Recently, I was listening to Dhruv Sehgal, the writer, director, and actor of Little Things, discuss writing—how hard it is when you're not intentional about it. That’s been true for this blog too. I’ve always used it as a way to think through ideas, to flesh out thoughts into something more. And since I haven’t written in a while, the ideas have stopped flowing…
It’s no secret that intentionality can be a path to success in anything you choose. Be intentional about living an active lifestyle, and it leads to better health. The same applies to relationships, work, wealth, and so on. It was not without a reason, that Virat Kohli always went on and on about “intent” when he was the captain of Indian cricket team. But as life catches up, priorities shift.
And then we start to play the act of balancing priorities. This is a familiar game for engineers. You create a list of tasks, stack-rank them, and—voilà—problem solved? A JIRA board for life. I’m only half-joking though. There are some productivity fanatics who operate like this: Meet a friend at 8, call mom at 12, dinner with a partner at 7, walk the dog at 10... If it’s not on the calendar, it doesn’t exist. This mentality is often taken to extremes in Silicon Valley culture, where all “non-essential” activities are offloaded to third parties.
Sadly, we live in times where chasing productivity is the norm. Calendar management, apps to delegate non-essential tasks, AI to write emails—it’s endless. I literally build products designed to boost productivity. But what do we actually do with the time we gain from these productivity hacks? We were supposed to use that for the things we love - hobbies, family, relationships et al. But thanks to the trap of capitalism, we have come to love productivity for its own sake. Optimizing things to get more “work” done, while losing sight of the things we once loved when we weren’t obsessed with productivity.
I recently, finished reading Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. The book could have been a blog post because it says the same thing in 100 different ways, but there are some great points in there. To quote a passage, the author writes,
“Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved “work-life balance,” whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the “six things successful people do before 7:00 a.m.” The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control—when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about. Let’s start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen. But you know what? That’s excellent news.”
This brings me back to intentionality. If we focus solely on productivity, we’ll end up tweaking it to death—it’s a bottomless pit. But striking the right balance with productivity can unlock the time needed for all the good things life offers. Being intentional about where you put your focus makes space for everything from brewing that morning coffee to, finally, getting back to writing this blog, which I must say has been long overdue. :)