Leaving behind toxic productivity

This post is another sequel in my vaguely defined productivity tracking series of blog posts. With any luck, this will also be the last.

I spent most of my 20s in “constant” pursuit of ambitious goals I could never seem to really even get started on. Book series outlines I kept telling myself I would write one day; board game and video game ideas I kept telling myself I’d someday design and develop; any number of creative endeavors that made it any amount of distance from inception to completion—but usually didn’t get much further than inception.

Sure, I’ve had projects go far. A few years ago, I wrote the first 60,000 words of a web serial that probably could have gone on another million—an exhausting prospect that I quickly realized I wanted nothing to do with. And my Porydex project is still alive and healthy after 8 years of on-and-off development (and currently very much in another “on” cycle).

But this post isn’t about those successful projects, or even about any of the unsuccessful ones. It’s about the pattern, the mindset itself, the unhealthy obsession I had with “being productive” and “finishing my projects” and always pushing myself harder than I could actually handle being pushed, while surrounded by like-minded ambitious friends who did the same thing to themselves.

For years, I struggled to find ways to trick myself into being motivated enough to work on projects that clearly didn’t motivate me enough on their own—which should have been a red flag all along. I’d set monthly goals for myself, or word count quotas for writing, or page count quotas for reading, and so on. When that system of monthly goals failed, I tried bi-weekly goals instead. When that system failed, I gave it a break for a while and then tried the same exact process again. For some very mysterious reason, it failed just as hard the second time.

A decade-long cycle of telling myself to finish Thing X by Date Y, then all too often either not working on it at all (because, surprise, I’ve probably had ADHD all along) or not finishing it (because it was never a realistic goal in the first place, having not accounted for how much time I actually had available), and then berating myself for not meeting all my goals—and then doing it all over again.

I look back on it now and ask myself… Why? Why did I put myself through so much utterly pointless and unnecessary stress? Why did I stick so hard to processes that never worked for me, even while scoffing at other people doing the same thing with processes that didn’t seem to work for them? Why did I ever think it was healthy to treat my free time like a second job, complete with metrics and regular self-given performance reviews?

One big reason is that all of that unhealthy behavior was normalized and even admired in the social circles I had cultivated at the time. Some of my closest friends were aspiring writers on the same page as me: dreaming big and holding themselves to impossible standards that we rarely followed through on. We were a self-reinforcing pit of toxic productivity, enabling a lot of each other’s worst habits, but justifying it all the while under the guise of being supportive of each other’s creative endeavors.

Literally what was I thinking, bringing concepts from agile software development to my friend group of hobbyist writers, and getting everyone on board with kanban boards for their project management? What was I thinking, encouraging their desires to write up weekly project progress reports, and eagerly reading them every time? Even when a lot of those reports echoed my own struggles, with sentiments like “I didn’t write [as much as I wanted/anything at all], therefore I need to push myself even harder next week”!

Insane. We were all being insane.

(Probably some of what I was thinking was, we were trying to gather the momentum to turn ourselves into an actual indie media company, which we all realized called for some level of professionalism. Well… We gave it our best shot, at least. And in the process, learned that we are the exact wrong kind of people to run a media company.)

Over the last year I’ve taken a big step back from that whole projects-and-deadlines-focused mindset, and realized just how detrimental it was to my mental health all along. For all my years of making rigorous spreadsheets of project schedules and rarely ever sticking to them, what did I actually gain?

Nothing. Just a sense of disdain for those projects I could never bring myself to work on no matter how hard I forced it. Disdain that I wasn’t just “into” them enough on their own merits that I had to force it.

But that’s the thing. I never had to force it. I could have walked away at any point, could have chosen to stop trying to fit a round peg into a square hole and just let myself go with the flow of whatever my creative energy wanted to do at the time, if it wanted to do anything at all.

Maybe there are other 60,000 word stories I missed out on because I was clinging on too hard to other, older story ideas I thought I should remain “loyal” to. Maybe Porydex could have been a year ahead of its current development timeline. Maybe creative writing was the wrong path all along and I should have been trying something completely different.

I don’t know which of those might be true or not. All I know is, for the last few months I’ve just been casually working on Porydex without any cares about deadlines or schedules whatsoever—nothing more complicated than “hmm I guess I’ll work on this part next”—and I’ve been having a blast.

So that’s where I’m at right now. In a complete 180 to where I was a few years ago, I’m now firmly in the camp of: “Screw deadlines, those are for jobs. Hobby projects are infinitely better without any of that junk. It’ll be finished when it’s finished, no matter how long it takes. And if I want to put it down for a month or a year or forever, that’s fine too.”

The next time I do some creative writing, I’ll be doing it without any regard for deadlines or pressure or anything other than my enjoyment of it in the moment.