Do You Have Productivity Shame?

“We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.”

— Carlos Castaneda

I love peering through the lens of a camera that's managed to capture an artist in their raw and candid glory. The intensity of the focus is soul-piercing. My fascination comes from the days of working in a kitchen at a resort in Lake Louise with Chef Michel. A gruff French man who greeted me each morning with the snap of his tongue, "the fucking pretty boy from Ontario." I'm not sure he ever learned my name.

He deemed I was good for nothing more than cutting vegetables for a garden salad. Or at least that's what I thought was behind his thinking.

Day after day I showed up and did my work. Michel rewarded me with a new station every couple of weeks. Each station had more responsibility and a sense of status with it. But each station was still a single task. You were only given the responsibility you could handle. Many of the crew had at least one or two stubby fingers. You got a chance to see what your limits were.

The kitchen staff bounced around like a live-action game of snakes and ladders. Everyone was working to get to the front of the kitchen and closer to Michel. You would work for months to get one of the sweet jobs like cooking sauces. But the closer you got, the more responsibility he expected.

Your sense of work ethic was valued above all else. But when you have a roster of snowboarders and drifters as staff, no-shows were the norm. With black pants as the uniform, his footprint left a visual stamp of disapproval. He held you to a standard you didn't you know were capable of.

But there's a damn big difference between testing your limits and taking on enough to drown a fish. 

It's in these moments when you're overcommitted, stressed out, and feeling trapped that the voice gets a little louder. "Why aren't you working harder?" It's a soft ambient buzz that's always playing in the background. Am I letting people down? Am I working on my priorities? What are my priorities!? Blah blah blah.

The mental chatter slips into a focus of beating yourself up and dwelling on how unsatisfied you're feeling. You curse the fact you know it was unrealistic to think you could lose 50 pounds, whittle a rocking horse out of pine, write a book and start a business over the next month.

Jocelyn K. Glei is a writer who's obsessed with work, careers & creativity. I heard her use the perfect term to describe these feelings. Productivity shame. There's a damn good chance you're familiar with it. Have you ever set goals or schedules for yourself which you know to be unrealistic (even as you do it)? And then later beat yourself up for not being able to meet that schedule?

Welcome to the club.

We often don't know our limits when it comes to creative work.

Like how much attention can you actually exert in a day or put towards a project? We're talking high value, peak performance work. The kind of stuff that gets the creative juices flowing.

When I first started writing a blog, I'd mix writing in with three or four other mentally taxing to-dos for the day. I broke everything down by the time it took. Except not everything requires an equal amount of energy and you sure as hell don't get the same return. 

If you have an hour of free time, what's a better use of your time? Spending an hour in email overload or sweating your ass off in a CrossFit class?

Once I realized that energy is where I wanted to put my focus, my priorities jumped to the front of the line. Everything else on my to-do list is second and third stringers. I rarely give them ice time. They only get to play after I've put in my best effort with the shit that actually matters in my life.

It's like Michel taught me in the kitchen, only take on what you can handle. He didn't have me learning chopping, sauces, sauteeing, and searing all at once. 

Each project requires its own set of skills and energy to get it where you want it to go.

Think about this for a second: can your current habits carry you to your desired future?

Start by looking at each item on your to-do list and ask yourself, "Is this truly necessary?”

Once you have that figured out, follow it up by asking, "What is one thing you can remove from your life that would improve it?"

Answering those questions helps you see that everything of value has some element of compromise expected. As marketing legend Seth Godin pointed out in a recent blog post, "you can't run a marathon without getting tired, lose weight without dieting, get ahead without working hard, or earn big money without risk."

Godin went on to share this nugget, so the real question might not be, “What do you want?” It might be, “What do you care enough to compromise for?”

Edward Norton has had a long and successful career, but he still can't help being affected by public scrutiny towards his work. So, good news and bad news: You're not alone in your insecurity, but it never goes away!

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