Everything feels so urgent these days. Productivity is “the effectiveness of productive effort.” Productivity is not effort. It’s effectiveness. It’s easy for me to see that effort, especially in the form of busyness, can be counterproductive.
Slowing down has become the antidote to the bane of busyness–and an act of resistance. I was fascinated by this article in The Guardian. I didn’t know that Danes “forgot” how to run the trains when Nazis invaded Denmark. Or this Czech list of Don’ts:
“Similarly, in Czechoslovakia, six days after the Soviet invasion in 1968, the newspaper Večerní Praha published “10 commandments”, writing: “When a Soviet soldier comes to you, YOU: 1. Don’t know 2. Don’t care 3. Don’t tell 4. Don’t have 5. Don’t know how to 6. Don’t give 7. Can’t do 8. Don’t sell 9. Don’t show 10. Do nothing.”
This list is a master class in saying “No.”
Whether you are resisting an authoritarian regime or capitalism’s relentless push to do more faster, embracing your own list of don’ts might be just the thing to restore real productivity to your universe.
Here are three tips to try. As always, conduct your own experiments to find what works for you in your life and context.
- Try limiting your task list to three things a day.
- Use sticky notes to keep your to-do list short.
- Try de-atomizing your schedule.
I learned about de-atomizing from a recent email from Oliver Burkeman (I highly recommend his newsletter, The Imperfectionist, and love his book, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking.) Burkeman references a 2022 article by this 2022 piece by Nat Eliason.
Simple example: Americans used to have jobs that required physical activity. With more knowledge work/desk jobs, physical activity was greatly reduced, and these needs needed to be met elsewhere. In other words, one activity needed to become two: working and exercising. That’s atomization. So it’s no big surprise that activity levels have gone way down.
So to reclaim our schedules–and our happiness, according to Eliason–we need to de-atomize. My favorite way to do this is with the gardening workout. Digging, squatting, hauling pots and bags of soil, and moving around the uneven terrain of our yard offer a full-body workout.
Check out the article. It’s easy to see why our general well-being has gone downhill. Time to de-atomize!
