#3 When productivity becomes a burden

On keeping your life in order and why the pen is mightier than the keyboard.

Apr 16, 2021

I don’t ever remember using Trello, Todoist, Slack or RescueTime at work and feeling extra-productive.

I discovered Notion a couple of months ago and like many of its users, I fell in love with the idea of “thinking, writing, and planning in a single space.” It isn’t the first dedicated app that is looking to integrate knowledge bases, company wiki, tables and to-do lists under one umbrella. Evernote and OneNote do the same, more or less.

It didn’t take me long to realise I spend more time customising my Notion’s template and playing with fonts instead of *actually* being productive. Sometimes I encounter limitations on a certain product which results in me spending more time trying to find a solution. This has happened with all the productivity apps I’ve come to use so far. I seem to get distracted and overwhelmed.

There is an app for everything these days, and maybe that’s the problem. Procrastination is a dreaded word for which we feel guilty and ashamed. We’re so obsessed with doing things better, faster, in the most optimised way possible, we don’t realise the effects are counterproductive: we bury ourselves in more work, trying to make sense of the mess we’ve created.

I don’t reject technology. After all, I’m a “digital native.” Yet, on certain occasions, I learned to swap the keyboard for pen and paper.

I engage differently with information when I’m writing it down in a notebook. Perhaps that’s why journaling and morning pages have become so popular. I’ve also found that I retain information better. In uni, when almost everyone was using a laptop for taking notes, I was the one with highlighters and a divided notebook. Great ideas usually occur when I scribble or I jot down some quotes from a book.

Productivity means different things to different people. What is applicable to everyone is that your own mindset is in control of your time and this is much more powerful than any tool or software. As for the pen, Lord Byron knew this better: “A drop of ink may make a million think.”

How do you stay productive? What tools or techniques are you using? Do you prefer pen and paper or writing on the computer? Let me know by replying to this email or leaving a comment!

🥁 📚 The latest in the literary world

I am SO excited (read: VERY excited!) that The Jhalak Prize 2021 Shortlists have been announced. 🙌 The Jhalak Prizes are Britain’s premier literary awards for British and British-resident writers of colour. The choices seem to be one of a kind and the covers, oh the covers, are sublime! (ps. if you feel like rewarding me for the many research hours I put in this newsletter, forget coffee, buy me a book!)
Sally Rooney fans, buckle up: we’re one step closer to the release of her third novel, “Beautiful World, Where Are You.” 🎉 In the meantime, the cover has been unveiled. 👀 I let you be the judge of that. For those who haven’t heard of Sally Rooney, she’s the amazing writer behind “Normal People”, whose onscreen version was nominated for four Emmys and two Golden Globes. You can watch the 12-part series on BBC iPlayer, Amazon Prime or Hulu. You’re welcome 😉
Unpopular opinion: I’ve never been a huge fan of Harry Potter. (😱) I’ve read the books, I’ve watched the films, but that’s about it. However, this new “Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets” edition from MinaLima makes me want to revisit the wizarding world. It features 150 illustrations and eight interactive elements. I have to admit, it looks quite glorious! ✨ Hold your horses, though. It’s out October, 26. 🧙‍♂️ 🪄
And since we’re talking about J.K. Rowling, she has a new children’s book, “The Christmas Pig,” coming out this October (so many releases this autumn!). It’s been described as a “page-turning adventure about one child’s love for his most treasured toy, and how far he will go to find it.” Please let me know if there are any flying pigs and I might read it. 🐷 🎄

🎧 📰 👀 My media diet this week

Another unpopular opinion: I don’t like Berlin. Yet, I miss Berlin terribly. I miss Berlin for its randomness and casualness, above anything else. A bit like this article on where to go when the fetish clubs are closed. 👯 Why read it? You might have heard of Berlin’s vibrant gay scene but it is more than fetish bars, gangbangs and drug-fuelled orgies. One could call it an exploration of sexual desires and sexual liberation. It comes with a cautionary tale: “If you think the scene in Berlin was crazy before corona, you have no idea how wild it will be after.” 🤭
Remember MP3 players? That’s how the 14-year-old me used to listen to Taylor Swift’s songs, after asking my father to illegally download them from Pirate Bay and other questionable torrent websites. Over the years, my music taste has changed (thank God!), yet when “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” dropped on Spotify last week … I’m not crying, you’re crying. The Telegraph’s Poppie Platt is more articulate than I could ever be: Taylor Swift's “Fearless” was more than music – it was a mirror in which girls could see themselves. Why read it? To understand how an album release can become a personal event and ultimately, a shared experience.
“You’ll die at sea / Your head rocked by the roaring waves / Your body swaying in the water / Like a perforated boat” - The tragic story of a migrant poet, Abdel Wahab Latinos, who chronicled his fears about crossing the Mediterranean Sea in search of a better life. A six-minute compelling video from The Middle East Eye.
Memes and meaning: why our online habits are more than just distractions, an excellent analysis from the New Statesman’s Emily Bootle. Why read it? You’ll learn about the origin of memes, how memes have become “an atom of internet culture,” their “temporal quality” and whether it is possible to have reached a kind of online postmodernism - “memes for memes’ sake”.

📌 Random news in brief

Last week, I warned you against publicly displaying yourself twerking (you may risk losing your crown like Miss Papua New Guinea). Turns out The Royal Australian Navy has no problem with this when choosing “hot pants twerkers” to perform at the unveiling of a $2billion ship. It now has a name, too: Twerkgate. 😉 💁‍♀️
A vegan animal management student claims she was not given alternatives from tutors after refusing to take part in a farming module, which would have included a trip to a slaughterhouse. For what it’s worth, the pic with the 18-year-old lovingly holding a chicken is cute. 🤷‍♀️ 🐓
Do you like cheese? Congratulations, you’re racist. 👏 An Extinction Rebellion campaigner told a council that serving dairy at schools is “racist” because “65 per cent of the world’s population are lactose intolerant, many from the BAME community.”🧀 🐄
This goes hand in hand with the BBC Diversity Chef saying Idris Elba’s Luther “isn’t black enough to be real”. 🤯

Before we say goodbye… 🥺

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