looking productive vs being productive

on unconventional productivity and goblin mode

This essay is the first in a series exploring the world of ‘productivity’ content, taking a dive into its culture and the ideas that sit beneath it. ★

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For a long time, I have felt a little bit embarrassed by the way I get things done. Since I was a teenager, I’ve been someone who can shift into goblin mode and get a lot of good work done, fast. I promise this is not a flex. The flip side is that I have never sustained an early morning routine, never sat down serenely at a perfectly organised desk to start working at 6am, never stuck to an elaborately time-blocked calendar. It’s taken me until now, almost at the end of my PhD, to realise that this is simply how my brain works, and that it has actually served me just fine so far. And yet, every so often, I still find myself wondering whether I’m really being “productive” enough.

If you have spent any time in the same corners of the internet as me, a very particular image of productivity begins to emerge. Productive people wake up early. They drink lemon water and an ominous-looking green powder mix before coffee. They have immaculate desks, immaculate calendars, and a colour-coded system for everything. They work in focused Pomodoro sessions on such a strict timer that I think their body clocks must operate in 25-minute blocks, ensuring brain waves radiate solidly until that little timer goes off, when they conveniently pause for a break before getting back to the colour-coded workflow before them.

The details of this image change over time. When I was a teenager, productivity content revolved around Mildliners and Muji pens, used to craft painstakingly beautiful handwritten notes. These days, the ideal productive person seems to own an entire Apple ecosystem, an immensely complicated, aesthetically pleasing Notion dashboard, and a desk setup that costs roughly the same as a small car. But the core underlying message remains: productivity is about being tidily disciplined and in control.

For many years, I internalised that message. Because my own work habits looked nothing like that, I assumed there must be something wrong with me, or at least that I should always be striving to do a bit better.

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The longer I spend in academia, the more convinced I become that my best work is often the least photogenic. And I must say that I do have some exceptionally photogenic work days: I’m a student at a beautiful old university, and I love romanticising my days by visiting its libraries. But some of my most productive days—and by productive I mean genuinely fruitful, when I actually make intellectual progress and move towards my goals—are spent, as I said, in goblin mode. Curled up on my sofa with a hot water bottle and an old hoodie, or in my hometown coffee chain, wearing clothes scrounged from my teenage wardrobe because I packed too lightly to visit my parents. These sessions often feel chaotic; I become a hamster that has chugged a Red Bull and can’t quite keep up with its own thoughts. But I quite often come away feeling like I’ve finally gotten somewhere with a task that’s been at the back of my mind for a while.

Cosy Corner by Carl Larsson, 1853-1919

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Of course, I am not suggesting that to be productive you must go back to your hometown, put on a mismatched outfit purchased in the 2014 January sales, and chug mediocre iced coffee until you reach a flow state. But that’s kind of my point: a lot of productivity content tries to convince us that there’s a single correct way to work, and that replicating someone else’s steps is how to crack the code. When I actually talk to other researchers, writers, and people who do intense, tricky work, that is obviously not the case. Some of those people thrive on routine and structure: they genuinely take a lot from working the exact same hours every day, and time blocking every task a week in advance. Others only work in super intense bursts, with very specific setups to support that. Most people fall somewhere between these, or, like me, vary depending on the task of the day.

Yet productivity content presents one highly specific version of success as if it were universal. It flattens these individual differences in the way we work, while also ignoring the fact that most of us end up experimenting with various strategies to fit our evolving needs. It’s not so much that I disagree with the version of productivity being presented. Some of my own weaknesses are beautiful stationery and complicated organisational spreadsheets. I just resent the idea that there’s only one formula to achieve our goals: my beloved notebook ecosystem and spreadsheets exist alongside my goblin mode sprints, and that seems to work just fine for me.

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One reason this version of productivity dominates online is that it is highly visual. Colour-coded planners and perfectly organised Notion dashboards look impressive in an Instagram post. An enviably beautiful desk setup makes for a satisfying ten-second clip, which, in turn, makes for a lucrative sponsorship opportunity.

The problem is that the most important parts of intellectual work are almost completely invisible. You cannot easily film yourself grasping a difficult concept for the first time. You cannot capture the moment when two seemingly unrelated ideas suddenly connect in your mind. You cannot create an aesthetically pleasing montage of staring into the middle distance for twenty minutes or taking a break to clear your head and eat some grated cheese out of the bag before finally working out how to solve a problem.

Some of the most productive moments of my PhD would have made terrible content. They have happened while pacing around my messy kitchen, ranting out loud to myself about something, or sitting in a noisy coffee shop looking haggard with an empty Word Doc open and a vaguely panicked expression on my face. They looked nothing like productivity, yet they often produced my best work.

Here lies the problem. When we spend enough time consuming productivity content, it becomes easy to mistake visible productivity for actual productivity. We start to believe that the planner, the routine, and the aesthetic are the work itself, rather than simply tools that may or may not help us do it. When that happens, we begin to distrust our own ways of working, however effective they might actually be, leaving us feeling dissatisfied at best, and completely useless at worst.

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For me, this wasn't just a theoretical concern. When I was eighteen, I genuinely believed that productivity was something I could optimise my way into. While I don’t think I consciously sat down and decided to become the sort of person I saw online, I had certainly absorbed the message all the same. Successful students seemed to be disciplined, organised, and relentlessly hardworking in a highly regimented way. The recipe involved waking up early, timetabling the hell out of every day, and an intense degree of self-control.

I decided to become that person.

I worked incredibly long hours. I decided I would largely put hobbies, socialising, and rest on pause: I would have ample time to enjoy my life later. I distinctly remember telling my mum in the autumn term that I was looking forward to the summer break already, despite it being 8 months away, because I wouldn’t have exams to prepare for, so I could fully relax. I became very good at pushing myself through exhaustion and ignoring the signals my body was sending me. I’d often work from my bedroom during the day and close my curtains so I wouldn’t feel distracted by what was going on on the busy street below.

For a while, it worked. Or rather, it looked like it worked from the outside. I was productive in the narrowest sense of the word: I got things done, achieved great marks on my work, and appeared highly motivated from the outside.

But it was, quite frankly, pretty miserable.

I quickly found myself to be a woman on the edge. Despite achieving highly, I felt a huge amount of pressure to maintain that, and had physical knots in my back to constantly remind me of that. I once went to hand in some work to one of my eccentric but kind tutors 10 minutes past the deadline, and he popped out from behind the submission tray to jokingly say, “caught you!”. To his horror, I began to cry. I had so little mental reserve that a harmless joke could dissolve me. I walked away from that encounter with a Snickers bar gifted to me out of guilt and pity, and the advice that I “just needed to chill out a bit”. In hindsight, this was completely true. At the time, it did not feel helpful.

I have a long list of stories along those lines, but they’re probably for a separate essay. Suffice to say: I spent a long time dealing with the mental and physical consequences of trying to operate as if I were a machine rather than a person.

To be clear, I don’t think productivity content caused that burnout. The reasons were much bigger and more complicated than that, and I was ultimately a young adult blundering through her first year of university, trying to adapt to an intense academic environment in the only way I knew how. But I do think that ‘productivity culture’ reinforced an idea that I was already vulnerable to believing: that there was a single correct way to work, and that if I wasn’t naturally inclined towards it, I simply needed to try harder.

In the years since, I have been incredibly lucky to meet many successful, intelligent people who work in ways that look nothing like that ideal. The more successful, happy people I meet, the more convinced I become that sustainable productivity is deeply personal. People are not perfectly optimised machines, nor should we try to be.

Those who are most intellectually secure and thriving are those who have gradually learned how their own brains work.

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I still enjoy beautiful stationery; I still love a good spreadsheet, my satisfying planner setup, and the rush of a completed to-do list. None of those things are inherently bad. But the older I get, the less interested I become in finding the perfect productivity system, and the more interested I become in understanding how I actually work. I have befriended my inner goblin, and I shall continue to feed her grated cheese and iced coffee through the end of this PhD and beyond. It is fine if my most productive days look messy, chaotic, and unphotogenic. Alas, they seem to work rather well for me.

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Thank you for reading! This is the first in a series of essays exploring the world of productivity culture and the ideas that sit beneath it. In companion pieces for paid subscribers, I’ll be digging further into my own experiences: ways I’ve built up systems that have genuinely helped me, ones that absolutely haven’t, and how I’ve gradually learned to build a way of working that fits my brain rather than somebody else’s. If that sounds interesting, I’d love for you to join the conversation. ★