Why Does Everything We Do Have to Be Productive?

We Aren’t Getting Anywhere.......

Why does everything we do have to be productive?

We track our steps. Set reading goals. Fill our travel itineraries. Turn hobbies into side hustles. Even relaxation can become something we're supposed to optimize.

But what if enjoyment is enough?

In this episode of Notes from the Window Seat, I start with a simple walk with my dog Lucy—one that sometimes doesn't even make it out of the front yard—and I explore our tendency to measure experiences by what they accomplish.

From giving yourself permission to spend an afternoon lost in a novel to stumbling into an unplanned local festival in the Azores, this episode is about leaving room for things that don't have an outcome, a purpose, or a place on the agenda.

Because a life filled with productive days isn't necessarily the same thing as a life filled with good days.

In this episode:

• Why Lucy and Marty have very different definitions of a successful walk
• When hobbies become another form of work
• Giving yourself permission to enjoy something without guilt
• Why a good travel itinerary needs some empty space
• The difference between wasting your life and wasting a little time
• A different question to ask at the end of the day

Not everything worthwhile has to get you somewhere.

Sometimes doing something simply because you enjoy it...is enough.

Learn more about the window seat here: Notes From The Window Seat

Follow us on Instagram @windowseat2a

Transcript

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Why does everything we do have to be productive? Have you ever taken a dog for a walk and found yourself saying, come on, let's go, we need to keep moving. Maybe your dog has stopped at the same bush for what feels like five minutes, or they've suddenly decided that one particular patch of grass deserves their complete and undivided attention. And you're standing there holding the leash, thinking, why aren't we getting anywhere? I wonder why that bothers us so much. Why does the walk need us to get somewhere? Why does it need to cover a certain distance? Why does it need to accomplish anything at all? We spend years teaching our dogs to sit and stay. And maybe they've spent their lives trying to teach us something much harder. Not every minute needs to be productive. Welcome back to the podcast. Today I want to talk about our need to make almost everything we do count. When I take my dog Lucy for a walk, I usually have some idea of what the walk is supposed to look like. We're gonna go around the block, or we're gonna walk for 20 minutes, or we're going to a particular spot and then coming back. There's a plan. But I apparently forgot to believe Lucy on the plan. And even if I had, I'm not sure she'd care. In fact, sometimes Lucy doesn't even make it out of our front yard. We'll head outside the front door to go for a walk. And apparently she has a few things she needs to take care of first. She heads over to the pond. I'm not entirely sure what she's doing there. Maybe she's talking to the fish. Maybe she just likes the sound of the fountain. Whatever it is, she needs a minute. Then she'll wander over and check out the orchids. The next she'll stop and smell a few flowers. And yes, I realize how cliche that sounds, that my dog literally stops to smell the flowers, but she does. Then she makes her way through the ferns to see what's hiding there. Usually it's one of the neighborhood stray cats. There's a stare down, Lucy looks at the cat, the cat looks at Lucy. Apparently whatever information needed to be exchanged has now been exchanged, and Lucy moves on. The entire inspection of the front yard might take five minutes, or it might take twenty. It just depends. Meanwhile, I'm standing there with a leash, thinking we haven't even left the yard. But Lucy, she's checked on the fish, she's smelled the flowers, she's investigated the ferns, she's caught up with a neighborhood cat. She's had a pretty full morning. We hadn't gone very far, and I'm thinking it wasn't much of a walk, but I'm not sure Lucy would agree. And that got me thinking, how often do we judge an experience by what we accomplish instead of whether we actually enjoyed it? Maybe Lucy and I simply have two very different ways of measuring a good walk. We measure almost everything steps, miles, calories, the hours we work, the books we read, the countries we visited, the number of followers we have, the number of downloads of the podcast, sales numbers, and we even measure our sleep. Even relaxation has become something we're apparently supposed to optimize. And I'm not saying measurement is bad. Some things absolutely need goals. Businesses need numbers. Training for something requires progress. Goals help us accomplish things we might never accomplish otherwise. But I wonder if we have allowed that mindset to creep into places where it doesn't belong. Because suddenly we're not simply taking a walk. We're getting in our steps. We're not reading a book. We're completing a reading goal. We're not traveling somewhere. We're checking another country off the list. We're not taking photographs because we enjoy photography. We're creating content. And we're not just sitting quietly drinking a cup of coffee. We're practicing mindfulness. Apparently, even doing nothing needs a purpose now. But I wonder, does it really? What if enjoying something is enough of a reason to do it? That's almost uncomfortable to say. Because we're so accustomed to asking, what did I accomplish? What did I learn? What did I produce? Was this worth my time? And what if the answer is simply I enjoyed it? I went for a walk. I didn't go very far. I sat outside with a cup of coffee longer than I intended. I read something that didn't teach me anything useful. That photograph I took, I'll probably never even show anyone. Or I spent twenty minutes throwing a ball for the dog. Nothing came from it, except I enjoyed those twenty minutes. Why have we decided that's not enough? Now I love to read, but most of the time I'm reading something because I want to learn something. A business book, a self-help book, something that's going to teach me something, help me think differently, or give me an idea I can use in business. Even reading apparently needs to be productive. But every once in a while I give myself permission to read something for absolutely no useful reason at all. A novel. Just a really good fictional story. And when I do, I don't squeeze in 20 minutes between other things. I make an afternoon of it, sometimes most of a day. I find a comfortable place to sit. I have some kind of comfort food or snack nearby, and I read. That's it. I'm just read. I'm not trying to improve myself. I'm not highlighting passages. I'm not thinking about how I can use what I'm reading later. I'm just reading. There's nothing to fix, nothing I need to accomplish, no place else I need to be. For a few hours I simply disappear into someone else's story. And here's the part that I think that matters. I let myself enjoy it without feeling guilty about what else I could be doing. And that's not always easy. Because there's almost always something else I could be doing. There's always another email, another project, something to do around the house, something I should be working on. But for that afternoon, none of it gets to turn my reading into something I have to earn. I read because I love to read. And that's enough. And when I'm finished, I have absolutely nothing to show for those hours except that I had a really enjoyable afternoon. Maybe that's not wasted time. Maybe that's exactly what time is occasionally supposed to be for. We've become very good at turning joy into work. I think we're particularly good at doing this with hobbies. You start taking photographs because you love photography. Then someone says, you should sell these. You bake amazing bread. You should start a business. You love decorating your house. Maybe you should become an interior decorator. Or you write because you enjoy writing, and someone says, you should write a book. You love to travel. Someone says, why don't you start a travel block? Somewhere along the way, we got the idea that if you're good at something, or even if we simply enjoy something, we should find a way to make it productive, to make money from it, to build an audience around it, to get better at it, or to achieve something with it. But what happens when the things that once gave us joy become another thing we're responsible for? Sometimes a hobby should just be a hobby. Sometimes something can belong to you without needing to become anything else. Photography is an interesting one for me because it's something I do professionally. And when something you love also becomes something you do for work, it can be easy to start thinking that every photograph needs a purpose. If I'm somewhere beautiful, there's a temptation to believe I should come home with something, a great image, something for the website, something for social media, something worth selling. But sometimes I take photographs simply because I enjoy taking photographs. Maybe they're technically imperfect. Maybe no one else will ever see them. And that's okay. I don't need to turn every photograph into something useful. I can simply enjoy making it. The experience doesn't become less valuable because I didn't produce something valuable from it. And I think that's an important distinction. An experience doesn't have to produce an outcome to have value. We do this when we travel too. We have three days. There are twelve things we want to see. There's a museum at ten, lunch at noon, a tour at two, dinner reservations at seven, and tomorrow we're going to do it all over again. And I've certainly had trips where there were things I wanted to see and places I didn't want to miss. And there's nothing wrong with that. Sometimes you have limited time somewhere and you absolutely want to make the most of it. But making the most of a trip doesn't necessarily mean filling every hour. Some of my favorite travel moments have happened when nothing was scheduled, when there was room to change directions, when something came up that we hadn't planned. And we simply thought, why not? A few months ago I was in the Azores with a friend. One day while we were walking around, we noticed people setting up for what looked like some kind of festival. There were tents going up, people getting things ready. So eventually we asked a couple of locals what was happening. They told us that there was going to be a festival later that evening. Live music, food trucks, dancing, different things. We thought, oh, that sounds like fun. And then we continued on with our day. It wasn't something we planned to do. It wasn't on our itinerary. We didn't really even give it much more thought. Until later that evening, we were trying to decide what we wanted to do for dinner. When I said to my friend, why don't we go check out that festival? So we did. And it turned into one of those wonderful travel evenings you couldn't have planned if you tried. We picked one of the food trucks, and the food ended up being some of the best we'd had during the entire trip. There was music, people were dancing, local families were everywhere, just enjoying the evening together, and instead of standing on the outside watching, we joined in. We talked to people, we made new friends, we became a part of the festivities for the evening. There was no famous landmark involved, nothing we needed to check off a list, nothing we had traveled all the way to the Azores to specifically see. It wasn't on the agenda, it wasn't in any guidebook. We simply happened to be there and decided to say yes. It became one of our favorite evenings of the trip. Sometimes we become so focused on making sure we don't miss the things we're exposed to experience when we travel that we leave very little room for the experiences we couldn't possibly have planned. Maybe a good itinerary doesn't need to account for every hour. Maybe some of the best parts of a trip begin with an empty space and the question, why not? I think underneath all of this is something bigger. We don't want to waste time. Especially as we get older, time feels more valuable. We know there isn't an unlimited amount of it, so of course we don't want to waste it. But maybe we've gotten the definition of wasted all wrong. Is sitting on the beach doing absolutely nothing for an hour? Wasted time? Is spending an afternoon with someone you love and accomplishing nothing? Wasted time? Is walking three blocks in thirty minutes because your dog stopped sixteen times wasted time? Maybe if the goal was productivity. But what if enjoying the time was the point? There is a difference between wasting our lives and occasionally allowing ourselves to waste a little time. Maybe the second one actually helps prevent the first. Because a life filled with productive days isn't necessarily the same as a life filled with good days. And maybe that's where we need to rethink what we're measuring. Now remember Lucy? Maybe Lucy and I do have two different ways of measuring a good walk. And I'm beginning to wonder if Lucy's measurement isn't the better one. Instead of how far did I walk? Maybe it's did I enjoy the walk? Instead of how many things did I see? Maybe did I enjoy being there. And instead of what did I accomplish today? Maybe every once in a while the better question is, was it a good day? And those aren't always the same thing. You can have an incredibly productive day that wasn't particularly enjoyable. And you can have a wonderful day where almost nothing gets crossed off your to-do list. And we need both. There are days to accomplish things, there are goals worth pursuing, there are places worth getting to. There are things in life that matter enough to work very hard for. But there also needs to be moments when getting somewhere isn't the point. Which brings me back again to Lucy. She's still in the front yard. I'm still standing here holding the leash, thinking we haven't even started our walk. Meanwhile, Lucy's checked on the fish, she's smelled the flowers, she's investigated the ferns, had a brief meeting with a neighborhood cat. And I'm beginning to think maybe I'm the one who's confused about what the walk is for. Lucy isn't remotely concerned that we haven't made it around the block. She doesn't care how many steps we've taken. There's something interesting right here. Why would she need to be somewhere else? Maybe that's the lesson. Not that we need to move through life more slowly all the time. Not that goals don't matter. Not that productivity is bad. Just not every moment needs an outcome. Some walks don't need a destination. Some photographs don't need an audience. Some hobbies don't need to become a business. Every day on a trip doesn't need an itinerary. And some afternoons don't need a purpose. And some moments don't need to become anything more than the moment they are. Before we go, here's today's thought. Not everything worthwhile has to get you somewhere. Sometimes the short walk is enough. Sometimes sitting enjoying coffee is enough. Sometimes the simple conversation is enough. Sometimes doing something simply because you enjoy it is enough. So this week I want to give you a challenge that's probably easier said than done. I want you to waste a little time. Do something that accomplishes absolutely nothing. Don't measure it, don't photograph it because you need to post it, don't turn it into content, don't worry about whether you're getting better at it. Don't ask what you're going to get from it. Just enjoy it. Read the book. Sit a little longer with your coffee. Take a walk. Leave an empty space in the afternoon and see what happens. And if you happen to be walking a dog who wants to spend five minutes investigating the same bush or checking on the fish or smelling the flowers, maybe don't be quite so quick to say, come on, we aren't getting anywhere. Because maybe, for once, that's exactly the point. Until next week.