There’s more to life than productivity

lecturer in organisational behaviour, Victoria University

Productivity is a big deal in our culture, especially when it comes to work and careers. This idea will be news to virtually no-one. Over the past five weeks, though, many of us might have been surprised to discover just how much we personally care about our own productivity and performance.

For some, this might have been triggered by a massive shrinkage of time available for work, stemming from things like full-time parenting or caring for vulnerable relatives. With so little time to get anything done, we’ve been treading vocational water: doing our best to keep work and careers afloat, while weighed down by anxiety and frustration at not being able to deliver at our usual level.

Others who suddenly found themselves with an abundance of time might have first felt excited about the lack of distractions, but guilt when the muchanticipated productivity surge never showed up.

Humans have evolved to get emotional about things we care about. The fact many of us get emotional about performance is a clear signal it matters to us. A specific research interest of mine is performancebased identity: when people come to feel ‘‘being good’’ at their job is not only important but an essential part of what makes them ‘‘them’’, so much so that anything related to performance (eg, praise, awards, results) also matters at a deeply personal, emotional level.

This idea may seem a bit gross to Kiwis – as something native to more individualistic, competitive cultures like Australia or the United States. But just like that Joni Mitchell line, ‘‘you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone’’, often we don’t understand the ways we define ourselves until they’re threatened. By blocking our ability to perform at our best, Covid-19 has, I suspect, threatened performancebased identities in recent weeks.

I’m no more immune to the pressures of our ‘‘productivist’’ culture and performance-based identities than anyone else. When the lockdown was announced,

I first counted myself lucky to have stable employment and income, but was concerned about the impact four weeks of full-time parenting (shared with my wife) would have on my output – particularly in terms of delivering for my students.

More generally, I’ve always noticed I tend to be happiest at the end of those days when I’ve achieved a lot, and antsy on days when I haven’t. While that drive to excel is probably great for one’s employer and career prospects, research suggests that letting self-esteem hinge on performance isn’t great for mental health, families and day-to-day happiness.

The sustained period of reduced work has forced me, and I suspect many others, to finally confront my psychological relationship with performance.

We might have found ourselves asking why exactly we care so much about doing well at work, and why that really matters in the overall scheme of our lives. While we might have had less time to perform on the work front, perhaps we’ve found more time for other things, neglected identities that, when given a tad more attention, provide us with immense joy.

We might have similarly found ourselves asking what it means to ‘‘do well’’, or why we focus so much on how we’re doing relative to others instead of focusing on how much we’ve developed and improved since last year.

Crucially, we might have found the answers to these questions are far less black and white than we thought; that there’s a lot of complexity, nuance and ambivalence there when we start peeling back the mental layers – an activity the busyness of ‘‘normal life’’ never allowed.

If there’s one thing my research has taught me so far, and which has been reinforced by this lockdown, it’s this: productivity and happiness do not always go hand in hand. Our world might push us to build identities and our sense of meaning in life around performance and output, but each of us is also capable of resisting these pressures.

We’re capable of developing a more deliberate, thoughtful relationship with performance, beyond the pedal-to-themetal default society prescribes. By no means is this an easy mental trail to venture down but, of the good to come out of the lockdown, taking our first steps is surely something.