The Cult of Productivity

Is the decline of elitism of creativity inevitable?

Productivity vs. Creativity

“Do you think that the importance of creativity is declining?”

I recently posed this question to my wife. She spent most of her career in HR and doesn’t think about creativity or creative endeavors like I do. At the beginning of the pandemic, she left her cushy corporate job and decided to pursue being a life/career coach. Now as an independent professional, she creates way more content on various platforms than I do. Yet, she wouldn’t identify herself as a creative or a creator.

I’ve spent more than two decades as a creative. Quality over quantity has always been the mantra for us, the so-called Creative Class. Producing “less but better stuff” was what we were taught. Mediocrity, or settling for “good enough,” was the enemy. We worshiped the cult of perfectionism. 

I’ve been sensing for a while now that, in the modern, technology-driven, and efficiency-obsessed society we live in today, we put less value on creativity and increasingly more on productivity. Producing “more but good enough stuff” seems to have become the new mantra.

Countless creators sing the gospel of consistency, frequency, and productivity. 

In just the last 24 months, the number of self-proclaimed social media growth coaches and personal branding gurus seems to have exploded on Instagram, LinkedIn, and the platform formerly known as Twitter.

The pandemic accelerated this trend. While the cost of and the demand for elite colleges didn’t get disrupted as much as some experts thought they would be, the popularity of online courses did rise significantly, from the elite end of the spectrum to the opposite end. Yet another way for Ivy League schools to make even more money.

In addition, many creators have now figured out how the algorithms of various platforms work. The platforms benefit when more people are posting more content more frequently. Creators desperate for irrational emotional affirmations in the form of followers and likes are willingly uploading stuff in masse and for free.

Furthermore, the format of content—i.e. Reels on Instagram—is now overshadowing the substance of content. Posts that tout “Use trending audio for your Reel and watch your account grow!” “Post _ times a week to gain more followers!” or those strangely quick and short clips that you have to watch and stop several times to see what’s going on proliferate the Explore feeds. We see numerous posts that have the same formats and techniques. Sure, they may have a large number of likes and followers but are they truly memorable? Probably not because there are so many.

These formulas are providing these creators with shortcuts for reach and growth. Everyone loves a good shortcut.

One thing that is common among them, however, is that only a fraction of them encourage people to be original or creative. 

Put another way, algorithms of the online world are pushing creators and creatives towards quantity and formulas and away from quality or creativity.

The great thing about formulas is that they work, especially in the age of algorithms, while they work. The problem is that platforms and their algorithms are a moving target and change frequently and unpredictably. In a few years, 90% of these creators who chase formulas will either get tired of chasing them and/or algorithms will render them irrelevant.

Tools don’t make us smarter

The sense, or worry I should admit, that productivity is overtaking creativity occurred to me as I was listening to a podcast in which the two hosts discuss the topic of productivity, and specifically, note-taking rather enthusiastically. This conversation fascinated me. 

To begin with, I didn’t realize that there was a passionate cohort of note-taking aficionados out there. For Casey Newton—one of the hosts, a tech journalist who runs Platformer—note-taking is a professional obsession. He seems to organize his notes meticulously, and even mercilessly, and takes the task to a level that I never really thought about. He keeps a highly organized record of every link his articles on Platformer have referenced in Notion and uses a newly discovered note-taking tool called Capacities.io that helps “networked thoughts.”

His co-host, Kevin Roose, a technology columnist for the New York Times, is on the opposite end of the spectrum. His method, he reveals, is surprisingly low-tech for a tech journalist: emailing himself or taking voice notes in the Voice Memo app whenever ideas occur. He admits self-deprecatingly that his method, particularly the voice notes, makes searching for those ideas later almost impossible, ironically defeating the purpose of taking notes. He says he experimented with various note-taking tools, only to find himself getting frustrated with them 12 to 24 hours later and reverting to his archaic method of keeping a record of his ideas.

To be honest, I’m much closer to Roose than Newton on the spectrum of productivity savviness. For years, I’ve tried different means of taking notes/jotting ideas down/making to-do lists and I’m yet to find a system that I’m satisfied with. I did sign up for Capacities.io, opened it, but was immediately intimidated and went back to Notes. 

While Newton advocates for productivity tools, he argues that note-taking apps don’t make us smarter in his article on Platformer.

In short, it is probably a mistake, in the end, to ask software to improve our thinking. [...] The reason, sadly, is that thinking takes place in your brain. And thinking is an active pursuit — one that often happens when you are spending long stretches of time staring into space, then writing a bit, and then staring into space a bit more. It’s here that the connections are made and the insights are formed. And it is a process that stubbornly resists automation.

Authenticity 

I spoke at an event in Croatia last year and met Chris Do, the self-proclaimed “Loud Introvert, helping left-brainers, think right™.” On Instagram alone, he has close to a million followers, and on LinkedIn close to half a million. He’s a household name in the design community.

Although I didn’t get to know him directly until last year, I remember his firm Blind, a motion graphics company, more than a decade, if not two, ago in my twenties. Only a few years older than me and a designer like myself, I was very impressed with Chris running an Emmy-winning design company at a relatively young age. In the last decade, he shifted his work focus towards coaching and educating other designers to build businesses.

At a breakfast table of the event, we started chatting. My wife was with me and complimented Chris on his talk the day earlier. She mentioned how useful it was to her and wished that she could build her online presence more. He in return asked her what she did - a life career coach. When I bring my partner to an industry event where I’m speaking, people are usually more interested in talking to me. So it was rare and refreshing that a high-caliber speaker like Chris showed an interest in what my wife did.

The next question he asked her surprised both of us. “Can I help you?” 

Here’s someone who has more than a million followers on social media, gets approached all the time for advice, and charges $5,000/hr for a 1-on-1 coaching session for personal branding. With this question, he wasn’t selling his service to her. He sounded genuinely interested in what my wife did and helping her on the spot. There was no agenda beyond that. It was authentic.

With Chris Do at an event in Croatia

Creative and design industries are filled with big personalities and egos. In fact, regardless of the industry, anyone who is as successful and as well-known as Chris would have a big personality and be self-obsessed, and not be interested in talking about others. 

Before meeting him, I admired Chris for his ability and tenacity to produce high-quality content on such frequency. During my two-decade-plus career, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who cared enough about a random stranger who wasn’t even in the same industry and offered to help. This personal encounter with him made me realize that it’s his authenticity that put him in a whole different class.

The long run

Towards the end of the podcast, Newton provides a few practical tips for staying organized and being productive. While he comments Reese’s basic use of technology is “horrible,” his last advice to his co-host is simple and refreshingly technology-independent.

“Keep a daily journal as a bullet list in the morning.”

Drake supposedly put out 80 songs in one year alone. That’s more than one track a week. Even at his level of fame, when one’s descent from fame is as quick as someone else ascending and replacing them, he is savvy enough to understand that aiming for a stroke of genius every few years could be dangerous for his career. Instead, he is producing more in the Attention Economy we now live in to engage his audience more effectively, frequently, and consistently. 

Statistically speaking, in baseball, a player who hits a single consistently has a higher chance of becoming a Hall of Famer than a player who becomes a home run winner in a few seasons. 

It now seems that to be creative, we first need to produce more with consistency. Creatives need not be the hostage of quality, at least to begin with. While we should try to understand algorithms and need to produce more to stay relevant, that doesn’t mean we need to be subservient to algorithms. In fact, we should resist hacks, tricks, and gimmicks, to truly break away and stand out.

Sure, we can chase algorithms in an effort to grow our audience. In the long run, however, authenticity will prevail. 

---

---

Thanks for reading. Hit reply with any feedback, thoughts, or questions. I’d love to hear from you.