Your urgent isn’t my urgent. Or hers. Or his.

Your urgent isn’t my urgent. Or hers. Or his.

Four years ago, the pandemic created a productivity hustle. And it's not gone away.

Back then, people were writing books and papers, composing music, learning how to cook again, running home schools, pulling overtime and rethinking whole industries, all while finding an until-now unknown urge to go running every day.

Some believed that this reaction by so many people was a realisation that there may not be an occasion like this any time soon, a period of a few months where everyone hits the ‘Pause’ button at the same time, giving those of us lucky enough to be in a system where our salaries are more or less paid, and debts put on pause, too. And so they filled every minute of it with all the things they wished they’d made time for in ‘normal’ times.

Today, in 2024, the productive hustle hasn't diminished, and worse, it has shifted away from personal growth. The hustle has started to fill planning cycles of schools, pacey projects to 'reinvent learning spaces' (by throwing some new desks and chairs at people), and curriculum reviews that skim the surface of thinking and reorganise the disciplinary deckchairs.

And in the public sector, the phrase "do more with less" has been dusted off once more.

It is exhausting. And it's all busy work that is going to come to little, if anything meaningful.

Pause. There’s a strong case for doing very little rather than jumping on the overhaul-and-change bandwagon.

Our heads and bodies need it. Not just for the occasional detox, or precious away-day 'white space' to do creative work. We need it every week. Maybe every day.

Think about the effect of your "productivity" on others. On a micro-level, think about when a young couple gets married, buy and decorate a house, have a child and work their way up the career ladder. There’s a reason we eventually grow up in our late thirties or forties - this way of life is unsustainable. On a macro-level, we mustn’t set up an unscalable degree of expectation on each other.

Your urgent is almost certainly not my urgent. Nor his. Nor hers. So think twice before you proclaim the next revolution.

Take a break, and give the rest of us one, too.