The Illusion of Productivity
How do you like to convince yourself you're being productive?
Have you ever been hit by the feeling of uselessness, or that you're wasting your time being idle? This is something that comes around every now and again for me, and I'm sure for most of the population.
I might have a day or two to myself and earlier in the week I had planned to spend that time maybe learning something new, or reading that book that's been sitting on my desk for the last month unopened.
When it finally comes to that time I've been waiting for, nothing. I've no motivation, no direction, and sometimes no actual intention to do any of those things I wish I could do when I had free time even though that free time is right there in front of me.
What happens instead? I'll end up browsing some socials looking for a topic or technology to dive into, check emails, LinkedIn and convince myself this is being productive. Rock bottom is when I open a video course from the backlog that hasn't been opened since I bought it 2 years ago on sale.
Why do I do this? I've been thinking about this a lot recently. Mainly to confront this behavior and do my best to leave it behind as best as I can, but really to try understand what it actually is and claim back my time.
I've realized, it's the illusion of productivity.
Blindly following a video tutorial on some new programming language you want to pick up instead of just getting stuck into the docs and building something. Convincing yourself that you're making good use of your time because you're watching something educational.
It's bullshit, the quicker you confront this the better. Don't waste your time by forcing yourself to do something you're giving barely 5% attention to. Better yet, it's fine to do nothing instead, be comfortable being idle.