Constraints are the Antidote to the Toxicity of Hustle Culture
We live in an age of abundance. An age where you can order almost anything you want online and have it delivered in a few days to your doorstep. If you live in a major city you don’t even have to wait a few days, your momentary desire for longer metal straws can be fulfilled in an hour without needing to leave your house.
Chase Jarvis notes that this love of abundance leads to the toxicity of performance culture.
“More” is the favorite mantra of hustlers, and bigger and better are the constant aims of those enmeshed in the toxic culture of performance. – Never Play It Safe Pg 13
This abundance maps into the mantra of so many popular gurus. If you just get up at 5 am, have their favourite power smoothie, and schedule your day, you too can be as productive. If that doesn’t work, they’ve got three other steps you can add to your day so that you can have 12 productive hours in a day.
Constraints though are often the key to making progress on the items that are important to you. Parkinson’s Law states that work will expand to fill the time available. But infinite time doesn’t help you become a master. Infinite time merely encourages procrastination disguised as perfectionism to creep into your work because if you just have “a few more days” whatever you’re working on will launch without flaws.
On a recent Cortex Casey Newton of Platformer noted that one big thing Bullet Journalers get right is that they have to manually copy a task to the next day for it to stay on your list. That means they have to vote daily if a task is worth doing. The second it feels like too much work to move that task to another day you’ve just voted that it’s not worth doing. Recognizing this, Casey changes task managers regularly because the effort to move tasks to the new system means he abandons a bunch of tasks he was never going to do anyway.
The constraint of effort means he drops tasks that sounded good in the moment, but will never be important enough to become a priority and get accomplished.
Instead of looking for a life that’s free of constraints, impose them on yourself so they can act as a forcing function to bring out your best work. To write these book posts I give myself about an hour for the first draft on Friday morning before I get the kids to school. Knowing I have limited time to write, I’m thinking about what I want to tackle some time on Thursday. When I’ve had the entire day free I still get the writing done, but I don’t bother to think deeply about it until later in the day and then instead of having thoughts percolating through my brain I’m rushing to find something, anything to write about.
I have an hour to train for cycling on Saturday morning. I pick the workout Friday night so that I’m not wasting time trying to figure out what I’ll do in the precious moments I have to focus on cycling.
Dr. Seuss used the constraint of 50 unique words and a bet to write the children’s classic Green Eggs and Ham.
Lever 4 in this month’s book, Never Play it Safe, is all about constraints and how they help us get good work done, without falling into the hustle culture mantra of overwork which leads to burnout.
Don’t long for a life without constraints as if it’s a mythical world where you’ll finally get everything done. Set some boundaries on yourself and work inside those boundaries so that you can get stuff that matters to you done.
#abundance #bulletJournal #constraints #hustleCulture
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