Productivity shame: Why you never feel like you’ve done “enough” (and what to do about it)
You sit down at your desk in the morning, crack your knuckles, and prepare yourself to be seriously productive. You crank up your favorite Spotify playlist, fire up your laptop, and grab a cup of coffee, ready to kick some serious butt and take everyone’s name. Things don’t go as planned
What is productivity shame?
Productivity shame is the feeling that you’ve never done enough
- You feel a sense of guilt when you spend time on hobbies or activities deemed “unproductive”
- When you can’t celebrate your accomplishments or disconnect from work, you open yourself up to stress, overwork and burnout
Step 1: Disconnect your self-worth from “productivity”
If you judge yourself solely on the number of boxes you can tick off in a day, you’re either going to always feel productivity shame or end up only working on the wrong things (low-value, easy-to-do tasks)
- There’s always more you can do, and distractions, interruptions, fatigue, meetings-there are a thousand things that keep you from working on what matters most to you
Step 3: Appreciate progress more than achievement
Small, incremental progress repeated day after day will add up to big achievements in the long run
- Track your progress using a variety of tools to stay motivated and stay on track
- RescueTime can automatically track progress on specific goals for you
Stop the shame cycle
You’ll never be 100% productive, and without recognizing that, you’ll always succumb to productivity shame
- To fight back from this harmful mentality, disconnect your worth from your achievements, set realistic goals for yourself, and appreciate the process more than the final results
You’re stuck in the false belief that everyone’s doing more than you are
Productivity shame doesn’t just come from within
Why shame isn’t the motivator we think it is
It’s a terrible way to find motivation during the workday
- Shame creates a cycle of failure
- You feel ashamed of not being productive enough, which causes you to be less productive which causes more shame which ultimately leads to more failure
Overcoming productivity shame
How do we overcome this vicious cycle?
Set effective, yet realistic goals for yourself
Goal-setting is an art form, with three elements to every effective goal
- What you want to achieve
- Is this reasonable?
- How you’re going to get there
- Why you want it
- If you don’t have a compelling why behind your goal, you won’t have the necessary motivation
Cause #1: You link your self-worth to your achievements
The more you get done, the better you feel about yourself
- Unfortunately, your days rarely go as planned
- You will feel a sense of shame every day for not accomplishing the things that you set out to do
You’re setting unrealistic goals for yourself
Goals can be fantastic sources of motivation, but only if they’re set properly
- When your goals are too big, it’s easy to become discouraged when you don’t see yourself making real progress
- One of the great downsides of goals is that they tend to fix your attention on the end result