Unlearning corporate "productivity" habits

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Happy Sunday, happy September (ALREADY?) & thank you for taking the time to be here with me today for this week’s #TheLifeofJLOWE newsletter.

Last week I checked in for the first time since taking the plunge into self-employment and shared a bit on why you should be careful of chasing after success. If you haven’t read those pieces, be sure to catch up on them, because there are some big changes going on around here and you want to make sure you’re in the loop!

In other news, my Youtube channel is now active, so head over there and subscribe, and check out the two vlogs on there too while you’re at it 😉 .

Why do we fiddle our thumbs at work?

Since leaving my corporate job, as I mentioned last week, I’ve been going through a healing process of forgiving and forgetting how poorly treated I was at the company, and also re-shifting my mind away from corporate productivity myths towards a more entrepreneurial mindset for growth.

I worked a 9-5 job, which if you’ve ever worked a 9-5 job, you’d know means there was a lot of wasted time feigning productivity that I felt could have been better used for building and investing into my own personal goals and projects.

I know you know what I mean - especially as an analyst in a big company - there’s a lot of time throughout the day when you’re sitting at your computer basically pretending to do work because other senior people might be watching you. You want to make sure your Microsoft Teams status stays on green so you’re “available” because who knows what people might think if you’re “away” for an extended period of time.

Long story short - we sometimes fiddle our thumbs at work in a corporate setting - and that’s because to some extent, especially for salaried workers, showing up is enough. You just being physically at the workplace to some extent means that you “worked”, despite not having done much throughout the day itself.

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Time is your most valuable asset

For me, I’ve recognised the incredible value of my own time, so sitting at work and fiddling my thumbs wasn’t cutting it for me. I have a ridiculous amount of intrinsic motivation, so to be relegated to doing nothing and having to pretend to do “work” had a serious effect on my mental health because frankly it felt like, and was, a waste of my time.

You’re probably thinking to yourself, “So Justin, that means you didn’t have enough work to do. Maybe you should’ve volunteered or asked for more work!”

To which I would say “absolutely f*cking not.”

From I started my job in corporate, I had already rejected the idea of being a cog in a system, and let me tell you one secret that I’ve learnt: the reward for doing good work is… more work.

If I raised my hand for more work at the times that I had a smaller volume of work to do, I would’ve ended up swamped in the times that I actually did have projects to work on, which is equally as bad (or worse) for my mental health as having nothing to do.

Re-defining productivity and unlearning corporate productivity habits

So as I said above, my mentality wasn’t to ask for more work for 2 reasons:

1. Asking for more work meant more work in general, and I personally didn’t have any energy to give to a company that demonstrated that it did not care about me, nor would they reward me for doing more work day to day, given that I was a salaried employee.

2. When I say my time is valuable, I mean valuable to me, not to the company. So the solution wasn’t to offer more time to the company.

   The solution was to take all my time back for myself. Hence my resignation.

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Is 9-5 a realistic expectation of productive hours?

As I wrap up my second week of self-employment, I’ve realised that this idea of feigning productivity has lingered with me, and is something I’m in the process of unlearning. I didn’t realise it, but working in corporate made me feel like I had to be “on” or “productive” entirely between the hours of 9am to 5pm, before and after which I can spend time on myself and on my own personal growth and development.

Bullshit.

As I work on my own projects now, and have ownership and autonomy over all of my time, I’m really coming to recognise what a ridiculous expectation that is of human beings, as people that are multi-talented, and have a variety of needs.

I wake up at 7am still, and by 9am I’d usually already have had breakfast and gone on my morning 1-mile walk, but that doesn’t mean that my work on my projects has to all of a sudden begin at 9am and the clock starts ticking.

Why, you might ask?

Because all my time is mine, it’ll be midnight, I’ll have an idea for something I want to work on, and I’ll get out of my bed and start writing, brainstorming and researching, with no consideration for what time it is.

When I get into a workflow at 7pm and work until 2am because the passion behind my ideas is driving me more than the morning cup of Joe ever could, it makes me realize that 9-5 is an abstract concept imposed upon us by institutions to keep everyone in line in a system that is built to limit entrepreneurial drive and suppress creativity.

Call me radical I guess. 🤷‍♂️ 

Conclusion

As I drift further away from my corporate job and deeper into entrepreneurship, I’m loving every day of compounded personal growth that I’m experiencing. It’s a feeling of unlimited growth potential that’s impossible to feel when contributing to a system that forces you to conform to a linear pattern of growth.

In terms of productivity, I’m super excited to create new patterns of productivity for myself, in ways that not only prioritise entrepreneurship and career goals, but also the things that matter most to me like building relationships with people, my mental wellness and my physical health.

I asked earlier how you define productivity, and in a similar way to defining success, if you don’t define productivity for yourself, someone else will define it for you and make you prioritise their priorities.

My advice to you for this week on productivity is this - just as earning money, building a business or working out is something you’d consider productive, something that is equally as productive is rest.

Allow yourself to rest, to recover, to regroup and to recharge. Read books, practice yoga, pray, meditate, spend time off social media and away from screens, walk in nature or just be present with yourself. Slow down at some point this week and spend some time with yourself.

It’s in those slow, restful, recharging moments that you will oftentimes find the most inspiration, and getting yourself back to 100% (just like you charge your cell phone) will make you prepared to take on each day and week as they go by.

Until next Sunday,
Justin