Personal productivity and note taking feels like having a superpower or wearing an Iron Man suit. You are invincible. The world around you is changed. You’re capable of anything you desire. Your mind is clear and you finally have a tool and a discipline to separate the wheat from the chaff. You can finally focus, create more, have a bigger impact on the world.

This is certainly how I feel when I work on my notes. There were moments where I couldn’t distinguish between my superpower and myself. That experience came to a crash when I was faced with a challenge in my life that I couldn’t fit neatly into my superpower: Moving to a new country.

Dealing with the red tape, catch-22’s and systematic stupidity of bureaucracy, I was drawn to a book by David Graeber called “The Utopia of Rules”. The quote below struck a deep chord inside me that forced me to rethink my relationship with personal productivity:

Always remember it’s all ultimately about value (or: whenever you hear someone say that what their greatest value is rationality, they are just saying that because they don’t want to admit to what their greatest value really is). The “self-actualization” philosophy from which most of this new bureaucratic language emerged insists that we live in a timeless present, that history means nothing, that we simply create the world around us through the power of the will. This is a kind of individualistic fascism.

Creating the world around you through sheer willpower is wishful thinking at best. At worst it is delusional, and, if driven to it’s endgame, self-destructive. And if the world doesn’t change in the way you want, it’s not a world problem. It’s a you problem. You only lack willpower. Your agenda isn’t clear enough.

We see this self-actualization philosophy in different ways and behaviors: toxic positivity, “The Secret”, taking the red pill, personal productivity. The last two mentioned, the red pill and personal productivity, overlap in a way worth taking a closer look at.

I want to begin by showing how productivity has helped me turn some of my biggest personal and professional weaknesses to sources of strengths. Later I will dive into how productivity can be used as a spiritual bypass and a self-soothing mechanism and what can be done to avoid it from happening. Finally I’ll offer a way to rethink personal productivity as poetic technology, a term I’m borrowing from David Graeber.

How personal productivity saved my life

Productivity and time management used to be my professional kryptonite. Ironically, I could never do anything about it until it was too late. The first time it happened was late summer 2015. It marked the end of my time as co-owner at Reykjavík Roasters, a coffee roasting company with three coffee shops in Reykjavík, Iceland.

I was at the brink of burning out we were close to opening our second location. I was working regular bar shifts while juggling training, website maintenance and doing my share of running the company. Coming home to my wife and two small kids, I was never able to switch off work mode. I realized after I left that I had to find a different coping skill than burying myself with work. Let’s call that my first professional moment of clarity.

My second moment happened two years later. It started as a subconscious realization and ended up with me getting an ADD diagnosis. I was in a much better place in both my personal and professional life. I took on a new position as Head of Training at Iceland’s largest coffee roastery, Te og Kaffi. I was responsible for onboarding and training of 250 baristas as well as managing quality control in the coffee shops. One of my last projects at Te & Kaffi – one of which I'm most proud of – was transforming all the training material to online learning modules. I was able to do this equipped with my brand new set of tools, collectively referred to as my second brain. My second brain is a combination of task management inspired by GTD coupled with mindful note taking. I use my second brain to digest information and break down projects into smaller bits. This helps me reach a balance between life and work.

I finally had a system to communicate my progress at work. I had an overview. I have come to terms with the fact that I cannot organize internally. My first brain simply fails me. I use my second brain a lot like an exoskeleton. I wear my organizing on the outside. When an idea arises I need to extract it by writing a note. If I leave it inside I lose it.

The skill set I’ve acquired through personal productivity has been pivotal to my life. Knowing how to organize my thoughts and actions no matter where I am has made my life easier and more enjoyable. My second brain has become a reliable treatment for my hardest ADD symptoms. When my mind is racing and I can’t organize my thoughts, I do a brainstorm of things I need to do. I write a note with whatever is bothering me. I write without trying to make any sense. I look through my project list and revise next actions. I do a weekly review. I plan.

So why do I still have an eerie feeling about what personal productivity is all about? What bad can come out of something that has been so good to me?

Productivity as a Spiritual Bypass

One of the promises from personal productivity is to gain more control over your life. A similar promise is given by the wellness and spirituality world. Julian Walker explains this consonance in his article “The Red Pill Overlap”. In the article, Walker talks about the New Age subcultures which he has been a part of for three decades – people focused on health and well-being, whether it’s through yoga, meditation or bodywork to name a few. To keep perceived reality and ideology aligned, you need to get rid of anything criticizing your beliefs. Walker writes:

For many New Agers, individual health and well-being, as well as that of the global community, is often framed as only ever really being at risk from one thing: wrong thinking and beliefs.

As a way to combat the “wrong thinking and beliefs”, Walker introduces a mechanism he calls “spiritual bypass”, which works like this:

For understandable psychological reasons we become ensconced in a worldview that uses metaphysical beliefs as a way to defend against, distort, or reframe legitimate human suffering, vulnerability to illness and accidents, trauma, injustice, and painful emotions as not really being what they are.

Spiritual bypass is a way to shield oneself from bad things by saying they aren’t happening. Spiritual bypass is a necessary part of being able to shape the world around you – to take the red pill. Walker explains that in the case of New Agers, taking the red pill is “waking up to this fabricated and ungrounded romantic and passionate vision of reality […] and just like Neo in the Matrix, learning to bend reality with our all powerful minds.”

The red pill has become a very loaded metaphor since the Wachowski sisters introduced it in The Matrix. Within certain extremely toxic internet communities, the red pill seems to take you down a rabbit hole so deep that you can no longer distinguish between fantasy and reality. Spiritual bypass is what makes this possible. When personal productivity becomes a type of spiritual bypass, you take a red pill. A second brain becomes a superpower. An Iron Man suit.

Personal productivity can to a certain extent be a useful mechanism for coping with big challenges in your life. You can break down big projects into bite sized projects. You can manage those projects in a shiny new app. You can find a place in your calendar to work on your projects. As long as you've created a time block for your problems, your mind is free from thinking about it until you really need to. If the only thing you need is the right mindset and protocols then nothing is impossible.

But as the red pill takes you further down, you realize: There are no problems, only projects.

Self-Soothing is Bliss

Personal productivity can also function as the adult version of a pacifier – a self-soothing mechanism. In her article "The Promise and Pitfalls of "Self-Soothing"", Pamela J. Hobart shares her insight from observing her baby learning to soothe itself to sleep:

Maturation doesn't just mean learning to take your own bad feelings away (instead of waiting for mommy to do it). Maturation *also* involves learning to withstand difficult emotions, when they can't or shouldn't be dispelled.

When you apply self-soothing to personal productivity, this means maturation doesn’t take place. Instead you only have a coping mechanism that drives you on. You know what to do, but you have no idea why you should. In another article, titled "Towards a Humanistic Productivity”, Hobart writes:

[P]roductivity advice invites you to think more shallowly about what you are doing (or failing to do), when you really need to go deeper. Much deeper. All the way to “why do anything at all?,” if necessary.

Walker comes to a similar conclusion when talking about dissociation in order to be more productive. He thinks it can be "harmless and even helpful when you’re setting goals, or trying to get out of an objectively distorted and self-limiting mindset, but when pushed to its logical conclusion and applied to reality writ large, it is a disaster.”

But what happens when you never dig deeper?

The way I look at it, this is a hammer and nail problem. Personal productivity, however, is not a hammer. It’s a swiss army knife. You can open a can and tighten a screw with it. The number of tasks you can do with it is far greater than if you only had a hammer. But as the job gets more specific, the less useful the multitool becomes. In the same way, no amount of self-soothing or productivity hacking will fix a human being on its own.

So what does?

Why do anything at all?

In Hobart’s mind the solution involves maturation. Maturation is "learning to withstand difficult emotions, when they can't or shouldn't be dispelled.” This is a polite way of telling someone to grow the f**k up. Sometimes this needs to be said, if your only coping mechanism is toxic positivity. She also adds:

Do you live a better or worse human life when you decline to feel these, and all the other messy emotions on offer? Sometimes negative emotions are warranted and appropriate. Often, they aren't fixable anyways - and trying only makes things worse.

This serves as a prerequisite for asking the big question about personal productivity: “Why do anything at all?”

Walker comes to a similar conclusion. The “antidote” as he words it in his article includes:

[I]ntegrating a more emotionally honest psychological understanding of trauma and painful emotions, a better-informed and humble understanding of how science works, and a more intellectually unpacked philosophical conversation about reality, reason, consciousness, causality, and the human condition.

It is clear that personal productivity isn’t useful as a spiritual or developmental North Star. It’s not the desired lens through which to view and organize the world. It’s a tremendously useful skill set that can be used to nurture either our creative or administrative mindsets.

Productivity as a Poetic Technology

In “The Utopia of Rules” David Graeber distinguishes between two types of technologies, based on what is the driving force behind them. He calls them “poetic” and “bureaucratic” technologies:

From this perspective, all those mad Soviet plans—even if never realized—marked the high-water mark of such poetic technologies. What we have now is the reverse. It’s not that vision, creativity, and mad fantasies are no longer encouraged. It’s that our fantasies remain free-floating; there’s no longer even the pretense that they could ever take form or flesh. Meanwhile, in the few areas in which free, imaginative creativity actually is fostered, such as in open-source Internet software development, it is ultimately marshaled in order to create even more, and even more effective, platforms for the filling out of forms. This is what I mean by “bureaucratic technologies”: administrative imperatives have become not the means, but the end of technological development. Meanwhile, the greatest and most powerful nation that has ever existed on this earth has spent the last decades telling its citizens that we simply can no longer contemplate grandiose enterprises, even if—as the current environmental crisis suggests—the fate of the earth depends on it.

A poetic technology is only possible if it’s fueled by unhindered imagination, experimentation and creativity. Bureaucratic technologies need none of those things – which is both its most boring as well as most appealing feature. One of the deep insights from building my second brain is it’s crucial to spend as little time possible in administrative tasks. In other words, my second brain works best if it is used as a poetic technology. The moment I start fidgeting with how I organize my notes I’m in a state of hyperfocus and overthinking. The lack of output isn’t necessarily a source of anxiety. Rather, I miss the time I could’ve spent having fun.

poetic productivity 2x2.jpeg — Bureaucratic vs. Poetic technologies x Stagnation vs. Maturation.

It bears repeating that personal productivity is most useful if treated as a tool rather than a worldview. What you gain from using personal productivity as a spiritual bypass or a means of self-soothing lasts only a short time and it stands in the way of maturation. When used as a tool, specifically as a poetic technology, you have a way to reconnect with what you create or fail to create. Instead of forcing yourself to finish projects you don’t need or want to finish, take away the insights from the time spent on them, share them, recycle into other projects and go on with your life. The alternative is way worse: spending more time fine-tuning your workflow than doing actual creative work, forcing yourself to finish just to check boxes on your to-do list.

Shifting my second brain from a poetic technology to a bureaucratic one however is tempting. It comes with a promise of a future where you don’t have to think. To design the ultimate personal knowledge management method. To design workflows for every imaginable situation. To nail down standards of operation for every type of work I do. To creatively rethink, re-envision and visualize my productivity. To become the captain of my note taking spaceship.

But before I start optimizing every detail of my second brain, I need to keep asking myself, “What is the point?”