The Cult of Productivity

Such a good newsletter from @epilepticrabbit@mastodon.social this week

This quote from it is excellent;

It is productive to slow down, tend the garden and watch the bees. It’s productive to contemplate and find solidarity with the rest of the life on this planet. It is productive to just be, not consuming, just searching for acceptance from those who accept you as you are.

I am sitting in the garden reading this, well I am sat in the shanty town style lobster shack looking over my garden swimming pool, yeah I know living the dream. I am enjoying the sun and slowly plodding through my SaneNews mailbox listening to a Zero 7 created radio Apple Music mix. The only distraction is my mother in law texting me to ask where I am and when will I sit with her and watch TV, she doesn’t appreciate why I really don’t like watching TV. Oh well she needs company. I told her 5 more minutes. Replies “Thank Goodness xx”

I often suffer from the idea that I am not being productive or as productive as I think I could be, like many I expect and just as Laura states. For me I think a lot of this is because I expriement a lot, and I mean a lot, with ideas and those experiments don’t tend to lead to specific tangible outcomes but they do transform my thinking and future paths of discovery, and what I then share and discuss with others, so I leave a trail of code, notes, browser tabs in my wake that some find very strange and some have even commented on the impressive prolific output, as I try and share as much as I can openly, on repos, blogs etc. It’s semi interesting just writing this as the part time PhD I am completing, I keep saying this so it comes true, however the PhD itself is about a contribution to knowledge (to pass on) and I often wonder how much I demonstrate the tangible impact of my passing on, but I know the conversations and posts are doing that, and I don’t need any crappy tracking to know.

I’ve also done all the productive type things and am a little systems driven so I have all the apps… I am not sure why sometimes, but I don’t tend to not get things done, this last year is the first time I have ever had to ask for extra time for a few work related tasks and I think the global pandemic and work from home (WFH) are very connected to this. It’s been a hard year for numerous reasons personally and globally.

I did however very much enjoy the RESET course I did this year and need to revisit all the materials again as they made a lot of sense and it was all about being yourself which chimes with Lauras newsletter.

Well that was longer than expected, I mainly wanted to shout out Lauras newsletter.

Read the letter and why not get Laura a Coffee as a thank you.

Dr. Adam Procter @adamprocter
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