Stop Trying to be Productive.

Despite the luxuries of my privileges, I have found myself lost, unsettled, and overwhelmingly stressed during this pandemic. My life, just like everybody else’s, has been interrupted, and my productivity now feels almost nonexistent. Despite having seemingly no distractions to get in my way, I still feel as if I have done nothing meaningful in my long weeks home practicing social distancing. I had great aspirations for all the things I would accomplish during this time. I saw this newfound free time as a great way to work on myself, excel in my classes, and pick up a new hobby or two, or three. I envisioned myself having the same quality of life, just in a different location.

This was far from the case. As I began to settle back into my life at home it became increasingly more obvious that these great aspirations may not be achieved. My room still remains cluttered with the few bags I managed to bring home from school, my schoolwork grows increasingly more difficult to complete as the days go on, and I have yet to pick up any real hobbies or read a non-school related book. My productivity is the lowest it may have ever been despite the fact that I have the most free time I have had since I was a small child. It’s stressful and unsettling to say the least.

This lack of productivity is difficult to deal with and to understand. I grew up always being expected to keep busy and keep producing. Hustle culture emphasized the importance of my ability to grind nonstop with no questions asked. My social media feeds are still flooded with hustle culture: how to make the most of your day, new hobbies to try out, and tutorials for different crafting projects. I feel like I’m slacking and falling behind for not continuing to push through it and make the most my day every single day. In this period of time where theoretically I should be crushing my schoolwork and killing it with self-improvement projects, I find myself seemingly wasting away my days – and that feels like a problem.

Really, it’s a problem that I have been made to feel like I am wasting my time because I have not continued to be as productive as I once was at school. We are living through unprecedented times where the future is incredibly uncertain and unstable and yet I feel this pressure to still be consistently productive and it is difficult to shed the concepts of productivity and work ethic that have been pushed on me. But at what cost is constant productivity during these exceptionally stressful and wary times.

My ideas and beliefs that my days in quarantine would be filled with class work and self-improvement projects are fading away. I am beginning to realize that it is okay to take a break and not be productive, or rather it is necessary to take a break. By taking a break from productivity and taking a deep breath or two, or three, I have become more aware of the stress and the emotions that I have pushed aside during this pandemic. I have learned that I need to prioritize my mental health—whether that means being productive or not.

I’ve been trained through a culture that emphasizes productivity to continue to push myself towards success despite what I am feeling. While mental health has been at the forefront of more conversations recently, it is still discussed with shallow notions of doing a face mask and going for a run as the ultimate self-care fix. Yet, those same self-care cures continue to play into the same productivity aspect of hustle culture that leads to burnout.

Now, rather than focusing on staying productive and pushing myself to excel, I’m trying to focus on my mental health and general well-being. For me, that means allowing myself to find peace in not being productive.

It means that is more than okay to skip a lecture one morning and watch reruns of bad reality tv. It is important to take a break and get out of that hustle headspace and to do nothing for once. While it may seem that now more than ever it is important to keep working, keep learning, keep teaching: it is sometimes important to let yourself take a break and find time to do things that may not seem productive.

By Lilly Delehanty

Duke Student, pink purveyor and resident expert on surviving and thriving.