Intoxicated with productivity?

According to the author, our obsession with efficiency is making us unhappy, stressed out, and physically ill. For years, we’ve been pursuing ever-increasing benchmarks as though high productivity is what really matters in life. Ultimately, we’ve only succeeded in making ourselves miserable.

If you’re constantly adding to your to-do lists, looking to optimize your schedule, and hoping to somehow find more hours in the day, you might have fallen victim to the “cult of efficiency.”

So, what exactly is this cult? Well, it’s an attitude that supposes that the busier we are, the better. And although it’s never been more powerful than it is right now, this phenomenon didn’t grow overnight.

Our modern fixation with productivity is rooted in the past.

Since the 1960s, worker pay has just about outpaced inflation, but in the same period, CEOs have been taking home bigger and bigger paychecks. So, in essence, the fruit of our increased efficiency is usually reaped by our bosses and not by us.

The cult of efficiency makes us feel guilty about enjoying leisure time.

It’s no surprise, then, that we often find it hard to disconnect from work when we get home. In fact, researchers use the term polluted time to describe the kind of time off we experience when we still feel the need to return emails, field calls, and mull over business decisions. People who had thought about the financial value of their time were significantly lesslikely to enjoy life.

Overwork, on the other hand, often only increases our income by 6 percent a year — a poor trade-off, given the exhaustion and stress that excessive work can trigger.

Even in our personal lives, we strive for efficiency.

one of the most important things about the efficiency trend is that it very quickly escaped its origins in the workplace and became an attitude toward life in general.

So even if you haven’t worked in years, you might find yourself under the sway of a mindset that values constant self-improvement and busyness for their own sake.

In this light, it’s no surprise that busyness has become such a valued characteristic. And our eagerness to share our achievements on social media makes clear that busyness brings undeniable prestige.

Our focus on efficiency can deprive us of meaningful human connections.

isolation isn’t just emotionally painful. Among other dangers, it can cut your lifespan and even increase your risk of getting cancer or suffering a heart attack.

a recent study showed that we’re better at tolerating differing opinions when we hear them articulated out loud compared to when we read them.

Another fascinating study hooked participants up to an fMRI machine and monitored their brain waves as they listened to a story being told. Astoundingly, the researchers found that listeners’ brain activity began to imitate that of the storyteller! Scientists call this phenomenon speaker-listener neural coupling or, in plain words, mind meld.

Social media makes it too easy to compare ourselves to others.

If we’re not careful, the desire to outdo others can leave us engaged in an endless contest to be the most efficient and productive person on the internet. Needless to say, that’s a battle we can never win.

The solution? Learn to ground your evaluations in yourself, without reference to anyone else and what they might have done.

In other words, stop comparing your messy spaghetti bolognese with the picture-perfect dish you saw on Instagram. If the meal was good enough for you, you don’t have to bother with any painful comparisons.

A few simple changes can help us to slow down and improve our quality of life.

The first problem we need to confront in tackling our focus on efficiency is that many of us have simply no idea where our time goes.

Secondly, people with better time perception are less likely to feel overwhelmed, and spend less time watching TV and browsing social media sites. As a result, they can make time for true leisure.

In fact, a study conducted at the Berlin Academy of Music found that the best young musicians were the most aware of how they spent their time. Not only were they conscious of the hours they spent rehearsing — they were also more aware of the amount of the time they spent socializing and relaxing.

Once you have a clear picture of how you currently spend your time, craft a schedule outlining how you’d like your days to look. Remember, this is a schedule that prioritizes leisure, not productivity. Set aside a chunk of time every day to allow yourself to be totally idle and unproductive.

To recover our leisure time, we must learn to distinguish between means and ends.

A culture that stresses hard work and busyness doesn’t just persuade us to neglect leisure time; it also encourages us to focus on means instead of ends.

To be more explicit, focusing on how much we get done can lead us to overlook what we get done. Lots of us are so concerned with checking boxes that we’ve stopped asking whether the things we’re doing are truly making us any happier.

By paying so much attention to efficiency, we’re neglecting the end goal and instead focusing on the process. Once we learn to set this right, the cult of efficiency loses much of its appeal.

The problem with focusing on efficiency is that it leads us to ignore the end goal. Clocking up long hours at the office might be an impressive show of self-discipline, but it can also interfere with valuable long-term goals — like establishing close relationships with our children, or giving back to our local communities.

So what can be done? Well, we need to make a habit of questioning whether our “productive” behaviors are bringing us any closer to our cherished, long-term goals.

If you lose sight of your long-term goals, it’s easy to fill your life with “productive” but ultimately unrewarding activities. Once you drop these tasks, you’ll find that you have enough time to work towards your real aims and also to relax.

Our current focus on maximizing efficiency has blinded us to the joys of leisure and idleness. Ironically, our obsession with improving our lives has actually left us lonelier, sicker, and more stressed than ever before. The solution to this state of affairs is simple: make time for true leisure in your life and just do nothing.