Caleb Schoepp

Productivity Porn

Published June 28, 2022

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:

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.

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.


  1. Ironically, the thing delivering the wake-up message was productivity porn itself self-aware enough to surface the issue. ↩︎

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