How do you measure the success of your day? Often, I find myself measuring it by how many tasks I’ve completed on my to-do list. If I complete most, if not all my tasks for the day, I would consider that day successful. Otherwise, I deem it unsuccessful. While I get satisfaction from completing my to-do lists, sometimes I don’t feel that it’s enough. There are times I feel that I’m simply doing one thing after another, stuck in a rut.
In one of the lectures for my philosophy class, while studying Fr. Roque Ferriols, SJ’s Meron, we were discussing Techne, which, translated in English, is doing by understanding and understanding by doing. Roy Allan Tolentino, my teacher, was explaining how doing without understanding is blind, and understanding without doing is empty. He illustrated the former in particular, by giving student life as an example: Often, students feel that they just keep doing work again and again, submitting one requirement after the other, to the point where they can no longer see what it’s all for. Hearing this example brought me back to the thought of how I measure my days based on productivity and how mechanical this makes me feel.
There seems to be this general obsession with being productive, productive in the context of getting things done. There’s a whole array of apps geared towards productivity: 30/30, Wunderlist, Google Keep, Evernote, Penultimate and the like. There are websites and blogs, such as LifeHacker, Bakadesuyo, BufferApp, Harvard Business Review and 99u, that provide a variety of productivity hacks in the content they release. Productivity is no longer simply a concept in economics—it has become a trend.
This obsession with getting things done brings me to the question: “Is it really all just about being productive?” Some months ago, I stumbled upon an article, ironically from 99u, entitled “It’s Not About ‘Productivity.’ It’s About Living Purposefully.” In this article, Sam Spurlin, discusses how we absorb information by bits. He proceeds to show that, given the magnitude of the possibilities we can encounter in the human experience, our attention is horribly limited. Spurlin says that productivity is not simply about getting things done; it’s about making the most out of those limited bits of information, given a certain path you pave for yourself.
What he said made a whole lot of sense to me. However, I thought that the title of the article could be misleading. Without reading the article, you may jump to the conclusion that productivity and purpose are two things that are to be taken separately or that one impedes the other.
I beg to differ, though. Rather than one hindering the other, I think that productivity and purpose have a symbiotic relationship and support each other in turn. Purpose gives direction to productivity, while productivity strengthens purpose. Much like in Techne, productivity without purpose, like doing without understanding, is robotic and reduces work to mindless tasks. Likewise, purpose without productivity, similar to understanding without doing, is meaningless, and all dreams and plans remain as mere concepts.
It’s all easier said than done though. I do hope that in time, I will learn not only to measure the success of a day by how many items I’ve ticked off my to-do list, but also by how meaningful these tasks are–maybe not necessarily for that day itself , but hopefully in the long run.
