Guilt and Productivity
Ramit over at I Will Teach You To Be Rich really nailed the whole issue of actual productivity vs. non-productive guilt about productivity in this post that, yes, I only discovered this week:
This is why you’d never see me “studying” in the lounge while really talking to 589368943 people around me. Or why you’d never see me in the library sleeping. But you’d also RARELY hear me turn down something fun to do work. In fact, lots of people comment how they never see me working at all. It’s not that I’m especially smart. It’s that I don’t engage in unproductive behaviors to assuage my guilt.
Folks, I can’t explain exactly how strongly this resonates with my life experiences. Back in college, everyone who hung out with me for any length of time inevitably wondered how I earned decent grades while staying up all night playing spades in the lounge or watching dubbed re-runs of Sailor Moon on USA today. Frankly, I waste almost no time feeling guilty for things I’m not doing right now. Every moment is a conscious choice for me. If I’m not doing the laundry or updating Quicken with my latest receipts, I’m making a proactive choice not to do so. Part of why GTD has worked out so well for me is that it’s a formalization of the system of renegotiating agreements with myself that I’ve been making since I first headed out to elementary school.
I do precisely what I want to do when I want to do it, and I don’t give a damn about how anyone else thinks I should organize my time. My time, you see, is not theirs to organize. My failures are my failures. My successes are my successes. I don’t blame others for my results, and this allows me to disregard other people’s notions of how my working processes should be managed. I make no apologies for deciding to major in English. I loved my degree program, and it fit my interests well. I make no apologies for deciding to get a job rather than coasting right into a graduate program that no longer interested me. Similarly, I make no apologies for deciding to leave a promising career in IT and application development to give myself more time to write and to create the life I want. It easy to feel guilt when you choose to view your life through someone else’s framework.
The hard truth that you can either face now or be crippled by later is that you’ll never be happy living someone else’s life using someone else’s methods to achieve someone else’s goals. Take the time right now to figure out where you personally want to be and what makes you uniquely happy. From there, it becomes an absolute walk in the park to fill in the gaps between where you are now and where you want to be—all without guilt as a false motivator.
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