Adapt International Convention – Productivity Culture in the Age of Remote Work and a Global Pandemic
With over 200 speakers in over 35 languages with about 200,000 viewers, the 2020 Adapt International Convention was the largest online international conference in Asia on entrepreneurship, technology, and self-development. I had the opportunity to be a speaker on the topic of toxic productivity culture, particularly in the time of the pandemic.
My speech starts at 1:24:30 and ends at 1:36:40. Below is a transcript:
Hello, people of the world!
I want to begin by asking you all: Why do you work?
It might seem like a bizarre question, but I want you all to seriously think about it. Why do you work? What drives you to keep working? What are you trying to get out of the work?
There are probably as many reasons as there are people in the world, but I think broadly speaking, many of us understand that a key factor is that we are working to earn a living–to financially get by in this precarious world of ours where losing your job can lead to a loss of food, housing, health, and more. This is particularly true in the age of the global Covid-19 pandemic, given the economic crises affecting many countries around the world.
However, in our modern, hypercompetitive, globalized world, the dynamic has been reversed. Instead of just working to live, I argue that we are increasingly living to work. This is because we are beholden to productivity culture, which dictates that there is no meaning to our lives beyond how much we preoccupy ourselves with work. Society has conditioned us to believe that the more busy we are, the more successful our lives ultimately will be.
The pandemic has caused a global reckoning in terms of how our societies function. One key change has been the increase in remote work. Companies all over the world have discovered that the work that they forced their employees to commute long hours for could be just as effectively done from their homes. In fact, studies by Nicholas Bloom, a professor at Stanford University, show that workers are overall actually more productive working from home.
The truth is, we work too much, and in fact, we work even more remotely than at an office. Contrary to the expectations that workers would slack off at home, just in the United States alone, where I am based, data from NordVPN estimates that workers log in three more hours at their jobs than before the pandemic. What little work-life balance many of us may have had at the beginning of this year has been completely obliterated in the age of remote work, and so employees feel pressured to work later and later into the evenings. And this is not including all the other responsibilities people, especially women have, from raising children and caring for aging parents, to the other daily unpaid domestic labor that we must undertake to carry on with our lives.
I want you all to think about this. Studies show that we are more productive workers than ever before, but we are also more exhausted than ever before. Where is the sense in this? And is it sustainable? I do not think so, and today, I want to outline the state of productivity culture in the age of remote work in a global pandemic, how it is toxic, and what we can do about it to live healthier, more balanced lives.
To begin with, what is productivity culture?
At its core, productivity is a way to measure the efficiency of production. A traditional example would be a factory. Imagine if one factory produced ten thousand shoes per day? Doesn’t seem so bad, right? Well what if that same factory could produce one hundred thousand shoes in a day? That’s an increase in productivity, as more has been produced within the same time span.
A culture of productivity, on the other hand, takes that basic economic principle and applies that to us as individuals. Instead of finishing one of your assigned projects at your company in a week, you might finish three. Time is the key factor here. The more efficiently you complete work, the more time you have to complete more work. The more work you can get done, the more productive you are overall.
This extends beyond the workplace though of course. For example, how early do you get up in the morning? How do you spend your weekends? Are you eating your meals in the most efficient manner? The guiding logic of productivity insists there is always a way to manage your time to get more things done more efficiently–so that you can do more work.
By itself, productivity is not inherently a bad thing. Getting things done gives us satisfaction and purpose, and being efficient with our time to get even more things done can be helpful to demonstrate your conscientiousness as a worker and individual. However, the insidious logic of productivity treats people like factories that must be optimized to produce, or rather, work, more and more.
I ask again: Why do you work?
I believe we have been taught that to be productive is to be successful and lead a meaningful life. Think about the leaders we hold up as icons in our society, such as the CEOs of major tech companies. Our society worships these successful titans and how they are “productivity wizards,” getting up before dawn to shape the very world around us. We convince ourselves that to become like them, we must always strive to be more productive.
To lead a fulfilling life, work becomes an end in and of itself. It becomes our very identity and reason for existing. And this, my friends, is at the core of why productivity culture is toxic. The British psychologist, Dr. Julie Smith, defines toxic productivity as, I quote, “an obsession with radical self-improvement above all else, and the result is, no matter how productive you are, you’re left with that guilty feeling of not having done more,” end quote.
In a culture of toxic productivity, we must always appear to be working and improving ourselves to get more done and become even better workers. Modern technology via social media further demands a constant performance of us to be leading picture perfect lives. When we are not working, our posts on social media show we are eating amazing food, affecting change in our communities, or travelling to exciting locales on vacation. Our leisure time becomes another CV or resume to show off the fulfilling, productive lives we are leading. Even our hobbies seem insufficient if we can’t monetize or make a side hustle out of them.
When many people found themselves quarantined because of the Covid-19 pandemic, consider that many of us were led to believe that it wasn’t enough to just do our best to survive during these harrowing times. Instead, we ought to be “making the most of this time” to learn new skills and improve ourselves further as individuals and workers. Of course, for many of us, not least those of us who actually contracted Covid-19 or can’t work from home, this is difficult, if not outright impossible to achieve.
As for the rest of us, it may simply be difficult to get out of bed some days. Studies have shown that our toxic culture of productivity causes burnout, a state of chronic stress and exhaustion caused by overwork, among many other mental health problems, like anxiety and depression. Toxic productivity inflames our insecurities rather than making us stronger individuals, and negatively impacts our overall wellbeing. None of our colleagues or peers have to say anything as the manager in our head has already told us we are a failure.
As you can see, productivity is not just a principle, it functions as a religion and is at the very core of our self-worth and whether we feel good about ourselves as people. To not be productive is to feel that you have effectively failed as a person. And yet, it is a Sisyphean struggle. We check off more and more boxes as we push the boulder up to the top, only for it to come crashing down, as the work is never truly done, and there is seemingly no end to how productive you can be. In a culture of toxic productivity, we are merely surviving, not thriving.
Productivity at best, should be a tool, not a goal. None of us are robots in the end, so understand that you should not tie your self-worth to productivity. There is no competition to be the most productive person. You are valuable and wonderful enough regardless of how much you mark off your to do list every day, so cut back on the self-criticism and judgement.
Furthermore, the pandemic has collapsed all of our work-life boundaries, so take it upon yourself to set some non-negotiables. Like just because you can work after hours or skip meals doesn’t mean that you should. Numerous studies show that the best way to be more productive at work, is, ironically, to work less. Truly make the time for leisure, and not “hobbies” that you are hoping to make into a side gig. Putting your phone down and allowing yourself to be unproductive allows you to properly recharge for the work you have ahead.
Productivity though, as I have been emphasizing, is a culture, and it is not enough for individual workers to be just doing their best to lead better lives. Companies and management too must step up to build healthier workplaces. To those of you who consider yourselves to be leaders at your organizations, I challenge you:
First, don’t surveille your workers or force them to not be able to take care of themselves. Empathize with the circumstances we’re all in and acknowledge that we are not automatons solely useful for how much we can “produce.”
Second, encourage your workers to set boundaries and say no to tasks that don’t align with their core duties. Set examples so the rest of them feel empowered to do the same.
Finally, the era of the 9-5 is over. Take this time to consider truly sweeping policies to improve the lives of your workers, which will ultimately make your workplace healthier and more productive. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Serenity Gibbons recommends paying employees more to be less busy–cut down on hours, encourage employees to take paid leave and sick leave, including for mental health reasons, and consider innovations like the four day workweek.
This is just, as they say, the tip of the iceberg though. Meeting your employees where they are, rather than where you want them to be, should be a goal that any company should constantly strive towards.
I would like to conclude by saying that, in my own life, I realized that I too had internalized toxic productivity culture to a debilitating degree. Recognizing this about myself was the first difficult step in what will likely be a long journey to unlearn many unhealthy behaviors, but if there is one thing I am grateful to our current circumstances for, it’s that I have been forced to sit down and think long and hard about how I was going about life, and what my real priorities ought to be.
As the writer Arundhati Roy put it, the pandemic is a portal, one where we have the choice to walk through and build a new and better world. It’s time for all of us to leave toxic productivity culture behind for a world of fulfilling lives where work is just one part of a greater whole.
Thank you.