Guilt and Balance: Breaking The Productivity Addiction
When I was going through the responses to my annual survey, I began to see the same struggle coming up over and over again: guilt. More specifically, guilt about not being productive enough, whilst simultaneously not taking time for oneself: “I WANT more balance, but I always seem to feel guilty when I’m not at my desk”. Over and over, in different words and in different ways people were chastising themselves for not working more, doing more, achieving more - and not being more balanced.
I posted on Stories “OH MY GOD do we need to talk about feeling guilty any time you’re not productive. This is your LIFE. There is no “most productive” medal at the end of this. Do something for the sheer joy of it this week, PLEASE”. A few days later, I realised the irony of me posting this. I had that feeling of “well I’m certainly not the person who should be lecturing people on this because I was terrible for it”… but then thought that that’s exactly why I am the person.
You see, it was not too long ago that every single minute of my life was focused on productivity. If I was watching TV I had to be also working and engaging on Instagram, if I was washing up I had to be listening to a work podcast at the same time, I didn’t read any books (god forbid any non-work-related books) because they were an inefficient way of getting the information into my brain. I would grab a bag of crisps for lunch because even making toast would take too long. I would “reward” myself with a break to go and have a wee when I’d finished writing a blog post.
Someone replied to that Story that she had caught herself feeling guilty for “not thinking productively” while out for a dog walk, and I remembered, having listened to someone say that “going for a walk is great for stimulating ideas”, all the times I stomped around in nature berating myself for not stimulating the ideas quickly enough. My only priority, for years, was doing more work.
And that’s not to say it always feels bad, because it doesn’t. There is a magic to feeling so purposeful, so focused on making and growing something. You feel so capable, so important, so actualised on the independence of creating your own work and being your own boss. Those days when you’re in flow and you’re doing this work feel amazing and like you’ve found the whole point. You want more of it. More things, more growth, more feeling like a badass woman running her business. And, like any addiction, the balance starts, imperceptibly, to shift towards the unhealthy.
Eventually you start getting to a point where the highs of invincibility and achievement become more scarce. The more you work, the higher the bar becomes – what might previously have made you get a pizza in because you were so pleased with yourself now barely constitutes a toilet break reward. Nothing’s ever enough, there’s always more you could do, and you start to sink in the quicksand of “needing” to do more but having no resources left to do it with. You’re spending more time thinking about all the work you should be doing and worrying about what to do next, rather than being able to do much.
So you start to think about balance as maybe something that you need. I remember seeing people on Instagram cooking themselves lunch, with vegetables, and sitting down and eating it and it blew my mind. I saw people going out during the day. I saw people reading books and doing craft projects just for fun because they wanted to. I remember thinking that all of that looked really quite nice, actually, but having absolutely no idea how to do it.
Which sounds like an exaggeration, but if you’re in this place you’ll understand. I could not fathom how someone could just make pasta for lunch in the middle of the day (in fact, although I do mostly eat lunch now I still grab something low prep). I didn’t know how I could just go out for a walk without also taking my camera to take pictures for Instagram and listen to a podcast and make sure I got at least three blog post ideas. I didn’t know how I could do something for fun because I didn’t know what fun was for me.I only knew how to work.
And so, fast forwarding two years to posting that Story, I was shocked to find myself on the outside of this looking in, rather than inside the box trying to fight my way out. I hadn’t really noticed the change happen, not fully, and there are always ways in which you think you’ve not got the balance right (almost as if there is no perfect balance or something…). However, the truth is, bit by little bit, I have engineered my life to a place where my biggest daily priorities are the things I want to do for myself – walking, reading and writing daily. Where I am preparing and eating actual meals. Where I plan my working day around how long a walk I want to do in the afternoon (without headphones). Where I am reading poetry and fiction. Where I am working on projects just for fun and because I want to.
I feel like I should be able to now tell you “and here is exactly how I did it!”. In the period where I made “Fulfilment” my word of the year and was clawing around for a blog post or podcast where someone would tell me what to do to just fix this, I wanted the key. The thing I could do. But I think that’s the problem – there isn’t anything to do.
What has actually happened, over the last two years, is a letting go. It started with my grip, my white-knuckled holding on to control. I started trying to make myself believe that I get to decide how I spend my time, and then backing that up with cancelling some things that I’d said yes to for the wrong reasons. I stopped focusing on growth in my business. I mostly stopped listening to business podcasts. I started planning more intuitively and doing what I felt like doing more than what I had to do. I started thinking about how I wanted to feel and aiming towards that, rather than working towards what I wanted my business to look like and the trappings of success.
It’s still all a work in progress, always will be. I still feel the pull of achievement, of the external validation that comes with success and the cultural validation of busyness. I sometimes feel ashamed when talking to someone about not doing more, not scaling or working more hours. I suppose the difference now is that something has shifted in my head about what’s important – I want to spend my time on the “stuff of life”. And sometimes I find that in work, but mostly I find it in the mountains, and in conversations and the pages of a book.
I suppose want I’m saying is that balance isn’t something you find, it’s something you surrender to. Balance isn’t another thing to be achieved, can’t be sorted with some more to do list items(in fact, adding more to do list items is actually going to take you further away from balance). It’s not something you can be pro-active about doing. It’s standing in the sun with your eyes closed for five minutes, picking up that book instead of your phone, making a nourishing dinner listening to your favourite playlist instead of a podcast.
It will feel itchy as hell to begin with. Your brain will be trying to think about work, and you’ll be feeling guilty because you’re not doing balance properly and also because you’re not being productive. And this is the point where you’ll just give in and put a podcast on and go back to chasing that high - but this is the withdrawal. You’ve got to let that itch burn all over your body and let the thoughts come and go and keep stirring that homemade soup because one day, without noticing, you will be standing in a silent forest and realise that you haven’t been thinking about work at all.
