I Am Not a Machine: Thoughts on the Limits of Human Productivity
Photo: Minh Pham
I began the year restless, ideas steaming out of my ears. Last year was for reinvigoration, this year for production. I wanted so many things. I wanted to step into my writer self, fully. Which meant writing more, allowing more of my words to exist on the internet, engaging more with what I read so I could rework it into my own writing. I wanted to find some semblance of security in my work as an editor. Which meant getting a website built, establishing connections (which is how I choose to think about networking—placing a pink bow on a terrifying beast), hours and hours of unpaid labour because I was led to believe that’s how you establish the connections. I wanted to be a good graduate student and find a scholarship so that the cost of my tuition did not run my parents’ bank accounts into the ground. Which meant excavating my past life for the original version of myself, the one everyone from my childhood knows, the one who read everything and knew everything and took every available class, course, or workshop.
More than anything, I wanted to feel like I had my life in order. Which meant forming good habits: sticking to a regular sleep schedule, cooking more, eating better, taking a walk as often as possible because SITTING IS KILLING US, calling my friends more often even though I despise phone calls (and even though the pandemic was still forcing grief out of us in ways that kept communication too far out our grasps), looking for hobbies that are not word-oriented, spending less time on the internet, journaling every day, meditating every day, doing yoga every day, reading for leisure every day, but also reading like a writer every day, learning my mother tongue, planning, planning, planning, so each day fell into a reliable and recognisable rhythm that would tell me and everyone who met me: This Bitch Knows What She Is About.
I had three planners: one to keep track of my three jobs, one to keep track of my personal life, and one to keep track of my finances. I had an app for reminders and to-do lists, and of course, my trusty Google Calendar. I was set.
The first month went relatively okay. I wasn’t getting it all done, but I was getting some of it done, and because I was practising enough mindfulness and self-compassion, I knew that it was okay. I was on top of my deadlines, I was earning some money, I was doing All The Things with enough regularity to maintain the high of put-togetherness.
“I had three planners: one to keep track of my three jobs, one to keep track of my personal life, and one to keep track of my finances.”
Then things began to fall apart when one of my employers stopped paying me. When I could no longer organise my money, I could not organise anything else. Without the comfort of a steady paycheck, what had looked like the power of planning shed its cloak and revealed itself to be the unforgiving reality of freelancing.
I floundered, then regrouped. I spent more time looking for work, determined that for once in my life, my lack of willpower would not drive my goals to a sputtering halt.
But suddenly, I didn’t have time to cook or do yoga or remember to meditate. Before long, I was doing my weekly assignments later and later, scrambling to get them done just before class, consumed by guilt for rushing through them. Writing and wellness fell further and further down my list of priorities. Empty bank accounts are astonishingly heavy weights.
Desperate, I took on huge projects that ate up all my time without offering a congruent reflection in my finances. What little time I had left, I spent looking for more work, to no avail. To look at my MPESA balance, one could not have guessed I was working 16-hour days. Still, I clutched my goals to my chest, reading and re-reading articles and books on forming good habits, threatening and cajoling myself each new day into remaining motivated and productive.
I burnt out quickly. With little paying work coming my way, I no longer had need for my work planner, and my personal planner went empty for several pages. On one page, where I was supposed to fill in my weekly goals in the month of March, I only wrote, “Survive”.
* * *
One of my friends has been working a job for nearly two years without quite knowing what her duties are. She has no job description. Regardless, she works, doing everything that looks like it might fall within her purview, relying on vague instructions to do the work that should be done by three people. Whenever she has asked for a raise, her boss has evaded the matter or dared her in a manner emphasising the power dynamic between them to justify her request, spitting in her face the implication that she has done nothing to earn it. This is Nairobi, which does not belong to anyone’s mother, so she finds ways to cram everything that is thrown her way into the day’s limited hours and prove her usefulness through constant, reliable doing. And perhaps someday soon, she will have gathered enough leverage to move up and out.
It bears saying that, like many of us, my friend works more than one job. When we commiserate about the circumstances of our lives, I am drawn always to the injustice of it, the fact that we must contort ourselves to meet the demands of employers by manipulating time itself to produce more within less time. We turn to productivity and time management to find some sense of control in the unpredictable world of employment, where profits trump people each time. The concept of productivity gives us hope of work-life balance. If you can just organise your life efficiently enough to stay on top of your tasks, you will be able to manage your impossible workload. And when you can manage the workload, peace of mind is within your reach.
But the workplace cannot be controlled except by the ones in control.
At my last corporate job, just when I would begin to make headway with a task assigned to me, more tasks, carrying more urgency, would reach my desk, and I’d be instructed to set aside the initial task. Somewhere down the line, this initial task would be scrapped altogether because two different departments could not agree on what to prioritise, and Finance was not having it anyway. To my dismay, this same task would be revived months later, with my boss asking me out of nowhere whether I was done with it, because a breakdown in communication led her to assume that I had just kept chipping away at this task as I prioritised the other tasks that came along. That I was not at fault for any resulting delays never mattered much, and I received little recognition for the many, many extra hours I put in to fix someone else’s mistake, sacrificing various aspects of my personal life in the process.
A pretty planner cannot replace poor workplace systems and role ambiguity. Time management holds out the promise that one day everything will finally be under control, disregarding the reality that the well from which we draw work for the sake of work is bottomless.
The demands of the workplace that my peers and I face as we struggle to live whole, balanced lives ignore that human life is so much fuller now than it was years ago. So many more experiences are accessible to us, and we want them all. Our goals are bigger. For many, it’s not about just changing the communities in which we live; it’s about changing the whole country, the whole continent, the whole world. Different cultures must be experienced; different opportunities must be grabbed, simply because they are within our reach. As our work lives take up more and more space, the world beyond work continues to expand as well, requiring a reconsideration of what it means to live a whole, balanced life.
Hustle and grind culture gave birth to productivity culture because it’s the only way to earn enough to experience comfort, opportunity, adventure, and convenience in a world where fewer and fewer of us have a community we can rely on for support without exploiting the labour of others. You can work three jobs and have an active social life when you live in a home where someone else takes care of the chores, and you ignore the need for rest in its different forms. A whole life can only be lived within a community because no one person can do it all. Few of us know people who work forty hours a week, actively engage with their hobbies, get eight hours of sleep, eat a balanced diet, spend time with loved ones, take time to parent healthily, keep a clean house, exercise, engage in personal development activities, and still find time to run errands.
So we arrive at a place where we impose order and timetables on all of life, including wellness practices like working out, nurturing hobbies, and meditating. These things are scheduled around our work because although we recognise that they are important, they are less important than what pays the bills and therefore must be squeezed in; so that you have seven-minute workouts and one-minute meditations and you can’t be on the phone with your best friend too long even though you haven’t seen her in months. And what other option is there when financial stability is what grants us the space to nurture wellness practices?
The pressure to be productive at all times, the awareness that this is not sustainable, and the desire for an existence in which work, play, and rest receive equal respect lead us to try to get rid of activities that are simply a part of life, like errands and chores. No one likes washing dishes, yes, and it is true that the way dishes appear and proliferate in the sink literal minutes after you have washed them is no less than an act of powers and principalities. But, regardless, dishes must be done because this is part of life. It is hard to believe that a person can be so busy, have their schedule so packed and their deadlines so tight, that they cannot take ten minutes to wash a couple of plates and cups. We rage against the practices of tending to our homes when the real culprit, the reason we are too exhausted to treat the spaces we inhabit as sacred, is the economic system that demands we sacrifice every aspect of human life that is not financially profitable.
The solution to outsource and delegate extends only so far and comes with its own ethical concerns. A majority of middle-class Kenyans get help in the home when they can afford it. But often, the markers of ‘affording it’ are blurred and mean that domestic workers are paid as little as is possible, with no days off and no overtime. Not many will speak against this because we know this is truly what most of us can afford, and we know there is no way to live without it, especially with children and full-time jobs. Domestic help, for many people, is the only thing that makes life possible, so she may not get much time to live a full life, but because of her, you can.
“This is Nairobi, which does not belong to anyone’s mother, so she finds ways to cram everything that is thrown her way into the day’s limited hours and prove her usefulness through constant, reliable doing. ”
Even with help in the home, we must rush through errands because there is only one day in the week to get it all done—more often, one day in the whole month. Whenever I can (and this does not occur frequently enough), I want to lounge and have no one bother me, so who has the time to go into town every Saturday? So the one time I must go, I cram in everything that must be done in the CBD, including my haircut, which takes three hours because my barber’s business is doing well, and unless I go early in the morning, I am guaranteed to be in line for at least an hour and a half each time.
But chores and errands make up the general business of life. Eliminating them leaves our schedules a little less full, but our lives a little less whole, too. For those of us who enjoy window shopping, it’s quite stressful to be rushed through the shopping when all you want to do is wander through every aisle of Carrefour, admiring everything, budgeting for future you, and delighting in the fact that you exist in a world where you can go to one place, a mall, and find everything you could ever need. It’s small wonders and curiosities like that that are lost in our rush towards efficiency. We don’t stop to ask why everything we do must be in service of a goal. Some things do not have a point, only existing for pleasure and delight, and that is part of the magic of being alive.
***
When my sister was joining university, my primary advice to her was that despite her best intentions, she would always find herself engulfed in a frenzy of activity towards the end of each semester as she rushed to write term papers, present group projects, and study for the upcoming exams all at the same time. It doesn’t sound like advice; it sounds like a warning. But I gave it hoping that she would save herself from the vicious cycle, even though I knew she would not believe it until she experienced it herself; because we all like to believe that if we are just serious enough, diligent enough, disciplined enough, we can remake ourselves and prevail over our natural instincts to relax and take it easy in the absence of deadlines.
Just as all of us who had already gone through university knew would happen, each end of semester, the frenzy begins, and we can only watch her frustration with a bit of empathy and a bit of gratitude that that is no longer our lives. And each beginning of a new semester, she vows to be a “good student”, to attend every class, to begin her projects immediately they are assigned.
This cycle is a fantastic illustration of Parkinson’s Law. Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. It is the rare person who is given a deadline that is three months away and feels the need to begin the work immediately. Sure, you could create a detailed workplan, pinpoint milestones, anticipate challenges and put in place contingencies, and build in enough time for extensive research and multiple revisions before submitting your work three weeks early for extra credit. But you could also forget all about it for the first month, ignore the pressure it builds up at the back of your mind in the second month, spend three weeks and six days of the third month reminding yourself every day to get to it whilst managing to do everything else on earth but that, before finally pulling an all-nighter, slapping together barely coherent thoughts in even less coherent sentences, adding in citations from books and articles you have not read, before submitting the thing literally seven minutes to the deadline—a feat that you will celebrate because, objectively, it is impressive.
You will know your work was less-than-stellar, but in that moment, it will not matter. It will only matter that you submitted a paper you didn’t care about for an average grade.
We bring this attitude and process to our creative work in adulthood—this focus on the product, on completion—because we are used to rushing through everything. “It’s not the do date until it’s the due date” works with university assignments that we will have no recollection of in two years. It has no place, however, in creative work because this work needs to be good, and if it’s not good, it needs to be improving, and it needs to bring you fulfilment.
As we rush towards productivity and efficiency, we forget that some things need slowness. Some things need your full self, present. Frantic productivity, it has been said, is a fear response. You produce because you are afraid of failing your class. In adulthood, this method of working means that even in the vocations that should and do matter to us, our focus remains on the product. We want the result, and we want it fast, process be damned.
A friend of mine is a painter, brilliant artist. In 2020, he set out to complete the year with 20 paintings so he could hold an exhibition. As 2021 rolled in, he had one unfinished painting sitting in the study where he worked, judging him silently, he felt, every time he walked past it. He eventually finished the painting, but I make a point of poking fun at him for taking a whole year to do one painting, despite the fact that, as a writer, I know that struggle well.
Every year I have considered participating in NaNoWriMo, to take a crack at doing justice to the manuscripts shrivelling away in a folder on my laptop. The temptation to coerce myself into creating is powerful when imbued with the insecurity that asks, “Am I a real writer?” Many writers do participate in NaNoWriMo and end up with complete drafts. But many others only attempt it (and consequently, fail) to bypass the truth that creating takes time, demands the care that is found in slowness. That draft done in a month is just the beginning. With creative work, the process is more important than the product.
That the bible says God exerted himself for one week and made a world doesn’t mean that the same approach is available to us. Deep creative work is incompatible with this capitalism-induced need for efficient, incessant production. Our art deserves our time, not just because good things take time, but because when we create, we use our very life force, mining our experiences, values, and personalities for content. It deserves, I think, some reverence.
My friend, the artist, ended up realising that the reason his work on that one painting had stalled was that his outlook on life had changed from the time he began the painting. He could no longer draw on the melancholy he had initially used to fuel the work. Upon this discovery, he found the drive elsewhere, and the painting now hangs above his bed, as at home there as it would have been in an art gallery. I like to think that the process to this painting was no less meaningful for him than the process he might have undertaken to complete the 20 he initially envisioned.
***
I have since let go of this need to tyrannise my schedule. So drastic has my turnaround been that I have converted my to-do lists into ‘done’ lists. Instead of sulking over my inefficiencies —my natural tendency to plan out my days with care and intention, only to respond to the day as it comes and end up doing nothing I had set out to do—I now celebrate what I have achieved. I fill the done list with what I have accomplished that day, and it has provided a useful change of perspective.
To-do lists are wonderful tools, and they work for some people, just possibly not as many people as we think. And perhaps there is a problem already in how we think about what it means for a to-do list or a planner to “work”. These tools exist to help us track what we think we need to do, and in that regard, they are sufficient. In the course of living, though, you discover that sometimes tasks take more time than you assumed they would, and you are forced to reconsider the significance of the remaining tasks. Suddenly, the remaining tasks don’t matter so much, and we can shunt them off the list by delegating, outsourcing, asking for help, postponing, or throwing out altogether.
Because that’s really all we can do—respond to life day to day as it shows up. We reprioritise, restrategise, replan all the time, and the problem, perhaps, is in thinking that this is failure. When you look at your list of tasks at the end of the week and find that you have done only half or only one or even none of them, that doesn’t mean you did nothing all week. You simply rearranged your priorities based on how life showed up, whether in response to an emergency (which many of us understand) or in response to your headspace and energy levels (which fewer of us are willing to understand because it is a lot easier to say you didn’t do something because your child fell sick than it is to say you didn’t do it because you lacked the mental or emotional capacity to tackle it).
“We rage against the practices of tending to our homes when the real culprit, the reason we are too exhausted to treat the spaces we inhabit as sacred, is the economic system that demands we sacrifice every aspect of human life that is not financially profitable. ”
Extenuating factors can only be justified when they are external; internal factors are immediately vilified, and we read them as character flaws such as laziness or a lack of discipline or not “wanting it enough”. So we make more lists, buy more planners, cram more into our calendars, and set 58 weekly reminders because we just must become more efficient if we are to have a shot at the peace of mind that comes only from getting it all done. We respond to the demands of life by trying to make ourselves more efficient, a strategy that rarely works in the long term.
I have discovered that, for me, relentlessness is not the answer. Simplicity is. It turns out most of the things that must get done today, don’t even have to be done at all, and if they do, they don’t have to be done by me. All these ideas and projects I feel an urgency to bring to fruition, they can wait. Elizabeth Gilbert writes in her book Big Magic that ideas are sentient things, that if you have an idea and don’t act on it, it may go to someone else, and you will find in the world, created by someone you have never met, the very thing you had thought of making but never got round to. While this way of looking at it may be too whimsical for some, I take comfort in the thought that this means I don’t have to create everything I think of. I am only one person. The idea may be brought to life by someone else, and that doesn’t mean I will never have an idea again or that I can’t pursue it at a later point in my life. I can do less, and I can do it better and with more joy, because simplicity is the way back to passion. I am not a machine, no matter what corporate culture says. I am a human being, and that means that I can only do what I can do.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michelle Chepchumba is a Kenyan writer and editor. She is the author of Notes Under the Door and Other Stories and co-author of When a Stranger Called and Other Stories. Her work has appeared in AFREADA, Storymoja Festival, and Hadithi. She writes a weekly newsletter called The Mini-Scroll about unrushed creative living. Her Twitter handle is @chepchumba_m.
