Toxic Productivity
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When you are passionate about your work, it can easily bleed into every other area of your life — you read about work-related topics in your free time, you think about a particularly challenging problem in the shower, you journal about your work, etc. It also changes ones social circle: hanging out with an ambitious and curious start-up crowd easily leads to work as the default topic in a gathering of friends. Once you have work deeply embedded in your interests and social life, it does not take a huge mental leap to "work is what defines me as an individual".
That then leads to a precarious "all eggs in one basket" situation that leaves you vulnerable in cases of professional failure ("My start-up is not doing well; I am a failure") or burnout ("I'm cynical about my work; nothing matters").
It took quite a bit of time to disentangle my self-worth and my professional identity, but it makes life so much better.
It's also quite surprising to note how easy these thought patterns emerge from seemingly nothing. The bar we evaluate ourselves against is often quite removed from rational thought — we can easily place this at an arbitrarily high point just out of reach ("OK, my start-up is growing; it doesn't matter, it needs to be grow faster!").
Good on you for reflecting and picking up these thought patterns!
When you do this, I think it will be easier to convince your inner critic that you need rest (not just sleep but time to pause, other activities for your brain/body, etc.). Whatever balance is for you, you can train your inner critic to prioritize that over a cruel checklist.
Also, I think it's unhelpful to describe yourself as incompetent relative to everyone else or not. If you are behind some others, there are reasons (most probably related to experience), and if you understand them, I think you should be at peace with where you are. That doesn't mean stop improving. It just means, I am here; to get to Z, I must do X and Y.
Basically, zoom in and out of your situation enough to understand it, and do the best thing for you. It could be helpful to frame it as though you are setting up the parameters for a friend rather than yourself. A lot of people aren't as kind to themselves as they are to people they care about. Care about you; be kind to you.
The crux of the answer is making peace with getting left behind and constructing meaning where you’re. Or use that as motivation. In a connected world the Jones are way too many in number to match and exceed.
I think we as humans need to and will find the ability to have a thick skin for this. We have had to historically build resistance to various distractions - this is just the latest where all the celebs are very interested in making you feel like they are regular humans as well and what they do is very much achievable for everyone: in short it isn’t and we just need to get with the program.
no one is cheering on the dude who decides to vacuum the office after work for free
In both case I think the advice is "do not get invested that much that you loose everything including yourself if it fails".
That's great advice if you're 18 years old; but some things are worth the risk.
If you're not all in, you're not in at all. While this certainly applies to work in some cases, it applies as much as again if you want to start a family.
Modern relationships are a hell because everyone has their eye on the door at all times - ready to bolt at a moment's notice if something goes wrong, or if something better comes along.
You'll never have a family of your own with that mindset; it's a problem that causes itself.
Seems like black and white thinking. There's a big spectrum between those two extremes, and no good reason you can't healthily occupy a point on that spectrum. In fact, many points on that spectrum are probably a lot more healthy than either extreme.
Tongue firmly in cheek, in case people don't get what I'm saying.
It’s a modern concept.
Much easier said than done :)
But it is a very worthwhile pursuit. And future jobs and relationships will be better for it.
No, you are confusing cause and effect around emotional attachment and passion/effort.
People are equally likely to attach their sense of self-worth to aspects that require zero effort: nationality, favorite sport team, family name...
Putting a lot of effort into something is not the cause for attachment, but sometimes it can be the effect.
For example, I am very passionate about statistics, I spend a tremendous amount of my free time studying it. I also work as a data scientist. For far too long I mistook a passion for statistics as a passion for data science. I know many software engineers make a similar mistake regarding their passion for programming.
This is a surprisingly big issue in my experience because commitment to your craft can lead to friction with your work and vice versa. This is not a problem when you realize these are two distinct things, but can lead to problems if you aren't aware of this difference.
The most obvious one is that confusing work for craft means you can put more energy into your employer's goals than ones related to bettering your craft (and also yourself). For a software engineer, at first, a late night coding session can benefit both. However in the long run if you keep spending time solving your employers problems, you will have less energy to study and practice software for it's own sake. This can also lead to burn out in which you start to lose you passion for your craft as well.
The reverse of this is also true: being very good at your craft can hurt you professionally. Your employer doesn't care about good code, or the correct statistical models. In the past, whenever I saw fundamentally incorrect statistical tools being used in production at work I couldn't stop and try to correct it. I've seen many software engineers struggle similarly when orgs make bad technical decisions.
I failed many interviews because the interviewer had a mistaken view of things, and rather than just play along, I would try to correct them (I've learned that no matter how sincere and kind you are in your correction, it is always a mistake to correct an interviewer). I distinctly remember the first time an interviewer incorrectly "corrected" me, and instead of justifying my decision, I just said "wow you're right, I was just sketching out some ideas here, but that path is worth investigating". Got that job very easily.
Eventually I realized that I am passionate about statistics and mathematical modeling, these are related but ultimately tangential to my day job. It's great that I get paid well to do something closely related to what I love to study, but at the end of the day it's no different than a true coffee lover working at starbucks.
starbucks would be horrible for a true coffee lover. starbucks serves more "coffee flavored drinks" than real coffee.
Now that same coffee lover working at a high end coffee place where they can perfect the art of the pourover and refine their pull on the espresso machine.. that might be heaven for them.
I have such an annoyingly hard time with this. From a simple "couldn't achieve a technical goal I set for myself for the day" on a Friday afternoon ruining my Friday night and, through ripple effects, subsequently the rest of the weekend to I'm unfulfilled in my job therefore I'm worthless.
Clearly not every human being is an abusive asshole; it's wonderful to be really extremely deeply invested in your romantic partner! But unfortunately we can't really say the same thing about work environments.
What you're actually doing here is excusing shitty work environments. If all jobs are abusive to their employers, we need to fix that, and quickly. There is nothing more satisfying in life than being passionate about your work, and the fact that it is virtually impossible to do so without eventually feeling like a battered abuse victim is a symptom of a late-stage cancerous regulatory-captured capitalism run by a caste of psychopaths.
I want to be passionate and invested in my work. Can we work together to make that a good thing, rather than being something only stupid loser suckers do?
I think it is worthwhile asking what are the cultural, structural, workplace conditions which contribute to people feeling like this in the first place. Are people more likely to have 'toxic productivity' when they are having unrealistic deadlines/workloads thrown at them? Does management foster a hypercompetitive environment? Does being tethered to Slack/Teams contribute? Do specific workplace methodologies such as Agile, etc have an effect?
It’s not a “cycle” to be avoided with better schooling, but rather just the persistent, ever present human condition that we must all learn to manage individually.
In the modern human experience most people realize they don't or shouldn't have to run constantly just to survive. They understand how societies function and that if everyone puts in a little effort we'll all get growth and returns.
Modern workaholism in my opinion stems from market factors driven by capitalism and governmental policy. People have to hustle to survive more and more, we've began stripping off the protections societies have and replacing darwinistic survival of the fittest with a human social abstraction of survival of the fittest in economics. You need to make sure you succeed in the market to provide food, shelter, so on, otherwise you will starve or falter to poor health. You may be out on the streets living in a box. You'll still have some protections over living in a jungle alone, you're less likely to be eaten by a tiger or mountain lion but your overall longevity will be lower relative to economic success on average.
So the captains of industry, those who hold the purse strings, those who shape the culture and expectations are forcibly creating these sorts of obsessions through various private policies in terms of employment. You need to reach certain goals, you only take so many days off, you need to exceed your peers, you need to "grow" (become more efficient, pull in more revenue relative to your cost), and so on.
These environments shape a lot of workaholics you see now, in my opinion. They do it because to succeed in life they need to. To do the things they want to do, those are the rules they must play by. To supply their families, they pick up a second job, they sacrifice their evenings with their families to get a little ahead so maybe they'll be promoted or get a raise to meet up with inflation or in some cases, just so they're not the one on the chopping board when cuts come to provide stability.
Do this stuff long enough and it becomes embedded in your personal expectations and behaviors: you begin to be shaped by your environment. That's why we see so much deep focus on work. It's all driven by economic expectations and more so those who want to see their wealth magically transformed into more wealth passively.
It's not everyone, there are those completely driven and obsessed with goals aligned to workaholism but I don't think it's ubiquitous, most people set realistic goals for themselves and just want to have a happy living experience not extravagence and exceptionalism. I think those who have these obsessions are the ones who shape the culture from the top down due to a selection bias in our economic system (although.. due to pigeonhole principle, only so many of them are at the complete top--many need to live with less powerful positions).
This is not some crazy argument for socialism or to promote laziness, I think it's an overall good idea that people have some drive to be some measure of productive, it's instead an argument that capitalism has gone to extremes in efficiency and growth expectations and trimmed too much fat off the labor force to try and meet those expectations that labor is slowly starving. We need to reign expectations back down to something sane.
I’ve personally done both. I was once well-paid to discern the difference from afar.
It’s unfortunate but true that the ICM, adderall-abusing, 20hrs/day people just fucking crush the folks who kayak on the weekend.
Being a monster in technology isn’t everything, but being the best in anything is inherently extreme.
Olympians don’t have a “healthy body image”.
They’ll do anything to win.
I think the point is to let go of that measuring stick. If you measure them by how satisfied they are with their lives, kayakers are the ones crushing it. Being the best at something and the extreme work that requires does not necessarily make a better life than just walking your own path at a pace that works for you.
Neither should that diminish anyone who truly does want a life where they push to the extreme to be the best. If that works for them, great. But that is not for everyone.
I am rather impatient, as you can likely tell, with people’s endless efforts to conflate that with elite technical ability, either individually or in a team.
I ground it out over decades with no education and for at least one of those decades, no mentorship.
I’m not advising anyone to take that path, but I’ll always get grumpy if someone triple equals that with learning some scripting language and being good at GitHub.
Besides, nobody's gonna sponsor a boring Olympian.
I dunno what sports might require "sacrificing ice cream" but AFAIK Olympians are nuts and have very little life after their events.
Not at kayaking.
And I'm only being slightly facetious. "Winning at coding/tech career" is just one dimension of many, many alternatives.
It's frustrating when a "this is my life" person relies on a "this is my job" person and the latter is too busy planning their next kayak trip to carry their pack. It would be the equivalent of the former constantly poking holes in the latter's kayak.
The latter can and should be challenged. I 100% agree someone not really engaging at work can have a highly negative impact.
IMO we should aim for "highly engaged 9 to 5 - but then enjoy life"!
I agree, but that perspective doesn't reconcile with the point higher up in the thread from somebody who works in the field of identifying high performers. I believe their point was that the "work is a job" people can't really compete with the "work is my life" group. Naturally then, the latter group would then be constantly outpacing the others.
You can crush it and give your all in your 20s, and take a difference pace later on at the right time for you, and that can work very well for people, it often does!
The original article is cautioning against an all-in-one-basket approach that - rather than launch you into the career achievement place you expect - ends up taking more than you can give and burning you out.
It's also not all-or-nothing. Consider a Normal Distribution of achievement, it's entirely OK to be in the top 25% or 10% rather than top 1%. None of us I'm sure wants to be in the bottom percentiles, but it's fine to not even aim for the very very top. That's my view anyway, others will definitely disagree!
I guess it speaks to finding your tribe of people with similar values.
Sounds like a perfect opportunity for personal growth on the part of the former.
Not sure what ICM means, but if it's coding on adderall, 20hrs/day is not going to make great code. And this is assuming all of the requirements are perfectly written and understood. Especially if you're not taking adderall therapeutically.
The Kayaker is building experiences and growing as a person, and probably allowing their subconscious to solve the difficult problems while they are consciously enjoying nature. I think that having a diverse set of experiences ultimately makes you a better problem-solver since you can apply abstract concepts from one domain to another. From an entrepreneurial perspective, you can see a need within one of your hobbies that needs to be fulfilled, and apply your technical skills to it. Meanwhile the adderall person has churned out 1000 lines of business logic for their employer.
There is obviously more nuance to it than that, but the most intelligent people I have met were all incredibly well-rounded. I have also met people who probably had the potential to be equally as intelligent, but their laser focus on a single subject stunted their growth and they can only talk about/entertain ideas within their super specific niche. They become boring and unable to work with others.
But there is also that crowd of people who know that a more holistic set of experiences helps them get ahead in their career.
> Kayaker is ... allowing their subconscious to solve the difficult problems while they are consciously enjoying nature
To an extent taking your mind off a problem and mulling over it helps. But there's no subconscious doing the work, in the end spending the weekend thinking about a problem with a few breaks will definitely make more progress than a weekend Kayaking and not thinking about work.
I'd say I've done some of the worst work of my career during the weeks of deepest crunch time. Many of the people I've known closely who've worked like that long term have had stress-induced medical problems.
It's also interesting to point to Olympians here...elite athletes follow carefully planned training programs to balance training and rest to avoid overtraining, and while the best of the best can work up to massive training loads, there is a point for every human where additional training hours start to negatively impact your performance. To my understanding, recent research actually suggests elite athletes should sleep a couple of hours per night more than most people, so in some way a key piece of "doing anything to win" involves scheduling time to do nothing at all.
I hate that knowing your craft and not being embarrassed about it is a faux pas around here.
When did people who haven’t put in the time become a protected class? It’s not borderline racist to know why Electron apps suck ass in excruciating detail.
I'd say with that framing you can go kayaking and you'll be constantly vigilant about kayakers around you, building your status, watching their speed, noting their achievements, etc.
On the other hand, take me, I go to work and, miraculously, I don't feel being "crushed" by any adderall-abusers. I know many people who commit a lot more than me, I know many CEOs or managers decade younger than me, my old roommates are now tenured professors at respectable universities, and you got me wonder just now, maybe I just have a blind spot and they are "crushing" me day by day somehow, going in circles while firing their machine guns at me. Who knows? I sure don't feel it in any way, they all seem really decent folks, so maybe it turns that ignorance is bliss after all, no?
I struggle to even image how would that be done, but I have some ideas. Maybe if I cared about certifications, or went extensively to every meetup, or tried to lead a community, or bragged about my salary, maybe then I would have opened a hatch to get signals from those people. I don't, so I won't.
Maybe it has something to do with me keeping all too many hobbies (I'm thinking about dropping two or three of them actually, and that includes hn) plus my kids?
Maybe, but at some point - hopefully before they burn out - they'll realize they are drug addicts without any meaningful life outside of work, and then they take up kayaking on the weekends.
I’m a little burnt out on these articles that talk about work life balance, 4 day work weeks, UBI. Not working isn’t going to bring you meaning in life, it’ll probably make you more sedentary and feel more isolated from the world (or at least it does for me).
That's not to say that kayaking has zero value, but I find it hard to imagine someone saying "I was in a really hard spot in life, but then I went kayaking and it changed everything".
I find it a lot easier to imagine someone saying "I built a chrome extension as a side project and there's a small community that loves it. It brings me a lot of pride to hear from them in the Discord that it's really helping them"
The idea of scheduling your downtime. Or blocking off “leisure time” on your calendar
This would be akin to an alcoholic putting “sober blocks” on their calendar. It doesn’t address the problem, it in fact acknowledges and accepts the problem as normal.
For me the biggest problems have been: taking on too much too fast, and my phone.
For the first, saying No has been the cure though still difficult sometimes. The second I think does not get the attention it deserves. Delete work email, delete work slack, delete work calendars from your phones. If you are literally carrying your work around with you in your pocket every waking hour there’s no chance you’re going to avoid it.
> 1. Untangle your self-worth and your work
I think a lot of people propose to themselves static mindsets about how they currently "feel". You might currently feel that your self worth and your work are conflated into one thing, and that can be motivating, but it won't last forever. So what do you do knowing that what you're feeling won't last forever? You ride it out and experience the highs/lows of the feeling as it transpires as there is a good chance that the "feeling" will evaporate much sooner than you expect.
Anecdote: For the first couple years of my career I _did_ have conflated feelings of self worth and work. My work was my life for a couple years, and you know what? I don't regret it. It helped establish a good pace, set me leagues apart from my colleagues in terms of experience and knowledge, and landed me far beyond where I thought I could be after graduating. Were there downsides? Absolutely. Would I do anything differently? No, because there would be downsides there too and in the set of all possible options, I think I chose the best one.
There is nothing wrong with trying hard.
There is nothing wrong with trying hard for long periods of time.
There is nothing wrong with experiencing burnout.
There is nothing wrong with working to overcome burnout.
These attitudes have negative consequences. Trying to avoid them also has negative consequences. You're going to experience negative consequences, and that's okay.
Yes, even small amounts of productivity are extremely toxic to me.
I need a hit, baby, give me it
This has granted me immunity.
People who are faking productivity can be quite hard to spot, because often they look busy. If others become suspicious and try to confront them or try to detangle the spaghetti of inefficient practices, there is often a flood of excuses and illogic. Not necessarily just with the workers, but also with supervisors or managers, who are hiding that they don't know or are not sure about what they are doing.
Language changes. We used to make up words like "shopaholic". Now we might say "toxic consumerism" if we didn't already have a word for it. Different forms that mean the same thing; no need to get worked up over it.
I don't see much difference with the suffix -oholic that says the same thing.
To paraphrase John Wanamaker: half my productivity is toxic, half is beneficial. The trouble is I don't know which half.
In any case, the article is readable and brings up a number of observations I can relate to.
Bye for now. I need find a way to release some more dopamine somehow. ;-)
In the end, small wins become a curse, win big or go home and watch YouTube videos about productivity, on 3x.
Actually calculating how much my time is worth helped me answer this. Divide money earned by hours worked to get an $/h figure. Any moment where I can't do anything to earn more than that is free time. This algorithm ensures I only make extra effort when an activity actively improves my value and allows me to enjoy myself completely free from guilt at all other times.
I could accept all jobs regardless of pay and make more money by working at all times but that suffers from a serious case of diminishing returns. It's harmful for my self-worth and self-respect when I put in extra effort to make less than what my time is worth. So I just do nothing instead.
I think this is key. I had a 40 minute drive home. I don't miss the drive. What I miss is the demarcation of my workday and transition to free time. Maybe I could switch in and out of tennis shoes, like Mister Rodgers used to do.
But lets face it, most of us have the opposite problem.
Anything above 40 hours should scale on top of base - and not in a linear fashion.
Otherwise that is simply a toxic productivity. Working hard so that someone else could get an extra ski holiday (or whatever).
I don't regret it at all. I'm in an excellent position today because of how hard I pushed myself. Maybe there's a bit of difference because most of my productive drive was used outside of work.
Burnout is terrible. At the same time, you won't get to where you want to be in life without effort.
Yes, there is also toxic workaholism - where financial pressures, peer pressure and other reasons cause people to be lost in the work and burnout. The biggest reasons for burnout in my book is not working too much, but working where the volume of work doesn’t match the reward, or where you ignore sleep depravation and don’t pay off sleep debt (not eating enough while working may lead to that as well). So if you are lucky enough to get people who are born machines of productivity, make sure you compensate them well so they don’t burn out and ensure they get adequate sleep. It pays pack quickly.
The part of what is described that resonated is the feeling that I can't "sit still", and have to be "doing something". I've got a three year old daughter whom has improved my life immensely, and yet I still get comments from people about my other projects, and how much I get done regarding those projects, despite having a toddler. My secret, of course, is just that I can't sit still. My free time has been diminished pretty severely by becoming a father, and yet when I have a spare hour or two, I won't sit and relax; I will take that time and try to push through as much as I can on whatever project I'm working on.
That a person sets goals for themselves that they seek to accomplish, is often a good thing. Those goals usually only become problematic when they are unrealistic or its too much, too soon. Like if a person is way too overweight, but thinks they are going to be able to run a marathon in a month. So by pushing an exercise routine to the limit, they begin to have say knee or back problems.
If a person is simply goal-orientated or competitive in multiple aspects of their lives, I don't see that as toxic, unless they are taking it to extremes. Like if it is causing relationship, stress, or mental health issues.
Don't get overwhelmed with a massive to-do list just do what is realistic and small amounts and prioritise
If an individual or group of individuals doesn't want to be hyper-focused, fine, don't do it, but it's a dangerous thing to judge others who may be different for being different form you.
Funny, that's basically exactly my routine.
The problem is the time at which I do it.
net worth is nice
family is nice
health is nice
it all turns to dust
act accordingly
this too shall pass
Energizer Bunny.
So...be nice. I could have worded my "correction" better (e.g. "Did the author mean the Energizer Bunny?"), or, better still, not have made the comment in the first place (it wasn't necessary, and I admit that. I probably won't do it again). I did correct myself, upvoted the HN user that corrected me, and, as a general rule, I do not take opportunities to launch unprovoked slaps at HN users that I don't know.
I've learned that it's generally a bad idea to initiate relationships with attacks. There's no upside.