Toxic Productivity

We’re back home in blighty again after a week sailing around Norway on P&O Iona cruise ship. We had a lovely time, but all good things must come to an end. I love being on a cruise holiday because it’s one of the few places you can go in 2025 where internet access is hard to come by. You can buy access from P&O for £20 per day or access the Maritime 4G mast at the princely rate of £1/MiB. Alternatively, you can go without until you reach the next port. That means a full detox from the bad news machines is actually pretty easy to achieve. It also has a surprising effect on my brain. When I have internet access and a machine with a coding environment or SSH access to a remote one, I feel like I must be productive and coding or blogging or something, and I feel guilty if I stop to rest. At this point, this is a fairly well understood phenomenon that Anne-Laure Le Cunff describes in her book Tiny Experiments: “We treat ourselves the way the stepmother treats Cinderella - ‘from morning until evening, she had to perform difficult work, rising early, carrying water, making the fire, cooking, and washing’” - a kind of toxic productivity and perfectionism that prevents us from resting or making time for ourselves. When I don’t have internet access and I’m away from home, I find that I can relax a little more guilt free. Being back at home puts me straight back into toxic productivity mode. “There’s so much to do, so little time… don’t just sit here reading or playing video games, the grass isn’t going to mow itself…” After a week at sea it is much easier to see this behaviour through a critical lens than when I’ve been at home in my usual routine and I’m stuck in the habit. One of the biggest problems with this cycle of behaviours is that it tires and burns me out and forcing myself to be productive ends in a perpetual cycle where I resort to activities that aren’t productive but feel good, like scrolling mindlessly and getting irate about the stuff I read. I’m going to try some tiny experiments to see if I can find the right balance of activities: * Firstly, every time I feel guilty about an activity I’m going to commit to an hour of that thing. I might not be able to do the hour there and then if something time sensitive comes up but I will do that hour later on the same day or next day. * I will also commit to a combined 30 mins of Mastodon and Lemmy a day, at maximum. I think scrolling mindlessly does eat up time where I could be doing something else. I’m going to try both of these things for 1 month and see how it goes.