This is not a guide on how to be productive. This is not “part one” of a series where I turn myself into some kind of lifestyle guru. These are just some of my own personal observations as someone who has spent about eight years or so constantly “grinding” and experimenting to find the most efficient way to spend my time. I’m here to analyze ‘productivity’ as a social phenomenon and use my own experiences as a frame of reference to highlight the absolute insanity going on in our culture and what’s causing it. If there’s any takeaway you as the reader should get from this article, it’s being able to see a challenge to the ideology and mentalities that we take for granted when it comes to this subject.

Now, a lot of what I’m going to say here has already been discussed some of the more niche blogs I follow, but I think there’s room to bring this discussion to a wider audience. So, consider this my own two cents being thrown in to help boost the discussion.

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If there was one thing which kept me from falling off the deep end when I started, it was the fact that I was not turning to influencers or self-help books for advice. Instead, I tried to develop my routine with good-old trial-and-error and consulted close friends who were more experienced than me for suggestions.

So, it’s always a bit surreal to step into this world of productivity content. Take for example what happened earlier this week. Fitness influencer Ashton Hall went viral after he posted an absolutely unhinged “morning routine” video.

It really has to be seen to be believed.

Nothing about the timeline he presents in the video makes sense. Taking six hours to accomplish what amounts to nothing, him spending four minutes levitating in the air somehow, reading a book for under a minute, and his affinity for rubbing banana peels on his face. It genuinely plays out like a parody of its own genre.

But it only hits so hard because this exact style of video is so common as of late. The whole thing comes across as absurd what it is depicting is absurd: for a guy whose so focused on showing off how he “gets stuff done”, you never actually figure out what it is he actually does.

There’s a name for this type of content and it’s called “productivity porn”.

Productivity porn is anything that after having been consumed makes you feel like you were productive when in reality you didn’t actually do anything. Just like regular pornography it stimulates you without even performing the act. It is a hollow imitation of the real thing.

It doesn’t just have to be cartoonish influencer videos. Anything which acts as a simulation of accomplishment can fall under “productivity porn”. I’ve fallen into some of these other traps, such as searching up and curating lists of books I plan to read, but then never actually bothering to read them.

Examples of productivity porn include but are not limited to: reading a tweet by a top VC about how to become a better startup founder; watching a Youtube video about the 7 mistakes you need to avoid at the gym; perusing a Hacker News thread about how to improve the code you write.

All of these activities deceptively make you feel like you’ve done something productive. “I just learned something new”, you tell yourself. And while this is true, you never actually did the thing you were setting out to do in the first place. A vicious cycle forms where you spend all your time thinking about doing things instead of actually doing them.

Productivity porn is only able to thrive because we live in a culture that’s lost sight of the difference between ends and means. We feel guilt over how we spend all our time being spoon-fed content, but if our window to “the good life” is also fed to us as content, then we haven’t actually escaped the cycle. And the picture we’re given ends up being completely out of touch with how people actually do things.

This leads us to never really consider some really basic questions. Like, what are we even setting out to do? “Be productive” is not an answer. “Self-improvement” is not an answer. “Become successful” is not an answer. “Feel less bad about how I spend my time” is not an answer. “Build a chair” is an answer. “Develop a computer program” is an answer. “Compose a song” is an answer. “Read a book” is an answer. It’s kind of like that old meme about bullshit jobs:

Success and ego are extrinsic motivators: they’re detached from the actual nature or activity of the task itself. If you already have a task you’re committed to, extrinsic motivators can assist with pushing you over the finish line to complete it. But if you don’t, then there’s no clear outlet for your extrinsic motivators to anchor themselves to.

If I write code because it’s fun, I’m more likely to be focused on writing the code, and committing myself through thick and thin to writing code because nothing else I spend my time doing can create that intrinsic sort of fun.

Productivity porn leans into these extrinsic motivators because they’re generic enough that the source ultimately doesn’t matter. If you see the activity you’re doing as an arbitrary obstacle to your real goal, it becomes a lot easier to constantly second-guess yourself or seek out easier ways to get to your goal.

There’s a kind of safety in perpetually learning/preparing, in that you get to stay in the stage of non-commitment. You don’t have to exercise your abilities in uncomfortable ways, or open yourself to the risk of failure or embarassment. Why take that step — gambling on something you can only hope will eventually bring you wealth/happiness/health — when you can just simulate the high through vicarious consumption?

Unless you’re genuinely working to keep food on the table, there really is no substitute for intrinsic motivators. For me, I did have a specific goal in mind: there was a genuine subject of interest (politics/philosophy) I wanted to study, dump my thoughts on (in long-form essays), and contribute new ideas to the larger field of discussion.

But I do get it. As much as I hate to admit it, there’s an egotistical aspect to all this — I was writing to be seen. I wanted to make stuff with the direct hope of eventually being able to leverage it to affect change in some way or another. I would get frustrated when I put time into something and don’t get engagement. I constantly was tempted to second-guess myself and what medium would be most effective for me to make myself known, and got impatient when I didn’t see immediate results.

If there was one saving grace, it was that my ego was directed towards something concrete. It was clear what I had to do. I constantly had ideas for essays I wanted to write and being productive meant just writing them. An undirected ego is an indecisive one, and ultimately one that’s easily distracted.

I know people who can just code or write for the love of the craft. I’ve grown up around them, I’ve met countless of them in my field. People who can just persistently shout into the void for years and not care at all. I greatly envy that. Time and time again, I’ve tried to attain that sort of nirvana, but my personality is just not wired for it.

It’s led me to suspect that intrinsic motivation isn’t something you can just learn or develop. Either it’s there or it’s not, simple as. I kept trying to reinvent myself through brute force; I assumed that if I was harder on myself, more organized, less distracted, more disciplined, that would get me to write more. It didn’t. Instead it constantly put me under pressure every time I wrote and made me more scared to write: each piece began to feel like it had these immense stakes surrounding it, and I associated working with my guilt.

In the process, I was so focused on results and my angst at not seeing them that I let it morph into an insecurity. I lost sight of why I even started writing and coding in the first place. I forgot how much fun it is to read a book, try to break down its ideas, synthesize it with other stuff I know, and then write up and discuss my own theories other people. I forgot how much fun it is to mess around with structure and style. I forgot how much I just love being able to express.

I was working from this mindset that everything comes down to pure willpower. That if you’re willing to make enough tradeoffs on your health, the other aspects of your life, and your sanity, that you can do anything. Looking back, I think I see a lot of that ideology here too: the 5AM wakeups, the cold showers, the accounting for every single minute. There’s this focus on all of these things because they test and show off your willpower/endurance. They theoretically give you more time and “cut out distractions”, but once again, everything comes with tradeoffs.

Because productivity porn is unconcerned with what you’re actually trying to get done, it doesn’t really draw a distinction between sprints and marathons. These grinding tactics can be effective in the short-term, but they essentially work as taking out a loan against yourself. The debt will come back to haunt you at some point or another. They can work for sprints, because sprints have a clearly defined goal with a clearly defined timetable. It was one thing for me to spend every waking moment cramming for a college final; it was another when I expected those same tactics to work towards a vague concept of “better-ness”.

Building a skill or a portfolio is a marathon: you are looking at a time table of many years, with no clear idea of when it will end. You have to consider yourself as an objective factor: you are not an abstract, Platonic will. You are a human being made of flesh and blood: your body has real limits¹ and your brain has real limits. If you disregard those limits, you’ll prime yourself to subconsciously run away from what you set out to do in the first place. The stress of morphing “get this task done” into a grand psychological war on yourself ends up unnecessarily making things way harder than they need to be.

People underestimate the extent to which even just engaging in their daily routines sap energy. Waking up at the same time every day, going to work for eight hours, commuting, doing laundry, meal-planning, following up on paperwork, all of these things add up. Doomscrolling is a problem, but what it replaced was vegetating in front of the TV after your shift. And what the TV replaced was going to the bar with your coworkers and drinking your sorrows away. It’s normal for the average person² to come home after all that and rest.

Going the extra mile is not any easier. The time you spend outside of this daily cycle can be incredibly valuable and is where you’re most available to push yourself in new and interesting ways, but it’s also a space where you realize that while time may be a limited resource, energy is even more scarce. This extra mile is the marathon. Whatever you do here, you need to reasonably expect yourself to be able to do for a very, very long time.

Trying to perfect your routine so you’re showing resolve in everything all the time only spreads you thin. The cold showers have a cost. The alarms have a cost. The constant introspection has a cost. And those are all things which are coming at the energy you direct towards actually Doing The Thing.

Ashton Hall’s a full-time influencer: he can spend his whole time optimizing ice baths and banana peels, because his job is to sell that vision. It’s not his Step 1, it’s the summation of his contribution to the world. The hard truth is that just like how you can’t just buy an expensive camera and become a good photographer, you can’t just Google up a formula to success. If there was a repeatable formula that worked for everyone, then everyone would be successful and the field would level out again.

If you want to become more disciplined, less lazy, stronger, etc — ultimately it’s up to you to figure that out on your own. References and resources can exist for very specific topics, but there’s no book that can tell you how to fix your personality. Every person is different in terms of their circumstances, goals, and weird invisible personal quirks. You’re the expert on yourself, so the first person you should be turning to is yourself. What you don’t know, you learn through experience — and in order to get experience, you have to first start doing stuff. So, if you really want to do it, then just do it.

About a year ago, I got some valuable, but simple advice directed towards specifically me as a person: to chill out. I focused on trying to figure out what that meant, and eventually started to relax. I stopped trying to find the optimal balance between all the different aspects of my life and instead let things play out by ear. I stopped feeling guilty over the breaks I took or the lulls in productivity I had. I stopped trying to block out each section of my day and I stopped trying to juggle ten things without giving any of them time to properly stew in my brain. I stopped constantly asking myself where my “big break” would be, and just got back to doing things that I enjoyed.

And what I found was that despite being more relaxed, I also was getting a lot more done.

I’ll cap this off with a quote by an old Prussian spy who was tasked with gathering intel on the habits of Karl Marx, then-political deviant who would go on to be an incredibly prolific and influential writer. This was a man who was working in the privacy of his own home, not with any audience in mind, and not in front of a camera.

Though he is often idle for days on end, he will work day and night with tireless endurance when he has a great deal of work to do. He has no fixed times for going to sleep and waking up. He often stays up all night, and then lies down fully clothed on the sofa at midday and sleeps till evening, untroubled by the comings and goings of the whole world.³

Huh, that feels more real.