Qualitative Productivity

It's been a mishmash week of ups and downs, bursts of diamond quality productivity peppering an otherwise massive pile of shit.

Sleep quality in the former half of the week deteriorated even as workout quality improved. Swathes of time wasted staring at the blinking cursor on the screen while trying to write my character's journal were broken by explosive pockets of such fierce concentration and focus, I finished tasks in a matter of hours that normally take multiple days, such as transcribing an entire session's worth of material.

Do I keep pushing or do I reduce how hard I'm trying to work to meet these daily quotas I set for myself? If I take hours to just stare at the ceiling while my fiancé is working hard, does that make me a useless sack of potatoes, or am I doing what I need to recuperate?

Am I being lazy, am I avoiding [insert task] because I don't want to do it, or is my mind/body telling me to slow down?

Two Equalizers balanced the scale to an otherwise negative first half of the week, and both of them come from YouTube videos I watched while walking on my treadmill and avoiding the blood hungry gnats outside.

The First Equalizer...

...was an interview between Mark Manson and Cal Newport, centering on Newport's recent book, "Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout." I haven't read any of Newport's books, but I think I have "So Good They Can't Ignore You," stashed away somewhere. The same applies to Manson's, "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck," though I have read many of his online articles.

While the entire interview is worth a listen and provides insight on the history and evolution of the word, "Productivity," within the focus of Newport's idea of, "Slow Productivity," there's a particular moment that resonated deeply with me. It's timing was impeccable.

Throughout my creative pursuits, I've experienced a persistent conundrum:

How does one measure "productivity" within creativity?

Manson asks this very question himself from a writer's perspective, pondering whether word count, hours spent at work, or chapter outlines are a satisfactory indicator of how productive a writer has been. I've always taken issue with writing advice that proclaims a writer should write, "X amount of words a day," because that's what [insert famous author here] does. Or what many art videos posit, "You should draw every day if you want to be an artist."

I've been there. I've done that. To meet wordcount goals, eventually I just start typing out whatever nonsense comes to mind, falling into depression and self-doubt when it doesn't match my standards, wondering if there's something wrong with my usual slow and steady approach. Drawing every single day inevitably leads to burnout.

According to Newport, this type of quantitative thinking is industrial thinking. It began with factories and mills, and we've adopted it into our everyday lives from work to education. It's anathema to creative or knowledge work because it's unnatural. The real metric by which to measure, at least in the case of writers, is on the scale of how many books an author has published in a decade and how proud of those books they are, which definitely bucks against traditional advice.

If the metric is a decade, however, where's the boundary between procrastination and taking the time necessary to complete a project, especially if said project will take 50% more time than we anticipate, according to Hofstadter's Law? Newport answers this question by using the Beatles as an example, but another example would be starting a website similarly to what I have done. Releasing that first post or a single starts the clock ticking on when the next milestone needs to be met, when the next release is going to be. In a nutshell, accountability combats procrastination (and perfectionism, but we'll get to that later). If one month is not enough time, then take two, but don't take three.

Work at a natural pace. It sounds counterintuitive, but Newport defines it as, "Not [working] like you're in the Ford factory," full intensity from nine to five, 5 days a week with no variation in intensity. The times where we are most productive vary. There are hills and valleys in our day-to-day, week-to-week, and even season-to-season energy and productivity levels. In many ways, this reminds me of developing that mind-body connection during a workout, paying attention and being mindful of how you're feeling in any given day.

Obsess Over Quality

"You're never satisfied with just being good at something," one of my closest friends told me several years ago. "You want to be great."

When it comes to my interests, I'm an overachiever. A perfectionist even. All throughout school, I would dive into projects that captured my interest and smash them out of the park.

For example, for my senior music composition recital to graduate college, I had to compose about an hour's worth of music, but for me that was too ambiguous. "Compose what you want," never jived with me, and I always felt guilty going into my lessons without that much new material to show.

Until the year of my recital when I had the spark of an idea. I was taking a poetry class at the time for my creative writing minor, and I thought, "What if I tell a story for my recital? I'll write heroic couplets, and the story will be told through both the music and the recitation of the story."

Thus, "The Wyrm Queen's Curse," came into existence.

I composed more music in those last 8 months of my college career than I had the other 4 years. I had found the perfect fusion of these two mediums and obsessed over the quality of the final result. To this day 10 years later, it is still one of the most fulfilling projects I've ever completed.

A more recent example was when I was working as an ALT in Japan, and I was planning a lesson for my high school and middle school kids that involved ordering food off a restaurant menu. The menu provided in the textbook was so generic and boring, I thought, 'This isn't going to engage any of these kids!' So, I made my own menu by cobbling together sprites and level backgrounds from Super Mario Bros., and the kids had a blast with it. Why? Because it was relatable, like they were in a themed cafe. I wrote "sales" promotions on the chalkboard, and kids would throw their waiters/waitresses for a loop by saying they wanted one item then changing their mind! Was their English perfect? No! But even the students who typically complained they hated English were having fun and were fully engaged!

Obsess over quality.

Newport calls it the glue that ties all of the principles within, "Slow Productivity," together. "When you obsess over quality, slowness becomes natural...because [otherwise] junk gets in the way."

At first glance, it might seem like Newport favors perfectionism, but that's actually when the opposite clicked for me. Obsess over quality until the due date, then call the report, chapter, art piece, etc...good enough for submission.

So often I would grow frustrated at myself for writing more slowly than I felt I should based off of a metric that others had conjured out of the ether, and I would grow equally frustrated at myself for writing faster but producing sub-quality work. For last week's blog, even though I may not have edited anything aside from the occasional syntax and spelling error, I still put my maximum effort and focus into the quality of my writing, despite that quality fluctuating at various points throughout the day and week.

Okay, sure, the topics within the interview may be perpetuating my own confirmation biases, but that's where the Second Equalizer enters.

The Second Equalizer

When I was first searching for new workout programs, I narrowed my choices down to two: Built with Science and Redefining Strength. Though the latter appealed to me more than Built With Science, I squirmed with discomfort at the idea of having to make a consultation call, because it felt too much like I was committing to that program despite not knowing the rates. However, that hasn't stopped me from watching Cori's YouTube channel occasionally, and this particular video happened to appear on my recommended list the same day as the interview.

Halfway through the video, after talking about the importance of nutrition and protein, Cori says, "Your focus when designing a workout is on how you can lift more quality loads during your session. Too often we just try to add more quantity or more training volume. Instead, we want to focus on the quality of the volume that we're doing."

In other words, obsess over quality.

Quality reps is a topic that Jeremy has also referenced in the BWS Program that I'm following, and, while I know the old adage, "Quality, not quantity," somewhere along the way it became flipped in my mind. As the quality of your work and your skills improve, the quantity will increase as well. In the case of exercise, quality will also help prevent injury, because it strengthens the mind-body connection, whereas if importance is placed more on quantity, form may suffer and result in long-term injury.

"When you're working hard toward a goal, you're going to get burned out. That's why planning in breaks is so key, and breaks are not only rest days every week but also strategically designed diet breaks and recovery weeks...The goal of these breaks is to help you mentally and physically have a break from the grind."

She parrots the same advice that Newport said in the interview: work at a natural pace.

It's okay if this week wasn't as productive as the last. It's okay to take a step back and say, "I need a break to recharge." What matters is, where will your projects, your focus, your lifestyle be in ten years, and are you proud of that?

This week's obligatory cat pic: Mura