- The notion of a perfect system is a neurotic fantasy of control. There is no perfect system which, if crafted, will ensure the smooth integration of your life. In fact the quest for the perfect system can be a vector through which malintegration is amplified, leaving you yearning for a closure which is neither possible nor desirable.
- Underlying that fantasy of control is a belief there is some fuller, freer state in which you are ‘on top of everything’. This is explicitly promised in even the more thoughtful productivity literature, creating a dangerous tendency to perpetuate a self-injuring notion of closure. There are more or less effective ways of organising your endeavours, but there’s not some break through point at which everything will just fall into place.
- Productivity systems sit at the intersection between the imaginary and the real. They index our aspirations about who we will be, as the kind of person who does these things in this sequence in this context, tying them to rhythms of the drives in daily life. The promise of something like Getting Things Done (GTD) is that it performs this tie in a more effective way than usually possible, maximising the degree to which we are undertaking tasks at the moment when our drives are inclined in those directions. But this is necessarily a partial phenomenon.
- In repudiating the idea of closure we open up the possibility of a ‘system’ that simply nudges us the right direct in a reliable and routine way. What ‘right’ means is a matter of reflexivity, which is prior to the system and needs to define its parameters, in contrast to the system becoming an excuse to forego reflexivity. If you can’t answer why you’re doing something, then the system controls you rather than the other way round.
- Productivity systems often promise a fantasy of wholeness, a vision of the self as a coherent, integrated agent moving smoothly through the world. But this is to deny the fundamental split at the heart of subjectivity, the ways in which we are always divided against ourselves. The subject is not a monolithic entity but a site of conflicting desires, identifications, and impulses. No system can suture over this constitutive lack, this internal alterity. There is now way to get everything into a perfectly representative system because there is no internally consistent ‘everything’ to represent.
- There is a temptation to view productivity as a means of armoring the self, of fortifying it against the vicissitudes of the world and the unruliness of our own psyches. But this defensive posture can ossify into a brittle rigidity, a refusal of the suppleness and responsiveness required to navigate life’s flux. An over-attachment to system can be a way of refusing the challenges of contingency, of seeking to master the real rather than engage with it.
- Productivity discourse often carries a super-egoic injunction, a demand to ceaselessly optimize and improve the self. But this can slide into a punishing, persecutory relationship to the self, a constant measuring of the self against an unattainable ideal. There is a cruelty in this relentless imperative to be better, to do more. It denies the necessary role of fallow periods, of moments of withdrawal and inwardness that are as vital as outward achievement.
- The pursuit of productivity can function as a defense against the inherent tragicomedy of existence, against the ultimate groundlessness and absurdity of our projects. It can be a way of papering over the existential void, of busying ourselves so as not to confront the radical contingency of our lives. In this sense, productivity systems can serve a profoundly ideological function, obscuring the true coordinates of our predicament.
And yet if you took away my Omnifocus I feel I would struggle to function.
Mark Carrigan 