The Joy (?) of Productivity

Have you ever considered why we procrastinate things we don’t want to do for work? Why do we wait until an hour before it’s due to turn in our very important philosophy paper? Why do we spend hours smartphone scrolling for the dankest memes so that we can put off that email we were supposed to send?

Let’s pause and think about that for a moment.

Why do we feel guilty about procrastination and why does the guilt somehow make it worse? And why do we feel like we have to be doing something even while on the toilet or during our “off” hours? What happened here?

Well, like that poor kid in today’s meme, we are shocked with our dishonorable behavior perhaps not because of overarching ethical concerns, but because of the link between productivity and a moral issue that goes back to the Middle Ages…

A Medieval Notion with Bonus Monks

I am sure many of us know about the Seven Deadly Sins . They are fun to count, right? Lust, wrath, greed, envy, gluttony, pride, and sloth. The last of these translates from the Latin word, acedia.

In traditional Catholic theology, acedia is moral indecision. The monk who suffers from the “ noonday demon ” decides to do nothing rather than use his time to do wholesome work, such as gardening, manuscript copying, beer making, praying, or other cool monk stuff.

Acedia is tied in with the Chrisitan notion of free will , assuming that human beings have unfettered ability to choose to do good actions or evil actions. Free will does not typically account for extenuating circumstances.

So, if the monk chooses of his free will to stay in bed all day instead of hopping to his prayers and chores, he has decided to do something immoral, since he chose not to do the good action. In the Middle Ages, mind you, psychology had not been invented as a science. If our monk was depressed, it was still considered his fault for not doing his chores.

Thomas Aquinas, an Important Monk

Thomas Aquinas , a powerhouse of a theologian, wrote about acedia and its connection to free will in his foundational (and huge–five volumes!) Summa Theologica (or, if you want to be a fancypants scholar, Summa Theologiæ).

The Summa,as we will call it from now on, consists of a million questions and a million and a half responses to questions. It is the backbone of a lot of modern Christian theology and ethics, especially in Catholicism.

Thomas, a Dominican friar (monk), basically made sloth viral as a sin. Not simple laziness, he says that:

Sorrow is evil in itself when it is about that which is apparently evil but good in reality, even as, on the other hand, pleasure is evil if it is about that which seems to be good but is, in truth, evil.

So, when you’re too depressed or anxious to get things done, by not doing the good thing, you are doing the bad thing. Who knew?

A Counterproductive Obsession with Productivity

But how does this medieval notion of acedia relate to the hustle culture’s obsession with productivity? Well, in a few ways.

With the rise of the Industrial Revolution, the advent of factories, and later the increased output of the assembly line, production and productivity soon became the norm for most. The more productive you are, it was reasoned, the better off you are as a worker.

The idea is to get from Oliver Twist to Andrew Carnegie through hard work and perseverance.

Team this with thinkers like Ayn Rand, who sold the American dream bit by bit to the rest of the world in her novels and concept of objectivism . Productivity becomes, bit by bit, equivalent to worth in the office and later, worth as a human being.

Wouldn’t you want to be productive if you were going to get happier from doing so?

Consider, if you will, what you do when you get up from sitting down. If you are of a certain age (I am not telling on myself, I swear!), you might tell yourself that you want to get as many things done as you can before you allow yourself to sit back down.

Or conversely, if you are a student, you might be running a lecture video while working on a paper and trying to get a social life in there at the same time. You may have several side hustles to support your life as a student. Rise and grind, eh?

But why are we so obsessed with how much we can do in as short a time as we can do it? Does productivity (however that is defined) correlate to worth at work, or even to promotions and moving up the chain?

But more importantly, does our productivity define us and our worthiness as human beings?

The anxiety of considering every task for the day, of writing bullet lists so we don’t forget, of taking calls, entering data, listening to lectures, going back and forth from job to job…is our productivity what defines us?

Procrastination Station

It’s no wonder that we procrastinate as much as we do. With the struggle and overwhelming thoughts of the tasks at hand and the tasks that lay before us, surely we could be forgiven if we want to put them off in favor of playing a video game, right?

With the nature of time (more subjective than you’d imagine), there are discrete hours such as those during which we work, as an example, or the duration of a lecture. They will stop and start at specific times. As such, we know what we must do during those times, and procrastination of certain things related may be a very bad idea.

But the notion of time to a master procrastinator may seem different, especially when it comes to tasks that are not due right away. Though your writer would never, ever know about this from personal experience, it could be the case that the procrastinator considers relative timeliness of tasks and then procrastinates accordingly.

(It wasn’t me.)

Procrastination is a form of acedia, in that the person is choosing to not act productively and instead organizing their nail polish collection or socks. Anything but the dreaded paper.

But the procrastination itself often increases the anxiety related to the task, the one feeding the other until we all become the kid in the meme above: staring into space listlessly, yet with eyes that have seen things.

The Worth of a Human Being

We can take hope, perhaps, in the fact that we live in a much more compassionate time for certain things than Thomas Aquinas. We don’t have to worry about strange diagnoses or outright dismissal if we are depressed or anxious. We have a better understanding of disability and accommodations.

We consider others in multifaceted ways that Thomas and his monk friends could not even imagine. And most importantly, we know that burnout, mental health problems, and other extenuating factors affect us.

But what we have that our buddy Thomasdidn’t, is a “fast-paced” (every job application ever) world which demands increased productivity, quality deliverables, and speedy output. It’s enough to make anyone anxious.

So the next time you worry about not being productive enough and getting your tasks done, take a moment to be compassionate with yourself. After all, you’re not only human. You’re a human who is more than the sum of their productivity.