The Problem of Productivity

This is the first end of summer since seventh grade that I will not be starting school. As I write this, Davidson’s first day of classes started last Thursday. The day before that, my brothers and sister woke up early to start their first day back. All that day I felt strange and a little melancholic. I feel like I should be starting school too. The summer’s over. It’s time to wake up early and get ready for long days of work. It’s time to have a fixed schedule and a plan and be stressed out and counting down the next days till break. It’s time for classes or Zoom meetings or something. But none of those normal things that I’ve gotten so used to are happening right now. 

I spent the month of June agonizing over my decision, but finally decided to take a leave of absence from school this fall. It’s not just that I won’t be on campus. I’m not enrolled in classes at all. I never thought I would be pressing the pause button halfway through college, but here we are. 

Why did I decide not to go back? The short answer is: the corona virus health and safety measures pose a whole new string of challenges and barriers to access for me, and navigating them would suck up a huge part of my time and energy. As an example, while I normally navigate campus on my own using a white cane, sometimes—whether I’m lost and running late somewhere or navigating a crowded indoor space—it’s more convenient to use sighted guide. (That’s where I hold a sighted person’s elbow and walk about two steps behind them.) Physical distancing requirements make this technique impossible, and my alternative is relying on verbal directions--which are often unreliable because lots of people get their left and right mixed up. So, over all, I’m confident I made the best decision for me, even though it’s not a decision I wanted to have to make.

But on days when I don’t feel productive, especially this past week watching my siblings go back to school, I ask myself whether I should’ve just bitten the bullet and done a full semester online. At least that way I would have been forced into a set structure. I would have had clear objectives to work toward, given to me by all my professors. I would have felt a sense of pride and accomplishment and that I was working toward something, moving forward in life, getting closer to some grand future where I am the confident, happy, successful adult I want to be. Instead, I feel lost. 

So why haven’t I found something to do?

Even while I still lived at school, I would have days where I felt miserable about myself because I thought I wasn’t doing enough. The bullying voices in my head would tell me I was not taking on enough responsibilities, not stepping into enough leadership roles, not competent or experienced enough to ever be competitive in a work setting, not disciplined enough—the list goes on and on. But usually a good talk with a professor or a solid weekly Bible study session with friends could quiet those jeering voices. At home, the jeering voices have only gotten louder, until they have driven me to avoid and escape and delay. The days all seem to blur together. I wake up ready for a new day, and before I know it, that day is gone, and I hardly know how I spent my time to make the day fly by so quickly. Then the days blur into weeks. I’ll start Monday with a list of things I want to accomplish, and next thing I know it’s Friday, and I’m lucky if I’ve finished any of those things. I spend so much time trying to decide what to do next, and agonizing over how much I need to do and how hard and overwhelming it will be to do it. The rest of the time I spend making excuses for why I don’t need to work yet. Hours and hours of freedom stretch out before me and I squander them. My procrastination in turn enrages me. I know I’m sabotaging myself; I just don’t know how to or am not willing to stop it. And then I think about the fact that there were at least eight weeks this summer if not more where I could have been consistently studying Chinese or working on my resume or starting a myriad of projects and yet didn’t. Then my feeling that it’s already too late leads me to quit before I’ve begun, and that only makes everything worse. 

But is productivity for its own sake really that important? 

Our lives are so outcome-focused; and built into them is a constant pressure to achieve the next milestone. From elementary school, we begin to be conditioned that what matters is not what we learn but what grade we get on the test. As we get older the teachers tell us they’re preparing us to be successful in middle school. In middle school the teachers give us harder homework and tell us we need to get on top of things and become more organized so that we can be prepared for high school. Then we spend high school chasing good grades and filling our time with extracurricular activities in the hopes that a good college will deem us worthy and desirable. Then in college, it’s more of the same. Only now the promise is a perfect career. All our lives, we’re chasing outward achievement. We’re trying to impress other people.

In high school, I lived a little differently. I got good grades, but I didn’t obsess over or receive a 4.0. I spent a lot of time with my family, and was only involved in a couple of extracurriculars. I was never the president of any club. In my first two years of college, my priorities were much the same. I valued getting plenty of rest and taking my time to enjoy three meals a day either with a good podcast to listen to or friends to talk to. In fact, savoring our dinners in the dining hall long after most people had left was how my best friend and I first got close. I have still not been president of anything, though I was constitutional advisor of my acapella group. (Yes, that is actually a real office with real responsibilities.) I like my approach to life. I like that I can spend hours talking to one person uninterrupted without needing to rush to five different meetings in a row. I like leaving room for spontaneity. I think even if I tried to go all the time from one thing to the next without stopping, I would fail. I can’t function on low amounts of food and sleep, it takes me longer to get from place to place, and going from one thing to the next without giving myself any transition time is exhausting. Most of all, I like that—though the jeering voices would have me believe otherwise—my identity isn’t solely wrapped up in outward accomplishments.

So a part of me is okay with all this downtime. It’s painful, but I’m being forced to confront these issues in myself, and I’m growing from it. Deep down I trust that God has put me where I’m meant to be, and that He has something big planned; this time of angst and frustration is just shaping me so that I’ll be ready to take on the next major chapter in my life when it arrives.

But is a season of growth without tangibly measurable improvements okay? Shouldn’t I be chasing opportunities, not just hoping they’ll magically fall in my lap? If I don’t take advantage of this time to advocate for myself, to grow my skills, to experiment with starting my own business or getting an internship to gain clarity about what I want for the future, how does that make me anything less than an idiot? How can I put personal development on a resume?

I think there’s a balance to be had. I’ve been at least in part held back by bad habits that I can work to break, and that’s what I’m striving toward now. This blog is a huge step toward that. Now that I have an audience and a deadline, I know I can’t spend weeks thinking about how someday I will write something down. I have to suck it up and start writing. I’ve also started reviewing Chinese again. Even if I only get half an hour of study in, my goal is to get to a point where I never miss a day. At the same time, I have to give myself grace. I think some of my lack of productivity is just my brain trying to adjust to the disorientation of quarantine. On top of that, I’m having a hard time deciding what, exactly, I want to be working toward. With that in mind, I’m trying to have a healthy balance of pushing myself to do better while celebrating my small successes and moving on and learning from my failures. I’m entering into a semester of searching, and I’m afraid it will just be a continuation of a long, lazy summer. I hope, at the end of it, I find some answers.