Breaking The Cycle of Productivity-Guilt

It’s not fun to fight with yourself. It is exhausting to try and live up to the expectations you’ve set for yourself and you feel that others have set for you. Why aren’t you perfect? Why don’t you get up early, exercise for 2 hours, drink a green smoothie, and then go to work and be the star employee at your company?

Why haven’t you started a business yet or made a million dollars? Why aren’t you a total productivity machine?

The non-rhetorical answers to these questions might seem obvious. Life is nuanced, human beings are riddled with fear, we’re tired, and a couple of other things. I won’t try to oversimplify it. 

But even knowing this, we meditate on these (ridiculous) questions. We hone in on our inadequacies and ask ourselves why we suck over and over. 

And is this effective? No. We learn nothing, no genuine self-reflection happens, and all we’re left with is a fueled inner hatred and cynicism about the future.

The actual remedy to this problem is counterintuitive but crucial, to break the cycle of productivity-guilt, we must set smaller goals.

Shattering Illusions

What is it about us that makes us think we are magically going to turn into superhumans overnight? And why does it seem like the entire human population is subject to this delusion?

After years of evolution, advances in psychology, our capacity for rational thinking… you’d think we’d put two and two together and realize that past behavior is a pretty strong indicator of future behavior.

We’ve spent our lifetimes building behaviors and habits, consciously and unconsciously, to form us into who we are today. We’ve dug neural pathways deeper than a mining pit. We know logically how difficult behavior change is and yet we think we can just effortlessly skip into a brand new lifestyle.

Juice cleanse, P90X, waking up at 5am. 

And even if we do change, it doesn’t last. We are usually just riding the high of short-lived motivation. Anyone can be a David Goggins or a Jocko Willink for a day. Sustained behavior change is a much different story.

Once we fail and our illusions come crashing down, the productivity-guilt ensues and we spiral back into our cocoons of self-loathing. It’s a vicious cycle. We don’t perform the way we want to, so we feel inadequate and bad about ourselves. We feel bad about ourselves, so we underperform. 

The temptation here might be to get discouraged and quit. But I encourage you to pause for a second. Recognize that goal-setting has the potential to be an incredibly valuable tool, we may just be going about it the wrong way. Usually, what’s missing is an objective, albeit disappointing, acceptance of reality.

Meeting Yourself Where You Are At

Sometimes where we are at feels ugly. We set audacious goals as a means to run as far away from our current reality as possible. We don’t want to look at our bank account or step on the scale or face the fact that achieving our goals may take a lot longer than we had hoped. 

The irony in this is that our disillusions are usually what’s stopping us from moving forward. The only way through is to sit in our inadequacy and get brutally honest about where we are at. There, we can take inventory and begin to set small, sustainable goals to move forward.  

Setting sustainable goals forces us to be realistic about our patterns. What are we actually willing to do every day? If you do not honestly feel that you can sustain the habit of waking up at 5am, driving to the gym, and working out for two hours, then don’t set that goal. Set a goal for 6,000 steps a day instead. Set a goal to do ten pushups in the morning after you wake up. It’s not a lot, but that’s the point. 

The paradox of setting sustainable goals is that your progress feels slow but you actually make gains faster. You’re giving yourself a competitive advantage because most people never escape the productivity-guilt cycle.

Discipline doesn’t only exist in 75 hard and five miles runs. Let yourself off the hook. The only requirement for progression is doing a little bit better tomorrow than you did today.

A New Model of Productivity

It’s time to stop beating ourselves with a stick and start giving ourselves grace, accepting where we are at, and choosing to move forward in small steps. And not what other people think are “small steps,” but what are actually small steps to us. 

We can’t change our results overnight but we can change our trajectory. The quote “If you do a little bit every day you never have to do a lot” is written on a whiteboard in my room as a reminder that I don’t have to overwhelm myself to make progress. An effective model of productivity requires work but more importantly, it requires us to make space for our current patterns and capacities and take them into account when setting new goals.

We will change and we will get better. In the meantime, we can be comforted in the fact that we aren’t alone in our feelings of inadequacy. Everyone is not where they want to be. So don’t guilt yourself out of doing something small, let the law of compounding effort work in your favor. We can’t change everything now but we will see gains if we do a little bit today.