It’s been more than a year since the pandemic started. All of us are overwhelmed and traumatized. And unfortunately, I still see many of us falling into the same terrible habits we had during the Before Times, when we met for lunch and dinner, orchestra music swelling as we embraced one another in slow-motion, golden sunlight burnishing our eyes into twinkling coins. (At least, that’s how I remember it).

One of these habits is the constant striving to be busy and productive. You would think that being forced to confront our own mortality on a daily basis would make us slow down, reexamine what’s important, and make some personal as well sector-wide changes. I haven’t seen that happening too much. In fact, it’s often the opposite. Without the buffer of travel time, pants selection, and face preparations (the touch-up-my-appearance feature in Zoom is a godsend!), some of us are cramming in even more meetings than we had before. I hear colleagues having 8 or 10 or 12 virtual meetings in a day. Meanwhile, the ability to work from home means everything is blurred, and many of us just end up working more hours in total than we used to, which requires innovative solutions like the fake commute.

When I was an ED, younger professionals would come up to me asking what it was like to be an executive director. “It’s great!” I would joke, “you get to work whenever you want, as long as it adds up to 70 hours each week!” This joke still seems relevant, and not just for EDs.

This needs to stop. Just like with the sad, pathetic state of retirement savings, we need to stop joking about how busy and overworked we are. Our obsession with and learned helplessness around productivity is getting out of hand. We already have issues with a Martyr Complex that encourages us to endure being underpaid while sitting on crappy chairs. We also have a Productivity Complex and it’s causing serious damage in several different ways that we probably aren’t even thinking about:

  1. We’re reinforcing unrealistic expectations
  2. We’re not being equitable
  3. We’re ignoring collective and personal trauma and other deeper issues
  4. We’re perpetuating exploitative and oppressive practices
  5. We’re making it harder to creates sweeping changes
  6. We’re defining individuals’ worth by their contributions in work hours

For the funders reading this, a lot of our hours are spent doing useless, annoying things to please you. Things like filling out burdensome applications and reports. Seriously, just accept applications and reports written for other funders. It’s the same information! If we’re going to stress out and work excessive hours, at least let us spend them on useful stuff instead of inane, meaningless things. You also have more important things to do than micromanaging these inane, meaningless things.

Read the full article about our toxic obsession with productivity by Vu Le at Nonprofit AF.