What does productivity mean anyway?
In last week’s issue, I cited RescueTime’s productivity metric in my examination of how much work is too much, but promised to critique it further. Here I go. When I downloaded RescueTime, I expected to see that social media, specifically Twitter, was eating my days. RescueTime classifies Twitter as VERY DISTRACTING and color codes it red, while word processors and email clients are VERY PRODUCTIVE and coded blue. (It starts with automatic classifications but you can change them—for some people, Twitter is probably a very productive part of their job, and you can tweak the settings to recognize that.) When I look at my charts, there is not that much red. My work days, according to RescueTime, are routinely over 80% productive. That’s gone up from when I first started using it, when I was usually in the 70s—which was already much higher than I thought it would be.
I feel good about those numbers. I expected RescueTime to tell me all the things I was doing wrong, but instead it helped me see that I was already doing pretty well! What I had to adjust was not my work habits but my attitude about them. That was an extremely valuable change that has helped me relax about “wasting time,” go easier on myself, and, in fact, get more done.
But there was another goal I had set for myself in RescueTime, and as the months wore on, it became obvious that I was hardly ever meeting it. That was to spend at least ten hours a week writing, or rather, working in my word processors. (I use Scrivener for research, interviews, and first drafts, and Word once the edits start coming.) Interviews, since I’m taking notes in Scrivener, count towards this time, so it’s not all pure writing. But word processor work—interviews, writing, and editing—encompasses the core parts of my job. Ten hours a week comes out to two hours a day, if I’m working five days. I thought that was an eminently achievable goal. But if I didn’t have a looming deadline or edits on a long piece to devote myself to, it was hardly ever happening.
Instead, I was routinely spending far more time on email than in Scrivener or Word. Some days, this makes sense. I set up interviews by email, and I get a fair number of important, if not always urgent, messages from my editors. (Science also uses Slack, but it’s not as all-consuming as I’ve heard it can be in other organizations.) I can’t ignore email completely, and for some hours or days—like when we are nearing the final version of a print story and I need to weigh in on the captions, graphic, final questions, etc.—email and Slack are actually the most important thing for me to be doing. But every day? No.
So if RescueTime tells me I was 85% productive, but I spent three hours on email and only one on writing, does that high productivity score really mean anything? To be clear, this is not a criticism of RescueTime as a tool. I could go in and change email to something less than VERY PRODUCTIVE, but sometimes it actually is very productive. Sometimes being on Twitter is too, if I’m using it to report. There’s just no way for RescueTime—or, sometimes, for me—to tell the difference between when I’m emailing a lot with sources and editors and when I’m checking it hoping for a distraction from the more valuable but harder work I should be doing. For RescueTime, an activity is either productive or distracting. It can’t be both at the same time. (TK joke about Schrödinger’s email.) (That one’s for you, Jason.)
I am not at peace with this issue yet, like I am with the impossibility of the eight-hour workday. I don’t really know what to do about it, and I don’t have a neat conclusion. I have been trying to spend more time on writing (or “design and composition” in RescueTime parlance) than on email (“communication and scheduling”) since I became aware how often I was doing the opposite. I’ve been more aggressive about closing my inbox when I’m working on something else, but I haven’t gone all the way to batching, which is when you check email (and, crucially, respond to it promptly!) only at certain set times. I’ll get there, I hope. But this week, I took a huge step down this new path. I took email off my phone.
I know. Can you imagine? I couldn’t. Being able to check email away from my computer once felt like freedom, and it was a huge part of why I first got a smartphone in 2011. But times have changed, and I realized I didn’t have to keep doing something that wasn’t working for me anymore. Maybe I’ll stick with this dramatic measure for a long time, or maybe it will help me find a way to live comfortably in the gray area again. We’ll see.
My writing
My dear friend and brilliant editor Jason Kehe asked me to adapt last week’s newsletter for Wired’s website, so I did. Jason and I started our journalism careers together as editorial fellows at Wired, and now he is a senior editor there, proving that media dreams still do come true.
Recommendations
American Factory. If you are sick of me whining about screentime and emails, refresh your perspective on what work can be, should be, and currently is with this documentary about a shuttered auto factory in Ohio that is purchased and reopened by a Chinese glass company. It is bewildering, inspiring, and depressing all at the same time. I watched it on Netflix, but it had a theatrical release too and may still be out there somewhere.
The End of the F***ing World, season 2. This is what the second season of Big Little Lies wishes it could have been: A sincere but still very entertaining exploration of what happens to finely drawn characters in the aftermath of trauma that has been meta-inflicted upon them by the plot demands of the TV show they don’t know they are in. On Netflix.
“Paying for Civilization.” The rare pro-taxes opinion piece, which captures my feelings about them too. By Anne Helen Petersen in her newsletter, which also goes out on Sundays and is very worth subscribing to if you like what I’m doing here.