Throw it off the boat!

I have occasionally been accused of being productive. I don’t consider this a compliment, because in my head I am a Creative Artiste who dwells in metaphor and muses on the human condition. I am a FREE-SPIRIT, not a cog in the machine!

<mumble>I just happen to sorta have a corporate job that takes the concept of productivity seriously<mumble>.

I have now been away from the U.S. long enough to unlearn the idea that productivity is in any way tied to my self-worth. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had to talk people (usually, sadly, women and people of color) off the ledge where they think their situation will somehow change if they just work harder. Gotta tell you, throwing yourself repeatedly into a wall of reinforced concrete doesn’t move the wall.

This last week was hectic. The kind of hectic that meant on Friday I took a grand total of 10 trains, traveling a total of 80 miles, according to Google Maps. That day, I had a big presentation at work, had to view two different apartments on opposite sides of London, and then catch a train to Oxford for the weekend. Oxford continues to be delightful, BTW, more on that next week:

As I navigated my “productive” Friday, I realized I do have a secret to my productivity. It’s not doing more.

It’s doing less.

Imagine you’re on a boat, rowing along towards your destination. All of a sudden, you’re told you need to add a stop and pick up some supplies. But you still need to get to your destination on time. How are you going to do it?

• Option 1: Argue, and try to either avoid the new stop or ask for an extension.

• Option 2: Do the stop, pick up supplies, and row faster to make up for lost time.

Most people do either Option 1 or Option 2.

Option 1 is almost always useless. The new stop wouldn’t have been added if it wasn’t important. Asking for an extension is also useless, because there are downstream consequences to your being late. Incidentally, this is something that happens a lot in the workplace. You’re thrown a curveball and asked to roll with it. Any time you spend arguing about the curveball’s unfairness is a waste.

Option 2 is also useless. Let’s say you somehow do it. You add the new appointment to your schedule, so now you can squeeze in that coffee with Friend 1 before you dash over to work for the presentation, and you already paid for the gym class so you do that too. And then you end up sick, exhausted, and unable to do anything for the next three days. Congratulations.

I’d like to offer Option 3: Throw something off the boat.

This last week was an exercise in constantly figuring out what I could throw off the boat. I canceled a music lesson and a gym session, although they were paid for. I was slower to respond to people’s emails than usual. On Friday, when a real estate agent called with an exploding offer and asked if I could see an apartment in 30 minutes, I decided writing this Substack could wait a day. I went with a protein shake, rather than a full lunch. I decided the work presentation was good enough, even if it might have been better with another hour’s work. I kept asking myself, “What’s one less thing I can do today?”

It’s easy, when we’re stressed, to mistake effort for results. We’re stressed about something, so we spend all this time and energy on it, but that doesn’t change the outcome. Whether it’s a work project or a novel, we can get caught up in this notion that if we just did one more thing, it’ll get us the results we want. As if spending a little more time editing, or polishing, or even praying, means the universe in some notion of fairness will reward us for our greater effort. Maybe it’s a holdover from schooldays, where people would cram until the last minute for an exam, just in case the thing we learned in the hallway waiting to go into the classroom to take the test was the thing that was going to make all the difference.

When I was in school, though, there was exactly one thing that made a difference when it came to how I did on a test – how much sleep I got the night before. This meant that on the night before an exam, the one thing that was a hard constraint was bedtime. I was going to study what I could until bedtime. Everything else got thrown off the boat. Hopefully it wouldn’t be on the test. If it was, too bad.

In other words, the secret to my so-called productivity is simple: ruthless prioritization. And I mean that in every sphere, not just time. I can travel for a long time with a tiny carry-on. Since all my clothes are color-matched, that’s one less thing to think about. And sure, on a regular day, I’d love to go through a full 6-step skincare routine, and maybe bother with lipstick, but if necessary, I can be done in 5 minutes. Moisturizer, sunscreen; everything else gets thrown off the boat.

I hadn’t realized until last week how constantly I ask myself the question: What’s one less thing I can do?” Put another way, rather than exert pressure on myself to do more within the same time, I look for the give in the system and cut myself slack. So I’m not really productive. I’m just a girl, sitting in a boat, looking for more things to throw out of it.