Pajamas and Productivity

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between how things appear and how they truly are. To be more specific, I’ve been thinking about situations where the way things appear is the complete opposite of the reality. For example, in our neck of the woods, there is a lot of luxury spending. We’re not, like, in private jet territory, but it’s really not uncommon to see people driving cars that cost over a hundred thousand dollars. A lot of people own speedboats or small yachts. And there is an ongoing problem for my kids because they only have android phones and the majority of their friends have iPhones which don’t have compatible group chats.

Forrest and I have tried to pass down our values about money to our children, something that has not always been easy. So when our kids say, “Wow, they have such a fancy car! They must have a lot of money!”, one of our go-to lines is, “No, they had a lot of money. Now they have that car.” The idea that luxury purchases indicate spending, not wealth, is one of those things where appearance and reality are at odds.

The reason this is on my mind right now is because it is ten a.m. and I am still in my pajamas. The appearance is that I’m having a lazy morning, relaxing and resting. The reality is that I’ve been awake for four and a half hours and haven’t taken a moment to change, let alone wash my hair. If I had taken the time to get dressed, clean the kitchen of the breakfast mess, and generally organize my life, I can promise you, I would have used up all my motivation long before I got to the writing part of my day.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last year figuring out which tasks were essential and important, and which I could leave off my to-do list. There were a lot of things that I was once told were important that turned out not to matter. In fact, the only reason I was doing them was to escape judgment from other people who, for one reason or another, considered those jobs necessary.

I don’t need to go through all the nitty gritty details, but suffice it to say that my schedule is clearer than it’s been in a long time. I’ve probably become a nightmare neighbor, what with replacing my sedate flower beds with an abundantly intensive cottage garden. I’ve stopped responding to texts the moment they come in and my blog doesn’t get updated as often as maybe it should…

But I’ve written more in the last three months than I did in the year before that. I’ve spent countless hours on the phone or having coffee with those friends, really talking to them. And those unruly flower beds don’t need watering or weeding any more, since planting native plants means they thrive without any input from me.

So, while on the outside it looks like I’m withdrawing and stagnating, the reality is quite the opposite. I wonder how often that is true for the people I meet. Especially in our hustle culture, we judge people for their output. How much content did you produce? How much in sales did you bring in? How many lines of code did you write? But maybe that person’s productivity is down because they’re learning a new skill, or healing from an injury, or spending time nurturing a child.

But when we only reward appearance, we get what we pay for - less learning, less healing, less nurturing. So, I guess in the end, the real question is, which is more important to us?