities. But of course, it is only when we clearly see our weaknesses that we can understand how we may improve them.

The lost promise of productivity culture.

Our obsession with productivity is ultimately an obsession with the unfair unexpectedness of time. Our feelings of anxiety (hurried heartbeats, restlessness) that cause us to procrastinate come from wanting to know with certainty that something will happen. And yet, this is impossible. Burkeman says that the solution is to realise and learn to accept that “insecurity and vulnerability are the default state”.

Taking time to think about why we feel anxious, and not allowing ourselves to run away from the physical sensations of anxiety, may be the solution. After all, “what we think of as ‘distractions' aren't the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They're just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation”. Burkeman's suggestions aren't far off from those offered by mindfulness and meditation: that once we get to know our mind and sit with it, we can start to feel better and make fewer escape-driven choices.

Productivity gives the false impression that we can do everything we want; we can become an all-conquering person, never again succumbing to the limitedness that time imposes upon us. But this is simply not right. “The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control,” Burkeman writes. There will always be the next task, and the one after that, not to speak of the people in our lives that will inevitably disturb us (as they should, Burkeman says, for why is it worth having time to ourselves if we cannot share it with others, too?). Having everything under control is the glistening of the productivity diamond: “we're constantly attempting to master [time] - to channel ourselves into a position of dominance and control over our unfolding lives so that we might finally feel safe and secure, and no longer so vulnerable to events”. Protection from vulnerability is an alluring, but impossible, state.

Is productivity really all bad?

I think Burkeman's list of actions in the appendix (focus on one project at a time; spend more time meditating; etc) echoes something of what Four Thousand Weeks does not mention yet is a very real reason why people take to the productivity mindset. In The Art of Taking Action, Gregg Kech shows how much our life improves when we do less thinking-about-doing and lot more actual-doing. “Action isn't something that comes after figuring things out. Action is a way of figuring things out,” Kech writes. And productivity culture is fast to let us know that it is not ‘thinking about' getting up at 5am, it's all about what to do once the alarm goes off at the start of the day. This can be useful for those prone to overthinking, and might actually be a step towards a less anxious everyday life. Burkeman's suggestion that once you get rid of your unhelpful assumptions about time “you get to roll up your sleeves and start work on what's gloriously possible instead” may become more possible once we find tools that help us do so better, making us feel more confident that we are able to do this work at all. Only as long as we do not let it fool us into thinking that we now have it all ‘under control.'

Besides these issues, I think Four Thousand Weeks holds a lot of value for a culture and its people for whom productivity has become a large part. It is a much needed reflection for a phenomenon that swallows up the lives of many people.

James Scholz stopped streaming.

James Scholz and his streams did not last. For whatever reason, on June 19th, James Scholz stopped streaming, and there was no stream on his channel for the following months. It was in November that the youtube channel started to upload videos once again, this time in much shorter, manageable study sessions. It makes sense to me that this kind of intensive focus on time is never much sustainable in the long term.

It is perhaps unfair to point out James Scholz as a metaphor of the whole of productivity culture, something that is also an industry with its own profit-related motivations and extends beyond the borders of any one individual. But for me, the obsession with productivity that led to the fame of one person for the sake of unbridled focus on the excessively productive use of time felt like a reminder that something had gone missing in our community. This is where Four Thousand Weeks delivers - as a reminder of the only really important productivity question that we need to learn and ask ourselves: “what would it mean to spend the only time you get in a way that truly feels as though you're making it count?”