Are you into productivity porn or yak shaving?

While you are sleeping, some people are grinding. Or so LinkedIn would have you believe. The social-media platform is flooded with “productivity porn” exhorting you to squeeze more out of every 24 hours. Self-anointed gurus flog online courses on living a life of “maximum utility”. The pressure to optimise your working hours and hack your routine can sometimes feel relentless.

People have long tried to make the best use of their time, yet the word “productivity” emerged only in the 19th century, during the Industrial Revolution. The term provided a way to quantify the number of goods each worker, division or company produced, judged in relation to the time or other resources it took to make the goods. Bosses began to focus on extracting ever more from those manning the machines. Later people started applying this idea to other facets of their lives to get more done in less time.

Efficient folk have come up with a range of productivity techniques. Benjamin Franklin was an early advocate of the modern to-do list. Each morning America’s Founding Father jotted down tasks and asked himself: “What good shall I do this day?” Office grunts take a less virtuous approach to planning. Some practise the Pomodoro technique, a strategy of slicing your day into 25-minute chunks of intense focus with five-minute breaks in between. Many people use a task-management app as a “second brain”, storing their thoughts in the cloud for safekeeping.

Productivity tools can also have the opposite effect. You may spend so long managing your time that you never get to the work itself. “Yak shaving” is a term for tasks that lead on to further tasks which distract you from your original goal. If you want to become a time-management master, don’t go anywhere near a yak with a razor.

Dopamine fasting
Avoiding pleasure to focus on simple things (noun)
Silicon Valley wants you to stop having fun

Most of us try to moderate our indulgences. Some people practise a more extreme form of asceticism, avoiding all forms of stimulation – TV, sex, work or even eye contact – to starve their brain of pleasure for stretches of time. This pyrrhic path to self-improvement is known as “dopamine fasting” and is popular in Silicon Valley.

Dopamine fasting is one of many tech fads that purports to make people more productive (another such craze is “microdosing” psychedelic drugs). Fans of the puritan reboot claim that it resets their chemical baseline for enjoyment. This, they say, allows them to resist distractions more easily and focus on the simple things in life – like boring work, feeling the warm sun on their skin or securing seed funding from a venture capitalist. (Any evidence that this practice actually changes dopamine levels in the body remains elusive.)

Cameron Sepah, a psychiatrist from California, thinks that many people misunderstand the idea of dopamine fasting. Rather than deny all pleasure, he says, the aim is to help people avoid impulsive behaviours and concentrate on more fulfilling things. That doesn’t sound outlandish. Silicon Valley likes to make a buzz, even if it’s just from rehashing an old idea and giving it a catchy name.
Bo Franklin

Cyberloafing
Wasting time on the internet during office hours (verb)
This has nothing to do with pictures of lockdown sourdough on Instagram

Your eyes glaze over as you join yet another Zoom meeting. The call of online chess is irresistible. So you give in. Then you admire your friend’s lockdown abs on Facebook, before bagging a special offer on Glossier makeup. Suddenly the meeting is finished. You have succumbed to “cyberloafing”: mindlessly surfing the internet instead of doing your job.

The web has always driven workers to distraction. The siren song of social media and fantasy football grew louder when covid-19 moved people from offices to kitchen tables – and away from managerial eyes. Yet cyberloafers may be no less productive than their more focused peers. Breaks can allow you to switch off temporarily, boosting concentration and motivation in the long run. Before the pandemic an impromptu coffee with colleagues did the trick. Online shopping will have to do for now.

But overbearing bosses are never far away. Some companies have software that logs and monitors what subordinates do on their computers. One such program, StaffCop, can give managers access to workers’ webcams and internet history.

Loafers are rising to the challenge. Various hacks can trick surveillance technology, such as tying a computer mouse to a fan, so it moves constantly throughout the day. That may not be quite the type of creativity that most bosses are after.
Claire McQue

时间管理大师 (shijian guanli dashi)
1. Time-management master (noun)
2. Someone who can divide their time between multiple partners
Taking boardroom skills to the bedroom

The Chinese place a high value on time. As one well-known proverb puts it, “an inch of time is an inch of gold, but an inch of time cannot be purchased for an inch of gold.” Those who make the most of their time are breathlessly referred to as shijian guanli dashi, or “time-management masters”.

Elon Musk, the full-time boss of Tesla and SpaceX, is the ultimate time-management master. As well as overseeing two fast-growing, multi-billion-dollar companies, building electric cars and space rockets respectively, he also has side-gigs running a tunnelling company and a startup building brain-computer interfaces. His “timeboxing” method, in which he maximises his week by chopping it into hundreds of efficient slices, has earned him legions of Chinese fans. (One of his tips is to hug your children while firing off emails.) Others learn from Zhang Chaoyang, a business mogul who says he sleeps for only four hours a night – and even interrupts this meagre slumber to gulp down some freshly squeezed vegetable juice.

The phrase has recently taken on a second meaning. When a Taiwanese pop star was caught cheating on his girlfriend last year, social-media users dubbed him a time-management master. People who efficiently divide their time between multiple partners are now given the same moniker. Perhaps you can have too much of a good thing.
Georgia Banjo

社内ニート (shanai nito)
1. Company NEET (noun)
2. An unproductive employee
Slackers with a salary

Hard work and responsibility are prized assets in Japan. So the country’s “NEETs” – people “not in education, employment or training” – are seen as a blemish on society. The media often deride them, portraying them as shirkers who play video games all day and subsist on instant noodles.

Many Japanese worry that such idle behaviour is infiltrating big companies. In recent years the term “company NEETs” has emerged to describe employees who have jobs (unlike actual NEETs) and commute to their office each day, but do no work. A survey from 2020 found that nearly a third of Japanese firms reported having staff who fit this description.

Company NEETs are the antithesis of productive workers. They feign busyness, take frequent coffee breaks and snooze in toilet cubicles. Some scroll the internet late into the night, waiting for their bosses to leave the office. When they are assigned even a simple task they string it out for hours.

Strangely, the pandemic has made slacking more visible. Now that more Japanese work remotely, bosses can monitor employees’ output and productivity more easily. Showing up to the office without getting anything done should no longer work. The reality is probably more complicated. A new term emerged last year: zaitaku (work-from-home) NEETs.
Miki Kobayashi

摸魚 (moyu)
1. Touching fish (noun)
2. Slacking off at work
Climbing the slippery pole

Read novels at your desk. Stretch and perform planks in the office kitchen. Hydrate regularly with tea or, even better, whisky. Never stay late. This is the advice of a group of young Chinese workers resentful of the “996 culture” – 9am to 9pm, six days a week – that prevails at many Chinese companies. Instead they choose a different path: moyu, a philosophy of slacking off at work which literally translates as “touching fish”.

The term emerged online a few years ago, inspired by a Chinese proverb: “The best time to catch a fish is when the water is muddy.” In other words, it makes sense to look for ways to take advantage of a crisis or upheaval. Discussions about moyu swelled on Chinese social media last year as some young people used the pandemic as a chance to rethink their working habits. Pay rises and promotions seem unlikely in an era of covid-enforced cost-cutting, regardless of how productive workers are, so many are choosing to sit back, relax and follow moyu instead.

Moyu is a response to a feeling among Chinese millennials that hard work no longer rewards them with a better quality of life. Their parents’ generation enjoyed a booming economy and believed financial rewards would accrue from overworking. But China’s economic growth has been slowing for a decade, house prices are rising and education and health care are expensive. Some young people think society is stagnating. Another crisis preceded covid-19, they reckon: dwindling opportunities for advancement.
Sue-Lin Wong

Productivity porn
Articles and videos that claim to make you more productive, but are actually a time-wasting distraction (noun)
The one habit of highly ineffective people

Have you tried the “Ten Ways To Be 10x More Productive At Work”? Or perhaps you’re a devotee of the “33 Freakishly Effective Ways” to achieve success? Many people have become addicted to “productivity porn”: books, blogs, videos and podcasts promising to help you maximise your output. Reading about how to optimise your time has become a great way to waste it.

Productivity porn took off with “Getting Things Done”, a popular tome on time management by David Allen, published in 2001. Allen argued that you could easily prioritise tasks by dumping them into a system of organised folders and lists, rather than dealing with work as it arrives. Tech workers and geeks praised his “life-hacks” for making their daily routines more efficient. The self-help trend caught on, with thousands of websites now offering tips on optimising every aspect of your life.

It can be comforting to read about magic formulae for success, particularly if you feel overworked. Yet most hyper-productive types just get on with it, rather than ponder how best to do so. And what is useful for one person may be less so for others: just because Mark Wahlberg wakes up at 2.30am and shivers in a cryo-chamber doesn’t mean you need to.

Like other types of porn, wasting your time surfing productivity sites leaves you with fantasies of a life you’re unlikely ever to achieve. After that, reality can seem a bit of an anticlimax.
Josh Spencer

Le blurring
The mixing of work and personal life (noun)
Even the French are losing their work-life balance

The French view workaholism as an unfortunate Anglo-Saxon invention. They are proud of their 35-hour work-week and all-of-August holidays. (As one French saying goes: “They live to work, we work to live”.) Despite this, French workers are more productive than British ones, on average.

Now these traditions are under threat. The French are suffering from le blurring – a slipping of the once-sacred work-life boundary. The shift started with smartphones. Suddenly your boss could contact you when you were at home stirring your soup, or even on holiday. Workers “remain attached by a kind of electronic leash, like a dog,” one French politician moaned.

The pandemic has further weakened the boundaries: working from home means that many people are now in effect living at work. The French have a legal prohibition on eating lunch at their desks, but for those who are braving the office, the government has made it legal, temporarily, to eat lunch in their socially distanced workspace.

The French are convinced that le blurring is bad for everyone. People who take a real break are more productive when they return. Others risk suffering from le burnout. Yet there is hope for harried employees. A law passed in 2017 gave French workers at firms with more than 50 employees a “right to disconnect” – a legal right to avoid work emails outside their specified working hours. Long may it last.
Pamela Druckerman

Studyspo
A productive part of social media (noun)
Keeping up appearances

While some people spend hours pursuing the perfect selfie, others create carefully stage-managed photos of tidy desks and immaculate to-do lists for social media. They post images of clean notebooks, neat handwriting and impressive collections of pastel highlighters, and release footage of themselves being super efficient in this clutter-free zone. These productivity influencers have amassed millions of fans in a corner of the internet called “studyspo”.

Celebrity “studytubers” owe their success to Ryder Carroll, an American product designer who invented “bullet journaling”. His system of symbols and marks helps users track tasks on a single pristine page. “Bujos”, as the diaries are known among devotees, are more pleasing to the eye (and Instagram users) than traditional, messy notebooks.

This modern journaling uniform has made it fashionable to flaunt your diary online. Whether you actually achieve anything on your list appears to be of secondary concern. This is procrastination with polish.
Hollie Berman

ILLUSTRATIONS: JULIA GEISER