By Trang Nguyen - PhD Candidate Amsterdam UMC
Welcome to part 2 of my take on productivity. Let’s take a step back and ponder why you and I are here, spending time we could never take back talking about a concept so non-essential to survival that it didn’t even exist until three centuries ago.
In a world that glorifies product over people, productivity makes us feel useful, valued and safe. “If only I achieved these goals and met these expectations, I would finally be able to convince the world and myself that I am worthy”. I’m not going to tell you that this thinking is wrong, because it is right in its own way. Our parents and grandparents lived this way too: go to work, get paid, feed and clothe the kids, sing lullabies and fantasize about a better life for the next generations — rinse and repeat. Oh, and don’t forget to not die from infectious diseases. That made them feel productive. And they were. The goalpost was clear, the finish line was concrete.
This is not the case for us. With the birth of the Internet and the bloom of social media which enables constant access to limitless information, the goalpost always moves and the finish line asymptotes the horizon. We can never cross it. We got our masters degree but a friend just defended their PhD. We’ve walked three times this week but a stranger is crushing daily HIIT classes. We will never be productive if we measure productivity by the ratio of what we get done over what we (hypothetically) could or (unjustifiably) should get done. In case you skipped Math classes, any number divided by infinity is equal to zero. But life is not about what should be or could be. It is about what is. And what is is that some day, we just wake up feeling crappy. Maybe we had an emotional dream, maybe our body is fighting an infection, maybe our ex-partners are moving on with the next loves of their lives.
The best we can do is to turn the lemons into … lemon juice. No ice, no sugar, just sour flesh and bitter skin, lukewarm moisture and shivers shooting from the roof of our mouth to the bottom of our feet. It’s horrible, nobody wants it. But remember, we are allowed to not feel ashamed, because we, with the little strength we had, squeezed the lemons. Or threw them at those who tried to convince us otherwise. Or simply left them in the kitchen corner with the rotten half of an onion (recipes that call for half of anything perishable are illegal). We should have and could have raised the funds and made a lemonade stand, but it wasn’t what our body and mind asked of us. It didn’t make sense to our intuition.
However, intuition is not the same as impulsion. I used to work from home a lot, and whenever I felt “urgghh”, I binge-watched Netflix. My eyes got dryer and my brain got more numb. Like a fruit fly trapped in a honey pot, I was suffocating in my comfort zone. This is an impulse, or frankly, just a bad habit. If I had really paid attention, I would have realized that I had been staring at the screen for two hours straight, and that my stiff neck, weakened back and tingling limbs were not asking for Squid Games. Instead, they were asking for movement, sunlight, fresh air, and a scream (because I needed more oxygen in my lungs).
Funny enough, forcing yourself to do more is also a habit. It’s reinforcing this ingrained belief that more is better. Like repetitively opening an empty fridge hoping for snacks to appear, banging your (exhausted) head against the wall isn’t the best way to draw out energy and creativity. So the next time you feel unproductive, ask yourself how you really are feeling physically and emotionally, instead of defaulting to your habitual behavior. Even better, talk or write it out. You probably will feel slightly less stagnant, which is already progress.
You’re still worried that this will turn you into an irresponsible and lazy snob, well, so what? You already think that about yourself, otherwise you wouldn’t be here desperately trying to prove otherwise. Jokes aside, following intuition does not mean abandoning all plans or giving up. You will still plan. You will still try. You will still do your absolute best to avoid your absolute worst. But the plan will be more flexible, the efforts will be more appreciated, and it will be okay to fall anywhere in between your worst and your best.
If you indeed find yourself having achieved literally nothing today, zoom out and take a look at what you’ve achieved this week. If you’ve achieved nothing this week, what about this month? This year? The past five years, ten years, twenty years? Winter-born monarch butterflies spend two months, a fourth of their lifespan, migrating south. They don’t incessantly worry whether they are flying fast enough, they just keep gliding and gliding and gliding until they complete one of the most incredible journeys ever known to life.
Okay, I have “lectured” you long enough, so I’m leaving you with a story. When I was 18, I went through a dark chapter of my life. One evening, while I was sitting alone at a street food stall in Hanoi waiting for my bowl of pho, a stranger asked if he could share the table with me. He grew up in a poor family of five siblings in a small village. He asked where I was from and out of precaution, I lied. We continued to eat our food in silence and after he was done, he said “I got my first paycheck today and I bought my siblings some new clothes. I just didn’t want to eat dinner alone. Thank you.”
Before I could respond, he vanished into the busy traffic. When I tried to pay, the waiter said it had already been taken care of. In the flickering street lights and chaotic honking of hundreds of scooters, I didn’t see or hear him clearly but 9 years later, I still remember him, a stranger from a poor family who paid for my dinner out of his first paycheck. It reminds me that I’ve been blessed in more ways than I can count. That the impact each and every one of us leaves in this world is immeasurable. That what brings us together is not how much “stuff” we produce but the shared human experience of joy and hurt, pride and shame, productivity and otiosity. And the murky pho broth infused with motorbikes’ carbon emissions.
Do you recognize yourself in this article? The PhD advisors are here for you. Get in touch with us for a consultation (phdadvisor@amsterdamumc.nl).