Productivity

Like most still do, I used to call my periods of anti-work “procrastination at its finest”. However after a few weeks of surviving the supposed hardest schooling year of my life to date, I've convinced myself that in reality, everything I do is productive - even the breaks for social media and naps and late night phone calls. The subsequent question is then: am I deluding myself or is there an ounce of truth in the self-comforting assertion that by doing nothing, I am doing something?

The underlying assumption here is that “being productive” means getting things done. However I’d like to extend this definition to include activities that help get things done as well. In other words, anything that contributes to reaching an end goal is inherently productive, even if said contributing is indirect.

This definition can be broadly applied to an activity we all must embrace: practice. Few will doubt that practicing is productive. However by practicing a dance or piece of music or speech, no one is actually accomplishing anything tangible. The dance has not been performed, the music not formally played, and the speech not delivered. Nothing has been officially done and henceforth no goal has been met.  However practice always helps accomplish the feat – and therefore can only be described as infinitely productive.

Now, in a desperate attempt to justify my personal lapses in this magical “productivity”, I have applied this definition to my breaks. Technically, if by taking a brief nap after school I am recharging my brain and getting my body ready for the long night ahead, then napping is suddenly productive. In isolation, calling the naps productive would be premature, but in hindsight they always help me stay up into the wee hours of the night slaving over whatever work I had to do. Similarly, if I were to work continuously without respite, I have no doubt that I would fall asleep on the textbooks sitting in front of me. The breaks I take to check my twitter feed and text my friends refresh my mind and keep me awake. So you guessed it – twitter and texting are now completely productive activities because they help me stay awake, which helps me get things done. I've quite successfully (at least in my mind) twisted what some call procrastination into what I can justify as being productive.

P.S. Reading this over, I sound like a zombie whose sole purpose in life is to do homework. However contrary to popular belief, I’m really not. I just have a lot of things to get done and therefore my weekdays sort of have to constitute long days of “being productive.”