“If it's good, then it's good
Break it down, this shit is outta my hands”— JPEGMAFIA - Free the Frail
A long time ago I was working one of my first jobs in the industry. My wife and I were not long into our new house with a mortgage that really tested us each month. She was working part time, I was working full time on a very tame salary as I was just out of university.
We also welcomed our first child into the world, and he was too young for any local nursery to take him. I spoke to my line manager about this predicament and we agreed that I could work a few days from home per week temporarily for a couple of months until he reached the minimum age limit for the nursery to take him in on they days that there would be nobody at home to look after him.
This was LONG before the current state of the working world where hybrid working is more of a norm than it being some new concept. So as a somewhat early adopter, I was keen to show that working from home was having no adverse effects on my productivity.
Then came a rather difficult phone call when I was talking a client through a presentation and my son started crying. I tried rocking him in his chair with my right foot as I tried navigating through my presentation with my hands and a brain that couldn’t think straight. We agreed to pause the presentation and pick it up later, and it went fine after that.
A week or so passed and this line manager noticed I wasn’t in on the office even though we previously agreed this would be one of my working from home days. I received a very abrupt email saying: “Jordan, It has been noted that you are absent from the office. I’ll be informing [boss name] immediately about this.”
This sent me down spiralling thoughts of “what!? We talked about this!” to the inevitable “he’s 100% going to fire me”. I paced around our barely furnished kitchen, looked over at my son in his little baby rocker, and had that feeling of dread where my stomach sank through the floor.
I frantically scrolled through emails and searched for any sort of phrase around “remote working”, “working from home”, I widened the net to “home” in a last ditch effort to find any mention of the arrangement, which I knew deep down was only verbal, and here we were with the other party not acknowledging it, and going to my boss to claim that I simply wasn’t showing up for work.
I had no choice to fire back an email “[line manager], we talked about this at my desk in the office a few months ago, we said that until [son’s name] was old enough to go to nursery that this would be the working arrangement”.
An hour or so passed, then I got the response: “Oh were you worrying about that? Don’t worry it’s all fine, I remember the conversation now.”
There is a little foreman/hovering art director who has permanent residence inside my head. I’m sure others are the same and maybe have had similar experiences to the one above, or they just realised one day that there is a voice in there, particularly when working remotely in a team, and it judges how productive I’ve been today. It leads you to believe that you need to constantly show evidence of output.
I hate this voice. I absolutely hate that it’s there and seemingly has no plans to move out. It reminds me that:
Your value is tied to how many hours you clock in. Do at least 9-5 every day.
Your value is also directly tied to your output. How many screens have you produced today? No designs today? Alright then, how many pages of anything have you produced? Show your working out. Demonstrate value!
One more thing: your value is directly tied to your family’s security.
What is crazy is that I now own a company, and that foreman still runs riot in there with the same statements. Even crazier: best work appears when he shuts the fuck up. Usually that happens in flow states, although they seem to be interwoven with work happening, so the foreman still wins in the end and gets to prove his point.
Oliver Burkeman wrote an essay called “What if You’re Already on Top of Things?” that helps silence that voice to some extent. According to Oliver, Productivity Debt is that familiar sense of being behind before you’ve even started, or having to prove your value every day.
What if you worked on the basis that you began each day at zero balance, so that everything you accomplished – every task you got done, every tiny thing you did to address the world's troubles, or the needs of your household – put you ever further into the black? What if – and personally I find this thought almost unthinkable in is radicalism, but still, here goes – what if there's nothing you ever have to do to earn your spot on the planet? What if everything you actually get around to doing, on any given day, is in some important sense surplus to minimum requirements?
Oliver Burkeman — What if You’re Already on Top of Things?
As per my writing style on here, I don’t intend to proofread anything and instead opt for a stream-of-consciousness approach, and I also have allowed myself permission not to land neatly on a conclusion, so I don’t come here with a 100% concrete solution to this problem. The term “Productivity Debt” helps in the sense that it gives me something to call it and something to aim at, but I tend to experiment with ways of turning down the volume on the foreman, letting go of outcomes, and relaxing back into creativity (or, more accurately, getting out of the way of creativity and letting it unfold).
I’ll wrap with a reframe that I’ve discovered on as part of this journey, and your mileage may vary with it: treat this piece of work like I’m making an album in the studio. Nobody writes and records an album in a day, just relax into the thought that you’ve stepped into the studio and the results will come when they’re ready, not like clockwork in a predictable 9-5 pattern. “If it’s good, then it’s good”.