What then is the point of professors being successful?

I stopped to the grocery store on my way home from work a few months ago to pick up some groceries for dinner. In the produce area, I ran into one of my math department colleagues, who was shocked to see me there. “So you eat,” she explained.
I asked her what she meant, and she said that my reputation for work productivity — not just how much I get done, but also how often I think, write, and talk about productivity — had led her to conclude that I must be giving up a lot of typical human behaviours (like apparently eating). I informed her that the reverse is true, that when I leave campus, I pass through a barrier beyond which no work is permitted. Indeed, I stated that the entire reason I obsess over productivity is that I want to eat, sleep, watch soccer, spend time with my family, and so on as much as possible.
I was thinking about this over the weekend after posting yet another post on productivity in academia, which I assume caused some readers to roll their eyes (Good Lord, not another post on GTD!) and reading this really good essay on the dark side of productivity. I decided it was time for a piece in which I explain why I think productivity is essential, and why I think it's necessary for academics in general to think about it as well.

Let me begin by stating what I believe productivity is not about.

Productivity is more than just “efficiency,” or getting more work done in the same or less time. Yes, a productive person can work more efficiently. To make efficiency the primary goal of productivity, however, is to reduce humans to robots. We're not machines, after all. We are human beings with a desire to accomplish meaningful work, but we also have other desires: We desire meaningful ties with our friends and family. We need to rest. We (especially those in academics) want to study and advance our expertise. We want to be able to appreciate our life experiences and have sides to our humanity that aren't tied to anything that goes into a tenure file. All of these are tremendously inefficient in terms of work, yet they are a big part of what makes life worth living. If productivity simply means getting more done at work, it is the most vain and inhuman ambition of all time (besides possibly Instagram).

Productivity is not meant to be an aim in itself. Speaking of vanity hobbies, the goal of productivity is not to talk about it and make other people envious of how awesomely productive you are. That's akin to working out purely for the goal of uploading selfies of your chiselled abs on Facebook. Believe me, I am quite aware that when I write pieces about productivity, I can occasionally slide into this (productivity-bragging, not toned abs), and I apologise for this because it serves no purpose.

So, what is the point of being so concerned with productivity? I can only speak for myself, but I believe this may be shared by many of my faculty colleagues:

We are human beings with the basic human right to live balanced, pleasurable lives. The goal of productivity is to create enough time and space to properly exercise that right.

Let me provide some personal context for this.

I've previously talked about how I got started with Getting Things Done (GTD) after a hilarious incident in the hallway with a former dean. However, there is more to it than that. Around this time – a period when I was terribly overwhelmed with work, projects, hugely overflowing email inboxes, and so on — my wife and I received a surprise: we were expecting our third child.

Our eldest two were two and four years old at the time, and we were exhausted. Our finances were in jeopardy because we had moved into a house that was too expensive for us, and my wife and I were working nonstop to make ends meet. Our time with the kids suffered because there wasn't much of it, and when we did have time for them, we were fatigued from work and didn't offer them what they needed. I was working practically every night and weekend to keep afloat, taking even more time away from my wife and kids, especially with my faculty work, and partly because I had no system for doing it. This increased pre-existing workplace concerns, and I was bringing that stress home with me and transferring it to my family.

And in the midst of it all, a new baby was on the way, with all the sleep loss, financial hardship, and added stress that entails. I recognised one day that the way I was treating life and work couldn't continue. I needed to gain a handle on my time, information, tasks, and cash or everything would fall apart.

In this tumultuous environment, I came across David Allen's Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, and while this may seem corny and scary, that book altered and maybe saved my life. By putting GTD principles into practise, I learned how to align my work choices with the identity I desired; I learned that I do have work choices and can, and should, say yes to some things and no to others, and how to do so; and I learned how to exert control over my work so that my work could get done at work and not migrate into my personal life like an invasive species. As a result, I was able to begin being fully present at work with my colleagues and students, as well as at home with my family, without having to worry about one while I was with the other.

This has nothing to do with "efficiency," blog postings, or social media likes. It was all about survival and asserting my God-given right to a fulfilling life. It was also about the idea that I only have one shot and a tragically small amount of time to raise my children, and if I messed it up because I couldn't find out how to set boundaries around my profession, I would live to regret it for the rest of my life.

One thing I did not do while studying GTD was accept the defeatist narrative that chronic overwork and ludicrous disorder are unavoidable aspects of an academic profession. This, I've concluded, is primarily a storey we academics tell themselves. Yes, we academics have a lot of work to do, and it will grow to fill the space that we supply. That is why, in academics, we need to think more about how to control what we feed it and set boundaries around it.

This is why I write so much on productivity on this blog: I want to send a message to my colleagues, a message of good news that the way academia tells us we have to live our lives — centred on and preoccupied on work — doesn't have to be this way. If we are ready to choose a more difficult path, we can excel at our jobs, conduct wonderful research, teach effectively, and provide outstanding service to our institutions without devoting every second of our lives to it.

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Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. Anyone who tells you, explicitly or implicitly, that you do not have the right to a balanced and fulfilling life is deceiving you.

So, in a real sense, the goal of production is happiness. Intentionality in one's work is expected to benefit the greater good of making us all more balanced, contented, and therefore happy. This is not a simple task, and it is not the norm in academia. (When was the last time you heard the word "happy" used to describe the intended goal of a faculty initiative?) It takes effort to keep your inboxes at or near zero most of the time, to establish a reliable system for managing your activities and projects, and to keep that system in good working order by constant weekly review. It takes effort to say "no" to a work request when you know it will irritate or disappoint the other person. However, it is the type of labour that puts the rest of our work in its proper place – the correct place, a limited place — so that the rest of our life can flourish. And by thinking and writing so much about it, I aim to bring some joy back into a world of higher education that I believe is in desperate need of it.

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We, as well as the individuals who are most important to us, will be grateful for our pursuit of that work.