The productivity struggle

This was supposed to be a productive day. It was very pleasant working up at the Berkeley clock tower, and I was reminded of more productive days I spent there during the plague. A blessed routine that let me ride out the uncertainty almost literally, since it took almost an hour of bicycling to get there. When you're focused on avoiding death via car you can't afford to focus on world events.

I set up the camping chair and unfolded the laptop and sipped my coffee. I felt a bit better. But what did I get done? Afterward I had to think hard about it. There was the ride, and the setup, and the sense of a clear head during that time, but if nothing got done, what was the point?

I remembered ordering replacement tire patches, and searching online for some new storage bags to stick on the bike -- which I did find at a good price, and ordered. I remembered synchronizing the phone. I looked through the GitHub repository for Crossrunner. The author had a donation page, so I gave $20. Then I googled "Super Merryo Trolls", and discovered that someone had written a general purpose graphics library for the Apple IIgs inspired by my essay about the game. Interesting! I took some notes.

But then it started getting cold. In fact, the weather felt colder than anything I had felt in my rides across the middle of the country in similar seasons. This was the magical Bay Area, where cold was supposed to be an irritant at worst! I put on my rain pants and jacket and still felt cold. There was no helping it, so I packed up and left earlier than I planned, capping my time by the clock tower at just over two hours.

That little patch of university lawn was supposed to be my workplace for the day. But when I finished coasting down to the house I found the check from my 401(k) and deposited that, and that was the last productive thing I did. The plan was to redeploy my computer on my desk, and continue with my open-source coding project, but instead I went on an elaborate online search for movies that I wanted to see, and then ended up watching half an hour of a strange old move called "McBain", and another hour of "Fear of a Black Hat", and then a few minutes of a schlocky film from the 90's called "Evil Toons", all of which I stole samples from. Between depositing the check and getting ready for bed six hours later, the only thing that I could even consider productive was when I applied a patch to a bike tube over the bathroom sink. It took maybe ten minutes.

I know there is more than one way to measure your life, including ways other than productivity, which the capitalist and commerce-driven world we live in claims is the only true measure. I've had problems in the past with feeling as though I'm wasting my time if I'm not doing a something that produces creative output or a physical result. This feeling is why I end up writing short reviews or editorials about every television series or book or film that I spend time with, and obsessively cataloguing everything I learn on my bicycle trips. If it's not productive, if it's not somehow adding value, then the activity has no value. It's done and nothing concrete has changed. ...Therefore it never happened.

This struggle with mandatory productivity is even more insidious than the struggle for work-life balance. Because if you must be productive at work to survive, and you can't enjoy life outside of work without making it productive, then productivity is inescapable. Whatever you think you're doing "for the hell of it" gets channeled towards producing some documented result, and "for the hell of it" immediately becomes a lie. Another phrase used for this is "goal-oriented thinking", to which the platitudinal antidote is "enjoy the journey, not the destination." But even there, we've already started living the lie, because you can't be on a journey unless some kind of deliberate process is happening -- unless you strip down the concept of a journey until you're walking in circles, or stumbling blind, or just tucked into bed and dreaming. And if you're putting in an effort to avoid effort, then what the hell are you doing?

I had this problem long ago, the first or second time I tried to force myself to do nothing, or at least nothing useful. Just the process of deciding what specific useless thing I wanted to be doing, became a project with a goal. Eventually this stage of the process mutated out of proportion, and when I asked myself the question, "Wouldn't it be nice to relax and watch a movie?" the answer to that question was, "Let's sit down for two hours and compile a list of movies I want to watch at some point," by aggressively searching through movie release schedules and reviews and looking up ratings online. No movie watching would occur.

Same with taking a walk. "Where do you want to go? What do you need to wear? Wouldn't it be nice to listen to a book while you walk? Which books are on your iPod? Let's sit down and..."

Thus I eventually learned my own particular lesson: I am an eternal filing clerk.

Somehow I ended up being that by default, when I'm not looking; when I'm not trying to do anything specific. And it's actually a bit stressful for me to stop. It's like I'm a rodent with incisors that keep growing, so I have to chew on information. Give me a book, give me a list to make, something to sort, something important that needs saying clearly so I can chew sawdust words off this giant log until each sentence is carefully jointed and just slender enough, and the reader doesn't get lost in the branches.

Between this sort of addiction to the state of creative flow, and another addiction I have to unstructured time, it's often hard for me to interpret what I'm doing, and parse my own mental health. If I booted three social visits off my schedule because I wanted to keep a clear runway to get this exciting programming project launched, but then I spent a third of the time tinkering with bike parts and mixing music, did I do a good job? Three projects moved along, which is good. But I set out to finish one, and it's still not finished. Plus I know that social visits are important for my mental health, even if they do require that I deal with transportation and scheduling, and the unpleasant sensation of a looming deadline. Next time I should insist on keeping the social visits, yes?

I always feel better when I do. But what does it produce? Oh, the agony...

Honestly, I've gotten better with this. Now I do actually watch the movies on the list. That can lead to a written review, but only if I have an interesting thought. I've continued to use music, especially "ambient" music, to mediate my attention, and that has helped me be in the moment through my other senses. It's an odd tactic, but for example, when I pair a walk through a garden with Coil's "The Angelic Conversation", the audio seems to make me more aware of the sensation of touching the flowers, the smell of the soil, the pressure of the air, the contours of the vines and spines. It's counterintuitive, but it works so well that... Okay, here's where the filing clerk comes in: I made a playlist called "Courtyards" that has seven hours of very narrowly curated music just for walking in gardens and courtyards.

(An aside: What's the most courtyard-y garden-y song in that list? I think it's "Madrigals of the Rose Angel", by Harold Budd. Give it a listen and tell me it doesn't conjure up a sultry afternoon in a Victorian garden.)

Where was I going with this? Oh yeah. The clock tower. A lot of my time up there during the COVID years was spent in pursuit of work, in an "office space" secure from infection, but it also forced me to undertake a set of "unproductive" tasks every day just to make it happen:

• I had to shower, get dressed in clean clothes, and leave the house.
• I had to slowly pedal my bike and work stuff three miles up a hill.
• I had to say hello to the people at the cafe, to get my coffee.

This all took up to three hours, depending on whether I lingered at the cafe.

Just having a routine - any routine - during that time was good for my mental health. Maybe I just needed to pass those 2 or 3 "useless" hours again today for the same reason? Something in the back of my mind wanted to spend that time, and the rest of me smartly leaned out of the way to allow it. "Yeah sure, go up to the clock tower. Work's still gonna get done, so it's justified. Get on that bike. Get that coffee. You'll be productive when you get there."

Now there's an interesting slight-of-hand, right? Allowing myself to do the unproductive thing because I can fool myself into believing that it's a stepping stone to productivity later on. Don't look too closely at the result. You have to leave room for yourself to be fooled next time. Don't let the filing clerk get wise to the trick...