Fits and Starts
Apr 21, 05:54 PM by Eric Allen
I’ve come to understand that my productivity level fluctuates wildly from week to week. I tend to have one- or two-week periods of very high productivity, during which I’m putting in maybe 40 or 50 hours per week of good, solid, productive work. Then I have weeks like this one. I’m so unmotivated and uninterested that I can’t even get myself to code! If I’m not coding, you know something’s wrong. I used to be terrified of these periods of unproductively because I always worried my strength would never return. Over the last couple of years, though, I’ve hit enough rough patches to know that things will get better, often in only a few days.
My struggle now is with my own feelings about being unproductive. Analytically, I can see that this is simply how I operate, and forcing myself to “be productive” during down weeks is counterproductive. Emotionally, though, I feel terrible. I hate myself for being unproductive, because what other virtue is there in life? I’ve built much of my life around productivity and efficiency, so when that’s gone what’s left? How do I explain to my teammates and professors that this week I’m just not going to get much done? I’m generally insanely productive, but I feel like that’s a burden, almost. I feel like people expect me to be completely productive all the time. If I’m not, I fail. So during these down weeks I end up suffering a great deal of self-doubt and self-loathing while I force myself to be marginally productive, prolonging the down period. It’s bad behavior, I know, but how do I fix it?
I’d like to ask you, my handful of readers, what you think about productivity. Would it be okay for me to admit to people who depend on me that this is just a bad week? Am I allowed to suffer downtime? Can I take leisure time and not feel guilty about it?
I have a lot of the same feelings—though, rather than loss of productivity, I try to think of those “down days” as refilling my stores of energy.
That doesn’t stop the recriminations, but it does give me a different lens through which to view them. I try to think of my energy as a silo of wheat which I am constantly using and filling. Some days (semesters) I use more energy them I take in, and when I start to run on chaff I have those “unproductive days”.
Other times (on long train rides or in the rare weeks between jobs) I refill that silo with supreme court case readings, novels or singing for fun.
Recontextualizing can tone down the self-hate, but I have yet to find a way to eliminate it. Sorry—I think it’s part of being smart :-D
— Jessica Apr 25, 11:41 PM #