Productivity Porn

I have a pornography problem, but it’s not what you’re thinking. In fact, if you’re anything like me, you might too.

It is well understood that social media can have a negative impact on your life. Whether you are doom-scrolling on Instagram, furiously retweeting on Twitter, or on your fifth hour of watching YouTube, you might experience:

• Feelings of jealousy, anxiousness, and loneliness induced by only seeing heavily curated feeds of those you follow. This ultimately leads to unrealistic expectations about what your life “should” be like mixed with a constant bombardment of FOMO.
• An increasingly polarized, misinformed, and enraged outlook on life as the incentives of our digital world push you deeper into a filter bubble, which might even lead to radicalization.
• A crippling loss of time and agency caused by the addictive and distracting nature of these platforms that use the push notification as a phantasmal chain tethering us to our phone. This ends in you consuming content not because you truly want to but just — because?

But, what I’ve recently come to realize is that there is an even more pernicious way in which social media is negatively impacting my life. Social media has become my productivity porn.

Productivity porn is anything that after having been consumed makes you feel like you were productive when in reality you didn’t actually do anything. Just like regular pornography it stimulates you without even performing the act. It is a hollow imitation of the real thing.

Examples of productivity porn include but are not limited to: reading a tweet by a top VC about how to become a better startup founder; watching a Youtube video about the 7 mistakes you need to avoid at the gym; perusing a Hacker News thread about how to improve the code you write. All of these activities deceptively make you feel like you’ve done something productive. “I just learned something new”, you tell yourself. And while this is true, you never actually did the thing you were setting out to do in the first place. A vicious cycle forms where you spend all your time thinking about doing things instead of actually doing them. As this cycle continues your productivity approaches zero.

Keep in mind that productivity is a personal thing. It can look like a variety of things: founding a startup, working out at the gym, building a side project, reading a book, growing a garden. Regardless, the key is that you benefit from doing the actual activity, but not from thinking about doing it. Hence the problem with productivity porn.

I only realized I had this addiction when it was pointed out to me over and over again. Start Marketing The Day You Start Coding by Rob Walling, The drawing advice that changed my life by struthless, How to get famous on twitter by the My First Million podcast, and The Cooking Skill That Can’t Be Taught by Internet Shaquille all were telling me the message I needed to hear. They each said it in a different way, but the core of their message was the same. Stop thinking (reading, listening, watching etc.) about how to do something and just go do it. Or using my terminology, they were all saying that I was addicted to productivity porn¹.

Each time I’d hear their message I would be hit with an electric shock when I realized that they were right. I would immediately shut off my phone. For about a week after I would steer clear of any and all productivity porn, but inevitably I would find it weaseling its way back into my life.

I find productivity porn to be a uniquely terrifying negative effect of social media for four reasons. While these reasons are also relevant to the other negative impacts of social media, I think they are particularly fitting for productivity porn.

• It saps my intrinsic motivation. When I find myself wasting excessive amounts of time on social media my intrinsic motivation normally acts as a backstop. Eventually I will become tired of scrolling on social media and will go do something productive. However, productivity porn short circuits this by making me think I was being productive the entire time.

• It is very deceptive. As far as I can tell I’ve been negatively impacted by this since at least highschool and I’m only realizing it right now. Looking back, it’s alarming to think about how much time I have spent actually doing things versus just thinking about doing them.

• It is necessary in moderation. Unlike other parts of social media, you actually need some of this in moderation. It is equally as bad to only ever do things and to never spend time learning about how to do them better. This makes avoiding it difficult because you can’t just cut it out cold turkey.

• It is found in all forms of media. This is the scariest reason for me. Typically when I feel like social media is too negative for me I feel safe running away to slower, less connected, and more deliberate forms of media — books, podcasts, blog posts, etc. These lack the virality of social media platforms and mitigate the issues that arise. However, I find productivity porn is just as prevalent in traditional media as it is in social media. While perhaps it is more toned down when found in traditional media, there is still no safe haven from productivity porn.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to conclude this post and I don’t think I’ve come up with anything satisfying. The only thing that is clear to me is that it is abundantly important that I figure out how to stymie the negative effect that productivity porn is having on my life. When I look for solutions to this problem I only come up with half-baked ideas and more questions. Is this something you’ve encountered in your life? What have you done about it?

Thanks to Morgan Frisby for reviewing drafts of this.