I’ve been thinking on and off—when I’m not death-spiraling about my exams and research and academic prospects and—about a warning on how goal-setting can backfire. In The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, Oliver Burkeman (2012) uses the behavior of pigeons in B. F. Skinner’s experiments to warn us about what high we’re chasing with our goals, something the productivity/hustle cult luuurves.
The pigeons, having met their immediate goal in obtaining food, indulged in a pause in their satisfaction. Burkeman connects this with an example of how, when taxi drivers meet their revenue goals early on rainy days, they clock off – despite that they could continue to make more money in a relatively shorter period of time than on non-rainy days if they just continued past their goal. They turn down the chance of far more efficient work to indulge in satisfaction.
In my reading of this, it’s like using a goal for “permission” to stop working, even if I might be in a productive groove. This evenly distributes the goal-meeting burden to other days or times when I might not be able to work as smoothly (or at all) for one reason or another, buying me tomorrow’s anxieties.
I think there needs to be a balance that takes your own procrastination tendencies and working limits into account. The setting—and celebration—of very small goals is very important to training the anxiety-riddled brain away from procrastination and towards the embrace of the prefrontal cortex. But when one celebrates writing a single sentence with a two-hour kenken break (I mean who does that it’s just an example ok), goal-setting drives a maladaptation for those doing this self-improvement work. The idea that we need to stop in a good place before the supply runs out, though, is equally important to being able to pick the work back up at a reasonable interval.
Finding that spot is a learning process, and the same can be said for everything else about our work rhythms. This is something those of us desperately sniffing at the productivity cult for answers on how to fix our problems need to put at the front and center of our dopamine-fiending brains: stop going all in on the way other people publicize their success.
But also stop printing kenkens at lunchtime.
MY BARBARIC MAUP 