Relax – you don’t need to be productive

If there’s one thing lockdown has shown, it’s that you don’t need to spend it productively. So it turns out not even a global pandemic can stop the crawl of the svelte-limbed, excessively moisturised, overly white-toothed monster that is the culture of productivity.

Oh yes, the indecently efficient beast is back! And now it’s bigger and badder than ever, prowling through your lockdown life hissing about All Of The Things You Should Be Doing With Your Time And Aren’t.

Since we entered lockdown two weeks ago the internet, influencers, and even your own head are bursting with suggestions on what you need to be doing with all this supposed ‘‘free time’’.

Start journaling! Join the cult of bread baking! Take up yoga! (Happiness can still be found doing a downward dog at the top of a solitary mountain in peach lycra!)

But whether you’re pounding dough or your triceps, the message is clear that you should be doing everything possible to maximise your ‘‘free time’’. Every single spare second should be squeezed for productivity, so you emerge from lockdown your best, fittest, shiniest, yeasty-est self.

And, despite us having zero previous evidence that we’re capable of a productive life even under normal circumstances, we’ve gone into this crisis fully expecting we should do just that.

Many of us have long lists of everything we’ll accomplish during lockdown. Mine was as tediously wholesome as you could imagine – lots of pilates, podcasts and pulsebased dishes.

Of course I haven’t actually done these things. None of us have. I have, however, mastered the art of staring listlessly at the ceiling, cradling the increasingly fidgety cat and whispering portentously, ‘‘how will this end?’’

But while we’re sitting, stewing guiltily over that unopened pilates app, lockdown has made one thing increasingly clear about the culture of productivity. Namely, it’s totally nuts. And you don’t need to feel guilty for not following it – not now, not ever.

First off, let’s just ease your guilt by pointing out that we haven’t been given more ‘‘free time’’.

Yes, we may now have some extra hours in the day that previously were for commuting or gyming or shopping. (Assuming that you’re not a parent who’s now 24/7 on the job.)

But this isn’t free time. That implies hours of sun-filled, blissful nothingness where we have the mental space to do anything we like from kayaking to crocheting a bonnet for your cat.

What we’ve got is a period of compulsory non-activity where we’ve been grounded at home, alongside a whole lot of unprecedented worry over whether the world is ending.

So naturally your ‘‘free time’’ is hoovered up by long stretches of dazed drinking on the couch stressing about the future.

And call me unmotivated, but when I’m working to make sure loved ones can make rent/buy food/stay healthy, I’m not exactly in the mood for hamstring stretches anyway.

But the main point is that if lockdown has proved anything to me, it’s that the productivity culture has never been more useless.

I had a sense pre-Covid that the ethos of living your life by wringing out every drop of selfimprovement is an exhausting, lonely, and unfulfilling one. Every list I ticked off, every podcast I listened to, every barre class I attended supposedly brought me closer to a sense of achievement.

Yet all it did was make me more frustrated, for as soon as I’d done something there was something else to master. (And there’s nothing so paralysing as the continual panic that you’re not good enough yet.)

Not to mention it actively stopped me getting closer to realising actual fulfilment, because every time I got a flash of insight I had to run off to another barre class before I could register it.

And what happened when the crisis hit? Did I reach for my yoga mat and begin emergency plie´ s? God no. When the chips went down, none of my relentlessly optimised skills were soothing, calming or even useful.

And if I had a sense that this was an empty life before, I certainly know it now. If focusing on selfimprovement felt frustrating before, now it just feels plain selfish.

It’s not the time to be worrying about smashing your personal best when everyone you love is in meltdown.

As broadway-musical-level cliched as it sounds, the crisis has shown us that what actually makes life meaningful is helping other people.

These have been long, restless, manic days, and the only things that have made me feel worthwhile are making people cakes, donating, volunteering and calling my parents to talk about their progress in the garden.

However Maria Von Trapp it is, it gives me a sense of purpose I never found from obsessively ticking off to-do lists.

’’Many of us have long lists of everything we’ll accomplish during lockdown,’’ writes Verity Johnson. ‘‘Mine was as tediously wholesome as you could imagine – lots of pilates, podcasts and pulse-based dishes. Of course, I haven’t actually done them.’’