On 'productivity'
One hell of a metric!
I woke up today (it’s a Sunday) after a decent sleep.
Then I sit back to relax for few minutes to have a slow morning.
I felt BORED.
Every minute, my brain was constantly bombarding me with ideas on what could I do next:
Maybe, work on that idea and build the app I always wanted to build.
Prepare food for kids.
Oh..snap, packing is pending for the upcoming travel..
That work item that I couldn’t do during the week.
There’s a lot in my TODO-list and I am sitting on couch…wtf Gourav!!!
Sh*t, I can’t sit idle.
My mind is now trained to squeeze ‘Productivity’ from every minute I have.
I took a pause before going into auto-pilot: Why the heck am I behaving this way?
And then a thought clicked:
Productivity is a big fat lie.
A market-sized, decades-old, sold-to-your-grandparents kind of lie.
We humans need connection
We need meaning.
We need purpose
…and a sometimes boring time and a few good naps.
Productivity isn’t on that list. It never was.
But try telling that to your brain at 11pm when you haven’t “achieved” anything that day.
You feel guilty. I feel guilty. We all feel like we robbed a bank just by resting.
Sitting idle in on a Sunday? Guilty.
Watch Netflix instead of finishing that “one more task”? Guilty.
Sit on the balcony doing absolutely nothing for ten minutes? Somehow, still guilty.
Wrong.
That guilt isn’t yours. You borrowed it. From somewhere you didn’t choose.
And it’s kind of b*llshit when you actually sit with it.
Let’s get nerdy for a sec
Productivity is just a unit of measurement.
Input effort (mostly time) → Meaningful Output
That’s it. That’s the whole definition.
And the goal is to maximize output per unit of input
It’s the same math used to measure how much a donkey eats versus how much load it carries.
Grass in. Cargo out. Ratio calculated. Donkey rated.
Harsh? Yep.
It’s an economics term. Born in factories, raised in spreadsheets, sent to live with capital owners.
Because more output per worker equals more profit.
Productivity was built to measure machines and the people standing next to them.
It was never built to measure your worth as a human being.
It doesn’t care if you’re a good father. A good friend. A decent human before your first coffee.
It only cares about the output column.
So why does it feel personal?
Because we were taught to.
Through conditioning.
Through marketing.
Through social media.
Through western hustle culture.
And it confused your self-worth and your output. It was never meant to impact personalities and self-image, but it does that today, unfortunately.
We’ve turned a factory metric into a personality.
Most of human history didn’t work this way.
For most of our existence, work had a ceiling.
You worked enough to eat and have shelter. Enough to cover your basic needs and maybe one small pleasure. And the second that bar was cleared?
You stopped.
You rested.
Nobody felt bad about it.
Nobody posted about it either.
People worked to live.
They did NOT live to work.
So, stop it
I’m not saying don’t work hard.
I work hard. I love building things, solving messy problems, shipping stuff that didn’t exist yesterday.
But remember, you are not a donkey being measured for grass-to-cargo ratio.
You’re a person who needs connection, meaning, purpose, rest, and the occasional lazy Sunday with zero apologies attached.
Next time you feel guilty for resting, ask yourself one honest question.
Guilty according to who?
Because it’s probably not you. It’s the metric talking. And the metric was never built to know your worth in the first place.
Being bored and spending time in solitude is a luxury, you have earned. Cherish it before the next race starts
— Gourav