What Could We Be Instead of Productive?

Hi, Professors! This is Karen Gonzalez Rice, art historian, professor and life coach for academics.  You are listening to “The Good Enough Professor,” the show that reimagines academic life for overwhelmed professors.  Let's create a more supportive, more humane academia, one small, intentional choice at a time. Listen on for how we can do this together.

Being productive used to be my highest praise for myself. “Well, at least I was productive,” I might say, or I might set up my plans for the weekend by saying, “This weekend I'm going to be productive,” or “Today I'm going to get my life in order.”

I very consciously stopped saying this a couple of years ago because I realized that it prioritized doing rather than being. And a particular kind of doing:  a socially sanctioned doing, an academic grind doing a traditionally-measurable doing, and also traditionally-gendered-tasks doing. But I mostly stopped saying this because it made me feel like I was always falling short of my own expectations. I was never as productive as I wanted to be. I was never as productive as I could be.

Today, I want to think about what is possible when we reframe our actions and our tasks away from structured external goals.  And I want to suggest that releasing being productive as a goal or a thought might create some spaciousness and some freedom for us to define for ourselves what matters.

Of course, this is nuanced. I am not suggesting that you set no goals or be a minimal participant in your academic life. Well, actually, if that's what you need, I'm totally on board with that! Do that, see what happens. Report out, let me know!  What I'm interested in, though, is:  What can we do and who can we be when we let go of the urgency and the assumptions about what being productive looks like?

I've been using an evidence-informed app for chronic pain recently, and I was really taken with a definition of stress that was offered on the app:  Stress is the perception that the demands on you exceed your resources. Stress is the perception that the demands on you exceed your resources. I thought, ha! This is the reality of academic life right now!  Colleges and universities have needs and expectations that actually exceed faculty and staff capacity and institutional resources.  This is a reality of higher education right now. So what do we do with that little word “perception”? Stress is the perception that the demands on you exceed your resources. I am convinced that on top of the baseline reality of overwhelm, of stress, in higher education, there is another layer that we have a little more power over as individuals, the layer of perception. 

For academics, part of the perception of overwhelming stress comes out of isolation, the sense of being personally in too deep and the assumption that everyone else seems to be doing fine. But what if everyone else is not fine? As a coach for academics, as a faculty development person, and just a confidant of many on campus, I am uniquely positioned to tell you that everyone else is not fine. Our perception of overwhelm is actually shared.

What if we collectively acknowledge that these external expectations are ridiculous and we laugh together? What if we actively clarified what is actually stipulated in our contracts, what is expected and by whom and what specific aspects of our work are and are not tied to assessment for tenure and promotion? Sometimes we are afraid to think like this, because we might have the sense that people, our colleagues, some inner critic of our own, might think that we are lazy or not pulling our weight or trying to get out of work, or that most awful accusation, that we don't care about our students.

But I wonder if that kind of clarity could actually help us focus and assess, probably differently every semester, what part of our identities as academics, what part of our institutional roles we commit to at a given time, where are we choosing to put our energy?

Social psychologist Devon Price has argued that laziness does not exist. Laziness, he writes, is a concept mobilized against us and also something we use against ourselves. Price identifies that we are rightly worried about our productivity, given the social and economic and existential significance of work in our current historical moment. 

As workers, as academic workers, when we embrace productivity as our highest goal—and this has particular connotations for academics of color—a fear of laziness keeps us enmeshed in overwork and the academic grind and keeps us policing ourselves in Price's book, which is titled, Laziness Does Not Exist, he describes three tenets of the laziness lie, which I think are particularly resonant for academics.

First, the laziness lie tells us that our worth is our productivity. Second, the laziness lie tells us that we cannot trust our own feelings and limits. And third, the laziness lie tells us that there is always more we could be doing.

These are lies that keep us caught between the poles of laziness and self-loathing, on the one hand, and productivity and pride on the other. But this is a false dichotomy. The laziness lie is a lie. Your worth is not your productivity. You can trust your feelings and your limits, and there is only so much that we can or even want to accomplish.

What if, instead of identifying a limit or a feeling of exhaustion as laziness, what could we learn from these messages from our inner selves, from our bodies? What could happen if we followed our laziness?

I have a couple of examples. I've been experimenting with ungrading, specification grading, collaborative grading, different kinds of ungrading or alternative grading that I'm playing around with this semester. These modes of grading are not necessarily less work. What they do is put me in a different kind of relationship with my students, a relationship that better aligns with my pedagogical values and my humanity and is more fun for me. So it doesn't feel like a slog, right? And it's so far allowing my students the freedom to make mistakes and try out ideas. So this, for me, is an example. You know, this is something that sometimes I worry that from the outside, looks like laziness on my part, or looks like a lack of regard for tradition—which actually it probably is a lack of regard for tradition!—but it's certainly not easy. It's not easier than traditional grading, especially at the beginning, but it feels easier, it feels more aligned.

So another example, a department chair who I have worked with, released the assumption that they needed to be available all summer.  Despite big projects, despite institutional pressures and initiatives, decided to go off the grid for four weeks. What was possible for them?

I have a colleague who was asked to expand a fairly famous article from their past research area where they are quite well known, but they felt so bored by this idea that they put it off until the last minute.  And then decided to write a totally new essay connecting their kind of older, important theory with their new and, you know, on the face of it, pretty distant research interests.  And it was brilliant. Now this was not necessarily efficient, not traditionally productive, maybe doesn't align with how we usually think about productivity, but it was delightful for them to create and also created new knowledge.

I had a good experience of that urge for productivity this weekend. So I've been sick with a head cold. I'm also super communing between two states this semester and I'm just, I'm exhausted, right? But my expectations of myself when I'm home with my family are very high. So because I was ill, I skipped an event on Saturday. My kid and my husband went ahead, and I stayed home. And my pervasive thought for the first 30 minutes that they were away was, I need to make a hot lunch so that when they get home, it's ready.  Until I realized that this is just an old story, this old narrative that my worth is correlated to the service that I provide. Which is of course a very gendered socialization, a very gendered expectation. I had to remind myself that my family would rather that I feel better so I can be present with them. And sure enough when my family got home, my husband walked through the door and said “Let's heat up that leftover pizza,” which I had totally forgotten about. There was really no reason for me to be creating a new meal.

What connects all of these different possibilities is taking steps away from measuring your success and your value in terms of some kind of absolute, disembodied standard, jettisoning other people's ideas of being productive and what that looks like, someone else's or even your own usual measures or yardsticks. Now, of course, it feels uncomfortable to move away from these familiar benchmarks, the kinds of checks that we might have made next to our more traditional to-do lists.

You might think about the goal of following our laziness, releasing productivity as a goal, as a kind of process of reclaiming trust in yourself and a sense of your own value. How do we get to a place where we are acting from confidence as we make decisions about our work and our time, rather than out of a kind of urgency or grind-based mindset of “I have to keep going, I can't stop.”

So who or what can we be instead of productive this semester?  Let's create measures that are weird and fun and connect to what actually matters to us.

Here are some of mine. How many museum cafes have I tried? How far outside of my comfort zone have I gotten/?  How many cool ideas have I gotten excited about? How often have I slowed down in class to be present for my students' curiosity? How fast my colleagues have consumed the macarons that I brought to the department meeting? How many days did I remember to eat lunch or drink water while I'm on campus? How much detritus and little pieces of paper and googly eyes for my kids' art projects and Kiwi crates is stuck in the floor tiles? How far has my mind wandered while walking my dog?  These are the measures that I want to propose for myself this semester.

Who or what could you be instead of productive this semester? Could you be a good friend? Be present, be quiet, or be loud. Be playful, be restful. Be a big dreamer. Be yourself. Be a different version of yourself. 

Or just be.

Thanks so much for listening to “The Good Enough Professor Podcast.” If you want to release academic grind culture and embrace your own Good Enough Professor within, join my email list. You'll get my reflections, gentle challenges, and simple prompts, all aligned with the rhythms of academic life and designed to disrupt the assumptions that get us over committed and keep us overwhelmed. Because remember, you are already good enough.