Monday is rarely fun; I think most people will agree with me on that. What is much less fun, however, is being bumped by a motorbike on your way to campus, on a Monday morning. After the bruises and sighs (that you would wind up having after an epic acrobatic roll on the rough texture of the road), and after forgiving the careless rider (not before cursing him repeatedly per common courtesy), comes a moment for me to reflect on that accident.
I get hit by bikes quite often. If surviving such bump were a legit party trick, I would have been a cool kid with thousand Instagram followers by now. Nevertheless, it is hard for me not to ask why. Yes, why? Why the firetruck does everybody seem to be on a rush, even when they are sitting on a marvelous two-tired piece of engineering that allows them to go faster than, say, a poor, quirky looking, half-sleepy pedestrian. The answer seems to lie behind the rush factor, which is the one thing shaping the hasty-frenzy that seems to be the trend these days.
When I say rush factor, I actually speak of this popular opinion that productivity is defined by how many activities we can cram within our 24-hour schedule. Obviously, since the aforementioned 24-hour day does not really comes in 24 hours (with the sleep, time spent on the road when the damn red light happens to show 115 countdown and whatnot), it seems to act more than just a light incentive for us to ignore the brake for whatever it is we are doing.
Of course, positioning myself as a small collateral-damage of the haste-parade will not make a compelling persuasion for slowing-down (fun-fact: you need to die on the street to make a case). But as propagated by our politicians, if you cannot convince people, just confuse the crap out of them. So let me start with the question: how exactly does productivity correlate with the number of activities done in a day? After all, it is this very assumption that fuels our reluctance to step on brakes. If that seems like a silly question, take a while to consider the two aspects of productivity: quantity and quality. The thing about getting more done within a day is to be concerned more with quantity than quality. And while theoretically that may reside in a gray area, realistically it causes us more harm than good.
Despite the assistance from the modern artifacts like computer, there are only so many activities a person can manage. In fact, when we get to the threshold of the amount of tasks we are capable of doing (or multitasking, if that is your thing you masochist), we pay less attention to the quality of our work. A good example to this is if you were to have me as your dishwasher: if you ask me to wash it cleaner, you may need to wait past the dinnertime before everyone gets their plate. If you ask me to wash it quicker, you would be able to start the dinner on clock, though not without the residual fermented breadcrumbs from last meal on your plate.
Instead of chasing numbers, we should update our understanding that maximizing productivity better translates to wisely determining the optimal point between quality and quantity of work being done. This prevents us of from getting caught in a rush that we have little control of (and from rolling over that poor pedestrian, obviously). This would allow us more control over our work, our surrounding, and ultimately our time management. Who knows, those pesky Mondays may become a little bit more friendly if we just know how to jot the brake every once in a while.
JC
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