Nothing as Productive

Dear Admonister,

I have a digital mind in Notion, I have pomodoro timers, I power-nap twice a day. My performance is at least 10X that of normies — I Get Things Done! Why are you hating on productivity?

Please admonish,
— Productive Performer

𝔇𝔢𝔞𝔯 Productive Performer,

Hating? I was unaware of your world-changing productivity, but by all means, go ahead, you go-getter. You're neither fooling nor hurting anyone with being a productivity tool, are you?

In fact, you discovered the secrets to life and maxing out its potential. You have found practical answers to crucial life questions — like:

• "How can I focus when I interrupt myself every 25 minutes?"
• "Can I powernap at work on the toilet?"
• "What do my peers accomplish — and how do I do more?"
• "What is oneupmanship — and is ten-upmanship better?"
• "Google, what is performance anxiety?"
• "Am I an imposter, or just gifted?"
• "How do I stay productive in a burn-out?"

While many people wallow in paralysing reflection, or falter in their self-helping productivity systems — you never fail, you never stop. You seize the day, you improve, and you go on!

And on!

And on...

And on.

Do you remember your early days — when you were still just 2X productive? You read Getting Things Done, bought a filing cabinet, and cleared inboxes every day. And now your filing cabinet is reborn as a Notion board — and you have Inbox Zero across all six mail accounts. People just don't realise how much effort it takes to arrive at nothing.

You're still human, unfortunately. Productivity is fragile — often constrained by petty needs like resting, eating, drinking. Nothing some planning optimisation can't fix. You schedule your sleep for the after-dinner dip, and the caffeine kicking in when you need to wake up again. Life hacking, not slacking!

Being productive really helps you socialise as well. Your peers admire you — they stress you are always so busy. Even friends and family say they can never catch up — which, of course, shows how far ahead you are, busy winning at life. You even had to schedule your two-week wellness sabbatical in the evenings.

The non-stop administrative churn is only a minor inconvenience when you consider how crucial it actually is. You hold a high position in your company — productivity would simply collapse in your absence. You are proud to be the best single point of failure alive — though of course, you never fail.

Now, the real price you pay will not show up until— Oh. The pomodoro timer rang. Time to interrupt myself. I have to expedite some other to-do items now. The productivity ROI KPI OKRs don't put themselves into the TPS report, you know?

I just wanted to ask a few other questions — whether you're happy, who you are without your work, if you fear silence, etc. No matter — I'll backlog them with the other low-prio items like 'finding love'.