The Theology of Productivity

Hi all! Dan here. Today I have a guest post from strategist, coach, and writer Sarah M. Chappell. Sarah believes that in many ways productivity has replaced religion in creating structure and meaning in our lives (guilty!). The problem is that this can sometimes feel empty. The reason things are this way is that we've taken some aspects of religious practice and applied them to our work life—but left other important pieces behind. By exploring the religious roots of productivity culture, Sarah believes that we can fix this problem, and find ways to be productive while also feeling good—rather than empty. Hope you enjoy it!

I've worked at the intersection of entrepreneurship and spirituality for years, and I've come to see our obsession with planning and productivity as the new religious fervor. We plan like God ordained it, iPhone calendar clutched in our fists like a rosary, mumbling our task list under our breath with the cadence of a Hail Mary.

In the year of our Lord 2021, 47% of the U.S. population consider themselves members of a religious group, compared to 70% two decades ago. This decline, though evident across regions and age groups, is particularly pronounced among millenials. But as formal religions step off the stage of our collective life, the human need for structure, purpose, and community is as strong as it's always been. What's playing that role for us?

Doing things.

Today, we find purpose and meaning in our jobs. We build our communities around loyalty to specific domains and disciplines, and to tools that help us work faster, better, harder. We put our faith in the idea that a fresh planner, a new project management methodology, or a rising SaaS contender for managing our second brain will open the door to a fulfilling future. This is not a mistake. God is gold. Prayer is productivity.

The decline in religious life is accompanied by a simultaneous rise in hyper-growth models and winner-take-all capitalism. We’ve conferred the role of moral steward and meaning-maker to a set of rules and habits designed to optimize our every waking moment, our sleep, our dreams. And the messengers of this new religion? Today’s prophets are not in rags, they’re in Teslas.

Am I bemoaning productivity as our modern shared religious experience? Not necessarily! Through my work as a business coach, I’ve helped literally hundreds of founders start new businesses, hire employees, and grow their companies. But I believe that productivity culture can be harmful, especially if it remains unexamined.  

The irony is that though productivity culture is our new religion, its roots are in religion. The problem is that we’ve ported only some of the pillars of religious practice into our modern work environment, and not others. I believe that looking into productivity culture’s religious roots might help us adapt some of the beneficial practices of religious life that have been left behind. In understanding this evolution—why it happened and to what end—we might be able to build a productivity culture that is more well-rounded and healthy. And in doing so, begin to divorce our sense of self-worth from our ability to produce work, stop agonizing about “outcomes”, and begin to re-experience the joy of making new things in the world. 

The Prayer of Productivity Pr0n 

Do you ever open a new planner, stare into its blank little boxes and think to yourself: What am I doing with my life? 

You’re not wrong to ask. Our days, as Annie Dillard wrote in The Writing Life, are how we spend our lives—and for the entrepreneur, the high achiever, the creator, those days are scheduled, considered, curated, and designed. They are productive. Productivity is the framework through which we approach the precise planning of every hour (even those left unplanned), sifting for a lasting impact, or at the very least some way of knowing that we have done a good job or a good thing or, well, done something.

Yeah but Sarah, what’s wrong with wanting to get stuff done and be good at my job? I’m growing my brand over here! You’re right, of course. It’s not a character flaw to want to work. 

The problem I see with productivity culture is that a feeling of accomplishment, the checking-off of the to-do, is not only a marker of our limited time, but the yardstick against which we assess our worth in a secular, consumer-driven society. When the day is complete and the task list is clear, there is an ease not easily replicated elsewhere. A feeling of certainty, even security, in knowing that our will has overcome inertia, the siren song of Twitter, and the fatigue of Pandemic Year II to enforce order on one small, finite corner of the universe. To know that we have done a good job.

My issue, then, is with the word “good.” Where does this idea of a “good job” come from? And how did we end up in a society where a “good job” is a sign that you are good, and a “bad job” a sign that you are bad? We have to dip into a bit of religious history to find out.

Where Does A “Good Job” Come From?

In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis makes his case for the existence of God by inviting the reader first to believe that there are shared principles—Moral Laws, he calls them, building on the natural law concept of Thomas Aquinas—that every person and every culture inherently possess. We know what is good, even if we do not always do it. We know what is bad, even if we sometimes dive headfirst into it. Lewis argues that any differences across time and location are essentially minimal when put in the context of the overwhelming similarities. 

Regardless of whether you find his reasoning sound, the idea of a Moral Law—something fundamental to all humans that transcends time and geography—is compelling, and starts to point to how we devise meaning in our lives through this shared morality, how we decide what is good, and why we keep creating religions to provide it.

Religion is often defined as being the worship of God, gods, or the supernatural. The supernatural bit I quite like, because all “supernatural” means is something outside of the visible world, and that opens up the possibility of all sorts of fascinating things being available for worship. I’m not as keen on the worship part—“spiritual, not religious” millennial that I am—but insofar as worship is defined as honoring something, I can get on board.

Religion serves many purposes, but most primary may be, well, providing purpose to existence. Religion shapes our days, offers rituals that mark the passage of time, prescribes the behavior that is best suited to the outcome of the religion (enlightenment, reincarnation, everlasting life, eternal damnation, other: take your pick), and enforces the associated morality (shunning, excommunication, imprisonment, that sort of thing). Religion tells you what your purpose is, dictating a path to help you navigate the creation of meaning in your life. Crucially, it connects you with other people who share that same purpose and who follow the same rules to meet it. It’s usually through these other people that you know if what you’re doing to stay on the path is good—or at least good enough. Gotta love accountability, right?

Our need for purpose is strong: we feel defined by what we put forward in our lives and what we make, and what we hope to leave behind. And humans are nothing if not makers of meaning, attempting to clarify our stints on this Earth through answering the question of “why” so our purpose can be fulfilled. Even as religion statistically fades, American culture does have a solution here: making meaning through making capital.

I’m far from the first to assert that generating capital is often pursued with a religious fervor, and with the establishment of the Internet age and its ever-increasing demands on our time, the fervor feels even more potent, for without its motivation and structure, we might, well, just read Twitter all day.

But even more than capital itself, it’s the “getting things done” (apologies to David Allen) that has superseded religion as the primary creator of meaning in our lives. With the exception of prosperity gospel churches and certain famous life coaches, it’s still gauche to admit to wanting to make money—even if that is the socially ingrained metric of meaning for many of us. Instead, we transmute the tangible reward of money into the ethereal reward of work, reverse-engineering our labor to no longer be about monetary compensation but instead to reflect a cultivated love of action. How many boxes have we checked? Words written? Instagram followers gained? Cold leads called? We are doing things in order to make meaning, but somehow there is never enough done, and an ever-increasing demand for ways to do even more. 

(I can hear many of you balking at the idea that you only work to make money, but think about what you’d be doing differently if you weren’t getting paid, or if you didn’t need to be. Unless you’re bootstrapping your own company, whether you are doing a “good” or a “bad” job is determined by the person or people who financially benefit from your labor—in some important ways, the religion of productivity is feudal. Entrepreneurs, you are not exempt: your customers are your overlords.)

The need to accomplish feels almost cult-like, an unquestioned status quo where those who do are somehow separate from those who don’t, and those who appear to derive sincere pleasure from the ritual of doing are a breed unto themselves, regarded with skepticism from across the company Slack. But we keep doing it, following this drive as if God Himself had proclaimed it, even though the returns are murky and any innate passion for creation is often buried under the weight of yet another Zoom meeting required for our professional advancement. 

Why We Feel Gross Trying To Do A Good Job

Modern mystic and poet Christian Wiman conveys this unease in his book My Bright Abyss:

“All ambition has the reek of disease about it, the relentless smell of the self—except for that terrible, blissful feeling at the heart of creation itself, when all thought of your name is obliterated and all you want is the poem, to be the means wherein something of reality, perhaps even something of eternity, realizes itself.”

While Wiman is searching for the Christian God in this eternity, the experience of ambition as both diseased and an ever-present social requirement is what we attempt to mitigate through our productivity structures, as if creating a delineated container for our desires will limit the “smell of the self” to an acceptable whiff, and perhaps also hide that seemingly shameful need for the deeper, true calling toward the realization of reality that proceeds from our very human creativity. Even without God, we still dream of the breath of eternity on our skin, and do actually want to find some deeper meaning for life. And without God, the act of making something new or feeling accomplished becomes the way through which we validate and affirm our existence: I make, therefore I am.