- Freelancer Anna Codrea-Rado wants to be less productive – not to work "smarter," but to work less.
- After years of New Year's resolutions to do more, she's vowing the opposite this year.
- She asked experts how best to overcome workaholism.
My New Year's resolutions used to always be about doing more: earn more, work out more, write more. As a self-employed writer who's paid by my output, I have no choice but to be well-organized and self-motivated.
But this year I have resolved to do less. I don't mean cramming everything into a shorter working week, nor do I want to work "smarter." I just want to work less.
Granted, I can opt out of hustle culture because I can afford it. But I'm not pursuing a life of leisure, I'm trying to reclaim my sanity.
I find myself constantly preoccupied with getting stuff done. My to-do list runs on a loop in my head whenever I'm in the shower or while I'm walking the dog. Those are the few times in my day I'm screen-free, but I'm still assaulted by a constant feeling of 1,000 red-alarm emoji flashing across my mind's screen.
Begrudgingly, I've come to accept that perhaps my relationship to productivity isn't all that healthy and it's time to take drastic action.
I'm far from the only one rethinking the outsized role work plays in their life. We're in the middle of a great undoing for productivity and hustle culture. From "slow productivity" to the antiwork movement, workers across all sectors and industries are scrambling to find a solution to their frustrations.
While I know that the biggest problems with work are undeniably structural, I've nonetheless started to wonder if it's time to just admit that I might be a workaholic. So I reached out to Malissa Clark, associate professor of industrial and organizational psychology at the University of Georgia, who specializes in studying workaholics.
She told me that among people she's interviewed for her research, there's one red flag that she consistently sees: busyness for the sake of busyness. "There is a strong dispositional component to workaholism," she said. "That idea of being constantly productive and busy, of doing something for the sake of accomplishing it rather than just being."
As I hear myself in Clark's description, she delivers another blow: "Workaholism does not lead to more productivity or higher work performance."
Hearing that was enough to convince me that I desperately needed to change my ways, but a stumbling block I was struggling with is that I have to work. It's not like giving up smoking, which, while by no means easy, is at least clear: You must completely eliminate smoking from your life. Giving up on productivity can't mean giving up on work. So I resolved to navigate the things that I have to do, just in a healthier way.
It made me question whether my job, which involves spending a lot of time thinking about the nature of work, helps or hinders my relationship with work. In "Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It," British journalist Oliver Burkeman describes realizing that the newspaper column he wrote about self-improvement was a great guise for feeding his productivity fix. "I was like an alcoholic conveniently employed as a wine expert," he writes.
This was the anecdote that sprung to mind when Clark told me that sometimes a change of job, or even career, is what it takes to overcome workaholism.
Not ready to go to the extreme of actually quitting my job, I sought the advice of Madeleine Dore, the author of "I Didn't Do the Thing Today," a new book exploring how to let go of the guilt and anxiety of a never-ending to-do list.
She told me that it's not the notion of productivity that's the problem, it's the culture surrounding it. It's using productivity as a "measure of our validity that makes us miserable," she said. "There's no such thing as productive enough when it comes to our worth."
She encouraged me to approach my challenge with a gentle inquisitiveness. "If productivity narrows our days, then curiosity can expand it again," she said. "If we're curious about why we're feeling guilty, it might not fix it, but it can deepen our understanding of what's going on in ourselves."
This helped me see my issue as one of quality versus quantity. As such, I'm viewing the "do-less" year like a "no-buy year". Just like I can't literally buy nothing, I can't do nothing either; a no-buy year is supposed to help you reset your relationship with consumerism, so maybe a "do-less year" will have a similar effect on my productivity addiction.
My intended outcome for this experiment is simple: I just want to feel less stressed in my professional life. My logic being, if I have less work to worry about, maybe I'll worry less about work.
So far, that seems to be happening; in the first week of the year, I took a hacksaw to my to-do list, stripping it right back to things I either absolutely had to do or truly wanted to do. And I feel so much calmer for it.
But doing less just for the sake of doing less seems to me like the other half of the busyness coin.
Truthfully, my actual goal here is to stop using work as an emotional crutch. If I'm forcing myself to do less, I'll have to pick what I do a lot more carefully.
It might serve as a necessary reminder that, while I can do anything, I can't do everything. And, hopefully, in those sacrifices, my true priorities will surface.
When I asked Clark for advice about what to expect as I embarked on this journey, she was cautious. "If you recognize that you have a productivity problem or workaholism, a year of trying to change might not be enough," she said. "It's going to be something you constantly have to revisit."
Frustratingly enough, it sounds like working out how to not work so much is going to take a lot of work.