Toxic Productivity
Everyone wants to be more productive. In the process, most of us get stuck in the chain of toxic productivity which will negatively impact our lives.
“Pushing myself hard is the inevitable path to success”. Many of us believe this to be true. Pushing yourself too hard for too long causes burnout and affects your physical and mental health.
This creates a constant urge to do something productive and makes you feel guilty for engaging in activities that you enjoy—like running, painting, or going for a leisure walk.
In this week’s post, we’ll discuss toxic productivity, how it affects developers, and how to regain stability by breaking the cycle of toxic productivity.
What is Toxic productivity?
Toxic productivity is the constant urge to be productive at all times—not just at work, but in all aspects of life.
You start feeling guilty for engaging in any activity that does not contribute to a larger goal. You start to prioritize working or completing tasks over self-care.
You constantly find yourself trying to improve productivity in some ways. Looking at Youtube’s productivity influencers or reading self-help books and trying to implement every method in it to maximize productivity results in you not doing any actual work.
Considering today’s hustle culture which glorifies working relentlessly day in and day out to achieve goals, it is easy to feel guilty for not slogging like everyone else even for one day.
Signs of toxic productivity
You can identify that you are experiencing toxic productivity by analyzing your thought process on a regular day. If you relate to the following signs, then you might be pushing yourself too hard without realizing it.
1) Feeling guilty for not getting work done
You have a constant need to do something productive at any given point in time. Otherwise, the guilt factor kicks in making you feel miserable for wasting time doing nothing.
Even though you complete a substantial amount of work, you will still feel like working harder to get tick everything off of your to-do list.
2) Deprioritizing self-care
One important sign is when you think self-care is a waste of time.
Do you work so hard that you need an app to remind you to drink water, or to tell you that “you’ve been sitting for too long”?
Toxic productivity makes you deprioritize anything that does not contribute to the larger goal. You might skip exercising, go for a jog, or even sacrifice sleep to be more productive just because someone "successful" told, “Successful people work for 18 hours a day”.
3) Activities without a clear purpose are not worth doing
Over-implementing common productivity tips like managing a to-do list or having a bigger goal and working towards it with a system might turn enjoyable activities into a task.
You might love going for a slow jog amidst nature. But the toxicity makes you think that it is not worth it.
You might go for a jog if it adds up to your goal to run 100k that month.
The activities that you enjoyed doing do not produce dopamine anymore unless it is a task getting completed.
4) Feeling burnt out
This is the most important sign of toxic productivity.
You constantly feel anxious about all the work you need to do and that you’re not doing enough.
Trying to be focused all the time without sufficient breaks can take a toll on your mental health. You’ll start to feel disconnected from your loved ones and constantly exhausted. Yet you’ll feel the need to push harder.
How does this affect developers?
Developers, like everyone else, easily start experiencing this due to various external factors and peer pressure.
Some of the effects toxic productivity has on developers are as follows:
Urge to learn any new programming language or framework that you come across or that is endorsed by a “successful” developer, eventually getting stuck in Tutorial purgatory.
Feeling miserable for not having developed 30+ personal projects listed in your portfolio.
Feeling worse for not developing a portfolio website.
Experiencing severe imposter syndrome at work, college, or conferences. Check out my article on Imposter Syndrome which dives deep into this.
Disappointed for not having a commit streak on GitHub or participating in multiple competitive coding events.
These are some of the common feelings toxic productivity makes developers experience.
If all these are relatable, you’re not alone. Let’s look at some ways to break this chain of toxic productivity and stabilize our work-life balance.
Ways to break the chain of toxic productivity
1) Set realistic goals
The most common mistake most of us do is that we set unrealistic goals. This easily makes you feel like you have to work a lot to achieve that one goal.
Set measurable, realistic, time-bound goals. This makes you set a reasonable work schedule and makes you achieve your goal.
2) Fix work schedules, breaks, and boundaries
In recent times, working day and night is glorified in many organizations. This easily burns out that employee and it also demotivates the other employees causing them to work less.
If you’re a manager, be candid about the start and end time of a working day and normalize taking breaks in between work. An employee shouldn’t be questioned for small delays in response. This aids the employees’ mental health and keeps them motivated.
Take regular breaks from work to avoid getting overwhelmed. There are three types of breaks that you can try and implement in your work schedule.
Macro breaks - One or two days a month to spend time with friends or family, go on a trek, etc.
Meso breaks - One or two hours per week to go for a long walk, take music lessons, do sports activities, etc.
Micro breaks - Multiple breaks for a few minutes to stretch and to spend some time away from technology.
3) Act of doing nothing
When you’re spiraling down toxic productivity, every second of your life feels like it must be spent with purpose. This adds to the already existing pressure and affects your mental health.
Normalize spending time doing nothing. For example, read a book you enjoy instead of reading a book to reach your 50 books per year limit.
You can get involved in activities you might have deemed unproductive, like hanging out with friends, going for a long walk, or watching a movie. It might be like you’re wasting time, but this is needed.
4) Acknowledge inner feelings
You have to acknowledge what you feel instead of ignoring them by being hyper-productive.
Fear of failure
Comparing yourself with others
Personal life events bothering you
Feeling like your job isn’t secure
These are some of the feelings that can highly contribute to toxic productivity. It is essential to address these by giving more importance to your mental health and consulting a mental health professional if required.
5) You don’t have to learn everything
We have to understand the effects of social media in our lives. Success stories are glorified, hustling all day seems like the only option to be successful.
You might find hundreds of productivity tips, habits that changed someone’s life, and programming languages that make you a millionaire in 2 months.
But it is not possible to anyone to implement everything in their lives. Find what suits your life and be good at it.
I hope this gives you some clarity on how being hyper-productive affects your life.
It is always good to work on improving our productivity, but not at the cost of our physical and mental health.
As developers, you would have come across ReactJS because of its popularity. ReactJs is the most popular JS framework in use, according to a survey in 2022.
Next week we’ll discuss “Virtual DOM (Document Object Model)”, a concept that ReactJS uses that majorly contributes to the speed and efficiency of ReactJS.
Until next time!