The Cost of Toxic Productivity — Part 2
Toxic Productivity is by its very nature damaging to us. I believe that the main way this cashes out is in our mental health which is why I devoted a whole post to that aspect — you can read that here. I think a number of the other costs are actually caused by the deterioration in our mental health, but not all of them. Either way, I am going to briefly outline some of them here.
Costs to our physical health
This is a key follow on from the impact on our mental health. Whether it is comfort eating, stress eating or a lack of exercise that is primarily caused by feelings of stress, not having time or just simply the skewing of priorities as the obsession or addiction to productivity and getting things done takes hold. If Toxic Productivity is a situation where any aspect of our productivity, work or process for getting things done takes a significantly greater place in our behaviour or thinking than it actually warrants then, as I’ve already outlined, two of the big ways in which this can manifest is by over working (spending too much time on work) or by over thinking (too much of our focus, mental energy and time going on to our work or the process of how we get things done).
Sleep
I’m starting here as this is over looked but also obvious. The more time we spend on our work, the less time we have for sleep. The more time we spend thinking about our work, the less time we have for sleep and likely that sleep will be of a lower quality. I have spent many a sleepless night driven by the fear that I might have missed something or that I did not know how to best keep on top of things in order to prevent me missing something. Basically, whether through lack of time, inability to relax/wind down/switch off, or generally elevated stress levels, our sleep is often an early casualty of this battle. This leads to tiredness, irritability, lack of focus and concentration. It can lead to an increased consumption of coffee or energy drinks to keep us going — which further impacts our sleep patterns and quality.
Diet
There are two sides to this. Firstly, we can sacrifice consistency in our eating habits. Skipping breakfast, forgetting about lunch and not really having time for dinner. Secondly, our obsession with all things work and productivity means we lack the capacity to actually consider what we eat and so grabbing something quick to stave of hunger and keep us going becomes a habit. Thirdly, we feel we lack the time to actually cook properly and so the quick ready meal or excessive snacking take hold. Fourthly, many people under stress will comfort eat or stress eat. This will often be unhealthy snack foods. So the lack of consistency and consideration in what we eat when, combined with a tendency to snack, leads to a situation where our diet becomes incredibly unhealthy and inconsistent. This is detrimental again to our energy levels, ability to focus and concentrate and longer term can cause all kinds of health problems.
Exercise
All I will say here, is that owing to a skewed sense of priority, a basic level of exercise is neglected as we feel we do not have the time. Here, I am not talking about going to the gym or going 4 runs a week. I am talking at the level of going for a 30 minute walk or walking from place to place. We do not do this as we feel we don’t have the time. In addition to poor diet and sleep, we therefore spend all day sitting. The negative impacts of this sedentary lifestyle cannot be over stated. Our long term health, energy and ability to function normally are rent asunder by this way of life.
All of this leads to a decline in our overall health and well being. In the immediate present — this will manifest in low energy levels. The list of impacts and their seriousness grows the longer this continues.
Costs to our family and relationships
It is really interesting to me that whenever you have a death bed scene in a film or a TV series, or a character is outlining their regrets from life, you never hear anyone saying that regret that they weren’t able attend more meetings or write more reports or that they never managed to achieve the perfect system for managing their own time. It is always to do with family and children.
This over inflation of the importance of our work and productivity often tends towards an over inflation in our minds of the importance of our ‘stuff’, and ultimately ourself. This is selfishness. This over inflation of our stuff, and the impact on our mental and physical health leads to stress, impatience, irritability and if left unchecked, worse things.
So let that sink in. Toxic Productivity leads to selfishness, impatience and irritability. It should be obvious that this is going to be damaging to our family and to our relationships. But it goes beyond that. I have worked with people in the past who believed that they were by far the busiest person in their circles. And that their work and role was of a significantly higher value and importance than anybody else’s. This led to the view their time was therefore more valuable than anybody else’s. They would consider it appropriate therefore to waste hours of other people’s time to save minutes of their own. It also meant that any commitment they made to you was a loose commitment. Combine this with the impatience, irritability and selfishness and you end up becoming a nightmare to work or live with.
In work relationships, this is damaging but in a family it is thoroughly destructive. Especially as to our children, the relationship we have them will be one of the most influential human relationships that they have and will go a significant way to forming and shaping their security and identity. If the message that they get is that they are unimportant, that can be very harmful. Just as harmful as the message that they are the centre of our world.
Costs to our productivity
This is the great irony. The more we obsess over our productivity, the less productive we actually become. It might be that we spend an ever increasing amount of time organising our work and tweaking our system for staying on top of things so we don’t actually get work done. It may be that the deterioration of our mental and physical health, both in the short term impact and the longer term impact, means that we are less able to work at the same capacity. It may be that growing difficulties in other areas of life caused by neglect or damage mean we do not have the same capacity to focus on what needs to get done. Or it may be the natural diminishing returns for every hour we spend trying do stuff without taking a break.
All of this means our productivity can actually drop. This however is not my main concern….
Costs to our effectiveness
This is the biggest concern. As opposed to merely considering the quantity of work we do, I am more concerned with the quality of our output. At this point I am not merely talking about ‘work’ but covering every area of our lives. Toxic Productivity damages our effectiveness.
Wrong Priorities
Firstly, we end up with wrong priorities. Both through the over inflation of of the importance of some stuff in a way that is wrong but also in the poor quality decisions we make in how to actually spend our time. We may be very busy and we may be getting a lot done. This is not enough. We need to consider what are the right things to give time and energy to rather than being busy on loads of unimportant things.
Poor Quality work and decisions
Firstly, a person who is tired and low on energy is not going to make good decisions. I don’t just mean big T Tired but also the human brain can only focus for so long before it needs a break — even a break doing something else. I used to argue that tea breaks is what made Britain great. Having a 15–20 minute break every few hours will have significantly improved the quality of work decisions that our grandfathers made. I furthered this by saying that therefore, from the lowest office worker, to the highest echelons of Government, assuming a basic 8:30am start time, without tea breaks, any decisions made after 11am were to be regarded with suspicion.
Secondly, a person who is stressed, will enter ‘fight or flight’ mode. This tends towards a frantic-ness as we go about our work to try and bosh things out quickly and ‘get stuff done’ rather than actually working to high quality. Therefore, over time, as we become more stressed and less patient, we will allocate less and less time to quality work and so this will decline. We also tend to move towards getting things done quickly over getting them done well.
State of mind = State of Effectiveness
If we are stressed or depressed this is going to have a major impact on our work and effectiveness. A stressed or depressed person will tend to favour ‘quick wins’ and ‘low hanging fruit’ over and above more difficult work that is overall more valuable. Thirdly, any creative work you are doing, wether that is writing a sermon or a talk, writing a report or blog post, creating a presentation, writing code etc etc. All of this is going to be impacted by the mood we are in.
Long term health decline and it’s impact
If this continues and we hit full blown burnout or depression. This will eventually lead to our effectiveness in life both with our families, and in our work, significantly deteriorating or coming to grinding halt. This is a short to medium term impact. We made need to take a significant amount of time off where we lack the capacity and ability be effective in any area of our lives.
Over the long term, significant health issues can develop from a sustained period of stress and lack of concern for our overall health and well-being. These can range from high blood pressure, through diabetes, through to more ‘normal’ but also detrimental things like pain in our muscles, back, shoulders and neck. I am not saying that all of these things will necessarily be caused by Toxic productivity, but more that the risk of these things developing becomes higher if our diet, sleep and basic exercise needs are not being well cared for. And that sustained excessive stress levels will increase the risk of some of these as well.
Overall, Toxic Productivity will lead to a decline in our health and overall well-being. This can cause damage to the people we care about the most. This is the biggest problem. In addition, our effectiveness in life will suffer. If Toxic Productivity is driven by fear — trying to prevent harm to ourselves — then because it comes from a fundamentally skewed take on reality, rather than prevent harm, it will actually cause it.
So, is there a better way? Is there a cure for this? Yes. And we will think about this next week.
