The word ‘productivity’ and why so many of us have a visceral reaction to it
There’s a reason so many of us flinch at the word ‘productivity.’ Every week, in spaces across the internet, I see women share that their partners told them they just need to manage their time better. As if the problem is their calendar. As if the problem is them.
It’s been used to make us feel like the problem is always us. And that’s not an accident.
Women with no children do 2.3 times more housework than their male partners. So time management is not the problem there. Unfairness is. And yet, 46% of women experience burnout at work compared to 37% of men, and Black women in leadership are most affected, with rates rising to 80%, though of course it would be wrong to suggest bad productivity advice is the cause of that, when misogynoir is.
When an employer overloads their staff and refuses to hire more, they call it a time management problem instead of a capacity problem. They make it an individual problem. Very convenient.
You can’t systemise your way out of an impossible load to carry, at home or at work. And when the advice tells you that you can, it’s not just unhelpful, it’s actively harmful, because it puts the weight of a structural problem onto your shoulders and calls it self-improvement.
What happens when we try to follow the traditional advice anyway
Some of us do try and follow the traditional advice. We wake super early, use hacks upon hacks, endlessly try to optimise, hustle, whilst still trying to be the present and caring parents and humans we want to be. And it works, for a while, until it doesn’t. Until we burn out.
Much of the advice was clearly written by people who have no idea what we are actually managing. It’s for a different life than the one we are actually living, or want to be living. It falls flat for us, if not being actively harmful, because it wasn’t designed with our lives in mind.
There’s a difference between genuinely not using your time well and having an unfair amount of work. Traditional productivity advice tends to treat every problem like the first one. Which is why so much of it misses.
What we actually deserve instead
We deserve more of the good stuff. Advice that can distinguish between a discipline problem and a capacity problem, because those two things need completely different responses.
For the moments where there is something a good system can genuinely help with, where you do have some time and some agency and you want to use it well, that’s where something like Time Buckets comes in. It’s a flexible rhythm system, not a rigid schedule. It works around caring responsibilities rather than pretending they don’t exist, and it’s built for the life you’re actually living. You might also find it useful to read about the small things I do regularly to help life feel calmer, which is a gentler place to start if the word ‘system’ still makes you want to close the tab.
Naming the structural unfairness isn’t the end of the conversation. The unfairness is real, and we can still build rhythms that mean we’re not spending our limited energy on the wrong things. Both things are true at the same time. The practical tools we use aren’t a band-aid on a structural problem, they’re a form of dignity. We deserve systems that work for us.
So if you’re reading this thinking ‘I am so done with productivity advice, I don’t even want to hear the word’, totally fair. But if you want ideas on how to spend less time on things you don’t love so you have more for the things you do, you’re in the right place.
If you’re not sure where to start, Stop the Spiral is a free tool for when overwhelm kicks in and you can’t see clearly enough to know what actually matters.
Don’t do more. Do what matters. Do it differently.
