Our desperate attempt to be fully productive and efficient is ruining our ability to have fun
This article is gonna be a some sort of an analysis on how wanting to be productive and efficient at all times can ruin the few moments we have for ourselves when we’re supposed to relax and have fun.
It is no secret to anyone that our society is focused, at least nowadays, on consumerism. We want to consume as much as possible from everything we can, and one thing that stands out is content. We want content. As much of it as possible.
If you’re like me and you spend a big part of your time in front of your computer, then you know exactly what I’m talking about. The amount of videos that are being uploaded on YouTube is insane, the mount of articles that are published online every single day is incredible, and this applies to a lot of other types of content.
This not only makes consuming all that content really hard, but it also makes creating content an incredibly complicated matter.
We don’t compete with friends or family, we don’t even compete with a few people we don’t know. We’re competing with everyone out there who creates content, and it is overwhelming.
You have to create content that is better than most of what’s there, or you will simply be ignored by consumers. Why would they pay attention to you, and what you do, when there’s something better out there?
And just like that, the creation of content, the importance of being productive and efficient became a huge priority in the life of those who want to create, one that is slowly ruining other things for us. I know it does for me.
It’s upsetting, and it’s incredibly annoying. But before we discuss exactly what this kind of obsession with productivity and efficiency does to us, let’s start with discussing what productivity is, and why we try so hard to be productive.
Addicted to productivity
I just did a little bit of research on Google and it turns out that around 300 to 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every single minute. Yes, I said minute. It means that, if there are 1440 minutes in a day, the total number of hours of video uploaded every single day on YouTube would be 720,000 hours.
That’s insane.
And what’s even worse is that if you decide to upload one video on YouTube, you have to remember that you’re uploading a 10 minute video alongside around 720,000 hours of video that other people are uploading.
To a certain degree, this applies to a lot of other websites and types of content.
I couldn’t find an exact number of articles that are being published on Medium on a daily basis for example, but I’d guess that the number is quite high.
No matter where you look, the amount of content that is being created and uploaded on multiple platforms is insane, and to think that your content has any chance of receiving attention just because that’s what you hope it will happen, is just a little bit insane.
And yet, we still believe it.
We believe that despite the huge amount of content that is being shared online every single day, ours will stand out somehow, and we’ll receive the attention we deserve.
And it sometimes happen. We have so many examples of people who “did it”, who got there, up there, where we want to be, who get thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of views whenever they put something online, that we get motivated to try as well.
The problem is that once we get into the “race” we realize that there’s a lot more to this “content creation” thing we wanted to do. You have to be consistent. You need to create high quality content. You need to give it for free for a long time before even expecting to get attention or money.
You need to compete with others for that attention you so much desire.
All that means that wasting hours and hours every single day playing videogames or watching TV shows or reading manga or watching Anime or anything else you’ve been doing so far, has to stop.
Okay, maybe not stop, but you have to set time aside and invest it into creating content. You just can’t waste all your time anymore, not if you want to make something good and get attention.
You need to create as much high quality content as you can, so you start reading about productivity. The word that’s gonna become a part of you and your thoughts for a very long time.
Being productive, according to the Cambridge Dictionary, means:
With emphasis on “large amounts or supply of something”. Large amounts.
Being productive (at least for a someone who wants to make content) means creating. It means investing time into a process that, once done, will result into a product that can be sold or consumed by others.
It means doing.
And doing requires time, time that you have to take away from other things and put into work.
We read books about how to do this, we watch long videos about how to be productive, and we try our best to achieve this state of “full productivity” in which we just become some sort of a productivity machine that doesn’t eat, doesn’t drink, doesn’t sleep, but just creates.
We use agendas, to-do lists, software designed to stop us from doing anything else online other than working, all kind of things. We even begin to blame other things, like phones, or friends, or family, for interrupting us from our productivity cycle.
Productivity becomes an addiction.
We set a time at which to wake up, and we plan our next day before we even go to sleep. We know what we’ll eat in the morning, what type of coffee to drink, when to start work, when to take a bathroom break, when to respond to e-mails, when to take the dog out, when to work again, when to cook and exactly what and how, in order to not waste time.
Time becomes an enemy, but also a resource that has to be managed extremely well. Those who can achieve that, can achieve anything.
We have to fight against ourselves in order to work, but that’s okay, because nothing else is as important as productivity.
But then, we encounter our biggest enemy, the one that goes against our newly found passion, a mistress that we so much hate yet love with all our heart.
Procrastination.
The beloved yet hated mistress — Procrastination
Productivity comes at a price. You have to sacrifice the things you did to have fun before, and let them behind you, so you can achieve your full potential.
But after days, weeks, months or even years of being as productive as you can possibly be, you burn out. You cannot stand it anymore.
I said productivity is an addiction because it sometimes feels like one. You know you need to stop, but you can’t. You know you need to take a break, but who’s gonna take care of all that work if you stop? You know it’s not healthy sometimes, but you must keep going.
Until something in your mind snaps, and you cannot continue anymore. Your entire body and mind rebels against that little part of you that wants to just write another article, or create another video.
And out of the shadows, out of nowhere, a beautiful, sweet mistress appears, ready to hug you and tell you that everything’s okay, ready to take the bad and replace it with good, ready to relieve you of all the stress.
Suddenly, all the things you once abandoned come back to you, little by little, and they once again befriend you.
Playing videogames for 8 hours a day becomes fun again.
Watching all the seasons Breaking Bad has to offer feel amazing. Who doesn’t enjoy walking around the house telling plants that you’re the one who knocks?
Movies? You always loved those! It’s finally time to watch 8 of them!
And that keeps going for a while.
The sweet procrastination is gently keeping you distracted, and makes sure you have a lot of fun.
All that, until you come to your senses. What have you been doing all this time? You haven’t been working at all for the past two weeks! You didn’t publish an article, didn’t upload a video, nothing!
And at that point, the struggle begins.
This is how procrastination is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary:
Everyone hates but loves to procrastinate.
It feels good in the moment, especially if you’re having tons of fun, but the realization that you spent all your time on unproductive things the entire day, and that you didn’t work on anything for a long time when you should’ve, makes us feel bad, sometimes ashamed of ourselves, or even angry.
It’s hard not to procrastinate, especially after a long period of time spent working. You need to take a break, but you also need to work.
And then a war starts within you, one in which you’re constantly forced to pick a side — procrastinate and waste hours on nothing important, but have fun, or work, be productive, and create valuable content, but tire yourself even more.
Procrastination became the enemy of everyone, yet a secret lover we all keep close to us.
There are thousands if not millions of videos on YouTube and articles online about how to stop procrastinating, how to avoid it, and how to just work, to be productive.
Everyone has a solution, a way of getting rid of this annoying yet lovely distraction that keeps us from what we should be doing.
Procrastination is, just like productivity, similar to an addiction. You know it’s bad. You know you should stop. And yet you still do it. You still spend hours doing nothing, just to feel horrible at the end.
This fight keeps on going for weeks, months or even more, until you find an escape, a term that is about to change the way you do things, a word that can solve all your problems, and allow you to do it all, without feeling miserable.
Our salvation — Efficiency
Efficiency is the solution to our problem.
It’s a way to both enjoy the rewards of productivity, but to delight in the laziness of procrastination.
It’s a way to combine work, with relaxation.
To do, and to not.
But how do we use this efficiency? How do we become efficient?
That’s another topic for which you can find thousands of videos and articles online. Everyone wants to be productive and efficient. It’s the new “trend”.
Being able to work a lot, and to produce a lot of content is great, but being able to do it quickly, so you can also have some time for yourself that you can spend doing whatever you want, that’s the goal. That’s what everyone should strive for.
And efficiency is what we begin learning about.
We discover that we can write articles a lot quicker if we learn how to type faster.
We discover that we can edit our videos a lot quicker if we start learning a bunch of shortcuts and tips that can improve our workflow.
We discover that we can edit our images better by using Actions in Photoshop to do small things for us so we can finish work faster.
We create so many ways to improve the way we work that we end up thinking more about efficiency than the actual content that has to be created.
And it’s fun as f*ck!
Being able to write an article in 15 minutes compared to 30 simply because you learned how to type a little faster is amazing.
Being able to edit things in Photoshop at an incredible speed because now you have 15 shortcuts that you know and 25 different actions that you use for all kind of small things is unbelievable!
And, the result is exactly what you hoped for — you get more free time for yourself!
Because of your newly acquired skills or/and knowledge, now you can finish your work a lot faster than before! You don’t have to wake up at 6 in the morning and work constantly until midnight! You can finish everything you do in 4 to 6 hours and have the rest of your day off.
Efficiency is great! We use 10 different agendas for our to-do lists, we installed only 20 new pieces of software on our computer in order to improve our workflow, we look at the clock every 2.5 seconds in order to make sure we optimize our time as well as possible, and we learn shortcuts like our life depends on it. We don’t even use a mouse anymore. Who even does?!?!?!?!?
And everything goes well, for a while.
We love that we can work better and faster, and we also love that we can relax and spend time doing things we like.
Until we realize that if we would spend just a little bit more time working, using our new strategies and efficiency tricks, we could create so much more content.
How much more content?
A lot more!!!!
The loop
And that’s how we enter our self created loop.
We want productivity, because it helps us achieve amazing things that we’re proud of.
Working too much however makes us feel bad sometimes, and it’s not as healthy as we’d like it to be. We lose our energy, we lose sleep, and we lose interest in what we so much loved to do.
So we procrastinate.
It’s not good to do so, and we know it. It’s good for us, for our bodies, but not for our work. We waste time, and time is a resource. It shouldn’t be wasted, but exploited.
Procrastinating feels so bad, yet so good.
In an attempt to balance everything, we learn to be efficient, to work better, smarter, not harder. We eventually get to a point where we can create more, a lot more, in less time.
And then we start the loop.
We can create more, now that we’re efficient, if we’d spend more time working.
But how much time should we take away from our relaxation and invest into productivity?
Just a little, at first, and more as the days and weeks pass. After all, since we acquired this ability, why not use it?
And we keep doing that until we get where we started.
We’re tired, bored, and we don’t have energy anymore. We want to work, but we just can’t. We begin to procrastinate, we waste time, and we feel horrible about it. Then we become more efficient, and everything gets better. We can work better, faster, get more things done, and have a bunch of time for ourselves.
But how much more can we achieve, if we’d spend just a little bit of extra time working?
Dissatisfaction
Not being satisfied becomes a part of our life.
An ugly one.
We will never be able to do as much as we’d like to do.
We’re just never gonna be as good as those incredible people on YouTube.
Gary Vee? Is there anyone who could achieve the same level of productivity and efficiency? That guy is a machine. We’ll never be as good.
Casey Neistat? It’s impossible to make such great videos without spending all your time working. You must be dedicated. Too dedicated.
Matt D’Avella? No, I like to actually have stuff in my house. And yet having so much gear? And editing so much? And taking so many shots? Are you insane?
(I’m kidding, calm down!)
You get the point.
This never-ending chase for productivity, this never-ending chase for the avoidance of procrastination, this never-ending chase for efficiency, all that slowly makes us unable to enjoy the fun things in life.
Things you loved before are placed under a question mark, and you start to wonder if they are really worth your time.
Should you relax?
Should you watch a TV show?
Should you play videogames?
Should you spend time with friends?
After all, if you think about it, whenever you spend time doing something other than working, you waste time that could’ve been invested into doing more.
And I think that this kind of mentality is “affecting” a lot more people than we’d like to admit.
We’re obsessed with being productive. We want to do more, and more, and more, because we have to. Otherwise, we’re left behind. The content we don’t create is content that can’t get to an audience, and because of that the attention we so hope to get will go to those who can be more productive than us.
We stop enjoying the small things in life, especially if they take too much of our time, because we just want to do more, just a little bit more.
I’m not gonna come up with a solution because, to be honest, I don’t have one.
To be even more honest, I’m part of the “problem”. I spend 3 hours playing a game after coming home from work and I think to myself “Wow, I could’ve coded so much in this time” or “I could write and publish an article instead of playing right now”, and so on.
Watching a movie is a commitment now. Two hours??? No one has two hours to watch a movie.
This is just a simple, (hopefully) fun and at the same time boring analysis of this kinda sad reality that we have to face, of the fact that our desperate attempt to be fully productive and efficient is ruining our ability to have fun.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have food to eat, 3 videos to watch on YouTube that have been waiting for me for like 2 hours, and I really, really have to play some The Witcher 3. Again.
Thanks for reading. Bye!
