Perspectives: Confessions of a productivity skeptic
An enemies-to-lovers story
This issue of Perspectives is a guest post from author of . Katie and I have known each other for several years, and — as a systems-minded person myself — I love this essay about tools that make Katie’s life easier. You can also follow Katie on LinkedIn.
As things so often do, it started in therapy. I was airing some distress about the tornado of tasks spiraling in my head when my therapist asked, very reasonably: “Have you thought about making a checklist?”
My immediate response: “Ew, no.”
You see, I am not a “checklist person.” I’m not the kind of person who has systems and then systems for those systems, who sees the planner sale at Barnes & Noble and thinks “jackpot.” The kind of person who geeks out over their productivity stack.
I resisted productivity tools for the same reason I cringed any time I saw the words “template” or “framework.” They reminded me a little too much of performative productivity culture—of thought leaders posting on LinkedIn about how they just love to nerd out over their Gantt charts. I didn’t want to be one of those people—I felt bad for those people. I’d gained class consciousness as a worker, you see. I wouldn’t be caught dead posting about how happy I was to be wielding the tools of my oppressors.
In the romcom of my life, productivity tools were the good-looking football player who also got good grades, and I was the angsty chaotic goth girl who had discovered Karl Marx. They represented everything I wasn’t: disciplined, efficient, predictable. And yet, no matter how hard I tried to avoid them, somehow we kept getting paired up as lab partners.
Then, my mental health started disappearing before my eyes. And let’s just say I started to see productivity a little differently.
The meet cute: Diary of an ex over-achiever
I haven’t always felt this way about productivity tools. In high school, I swore by my school-issued planner. In undergrad, I maintained my whiteboard of assignments and deadlines with the devotion of a Swiftie awaiting the release of RepTV. I was a classic overscheduled, over-competitive “gifted” kid. I lived for a good checklist. I loved to-dos and deadlines.
But then came my twenties, and a lot of stuff happened that destabilized my relationship with productivity tools and the concept of productivity more broadly.
First, I spent a few years at an agency where we were desperately laying processes just a few steps ahead of the freight train of demand about to bear down on us. Productivity tools became associated with trauma and imminent doom, this feeling that the whole rickety construct we had assembled could come collapsing down on us at any moment. Then I spent another year at a different agency, where I had a rather fraught introduction to the concept of the billable hour. Productivity tools became The Man, constantly surveilling and assessing my value to The Firm.
And so on and so forth through multiple jobs: I worked in contexts where tools didn’t work; where they did work, but they told on you; and where they would work, if it weren’t for the fact that it was a full-time job just to maintain them. I started to feel a particular way about productivity tools, and that way was that I did not like them. In fact, I felt… kind of betrayed by them. Productivity tools really started to feel like a bad boyfriend: hypercontrolling, paranoid, and jealous of my autonomy.
The breakup: It’s not me, it’s you
So, I broke up with productivity tools. I told them I needed space. No more Gantt charts. No more inbox zero. And for a while, that felt liberating. It felt like I was taking a more conscious, intentional stance toward life than all the capitalist robots. I wasn’t going to let some apps define my value as a human being.
But over time, and for a number of interrelated reasons, that sense of liberation started to unravel—as did my sense of well-being more broadly.
The reality was that, while I had rejected productivity tools, the tasks themselves hadn’t gone anywhere. They still piled up—emails, deadlines, meetings, personal errands. Instead of being written down or managed by a system, they lived in my head, jostling for space and attention and energy. Psychologists have a name for this—they call it “mental load.” And I was carrying mine around all by myself.
The fallout: The self-defeating, self-perpetuating cycle of doom
I’m not saying the lack of productivity tools in my life literally broke my mental health. That was its own journey. But the two things—my productivity tool usage and my mental health—do track each other pretty closely.
You see, there’s a pattern in my life that goes like this:
I build up a mental load from having all these deadlines and priorities jostling around just in my head.
Over time, that load gets incredibly heavy. Things start falling through cracks. Deadlines get missed, emails go unreturned. I start feeling like utter and complete garbage
Depression! I feel worthless. My inability to hit deadlines and deliver quality work confirms all my worst assumptions about myself as a human.
It’s a cycle! A vicious, self-perpetuating cycle. Return to step 1, rinse, repeat.
This is the sad montage scene of the movie: me, letting sad mail pile up in my mailboxes, digital and analog; me, letting sad dishes pile up in my sink; me, letting guilt and misery pile up on me. And all because I was stuck on this idea that productivity tools weren’t for me.
Then, one day, after I spent an entire afternoon unraveling because I forgot to close the loop on an email, I realized: chaos wasn’t the romantic rebellion I’d imagined. There wasn’t anything noble or artistic about missed deadlines or chronic anxiety.
No, it’s not a solution to my whole entire “deal,” so to speak—there are about twenty other shame spirals happening in my head at any given moment. But here was a single, concrete mound to chip away at here on the side of Depression Mountain: What if I had judged productivity tools too harshly? What if, instead of seeing them as symbols of conformity and oppression, I learned to see them as tools of individual liberation?
The reunion: The power of second chances.
And so, I decided to do the mature thing: I decided to give productivity tools another shot. But this time, I decided I’d be in control. This wouldn’t be some toxic relationship where they called all the shots. This time, I would set boundaries. As much as productivity tools tell me what they need from me, I would turn around and tell them what I need from them.
That’s been the project of the past several months: welcoming productivity tools back into my life. No, I will not be creating Notion pages to review the status of my relationship any time soon; but I can see but I can see how giving certain areas of my life a bit more structure has made that mental load a little less heavy. I have the beginnings of my own little personal “productivity stack” and it looks like this:
For life:
Finch for tracking basic day-to-day activities like taking my meds and brushing my teeth. This might sound simple, but for someone like me, getting these small tasks out of my brain and into a cute, gamified app feels like a small victory every day.
Peloton for fitness and activity tracking. I’m not out here trying to hit PRs every week, but staying accountable for moving my body has been huge. Plus, if I can check off that 30-minute “Walk+Run”, I get a tiny rush of satisfaction that feels way better than doomscrolling.
Sunnyside for tracking alcohol consumption. It’s not just about cutting back but about building awareness. It’s helped me keep that temptation at a manageable level—without feeling like I’m depriving myself.
Empower for financial tracking, because I’ve realized financial health is a critical part of my mental health. Checking my balance used to be anxiety-inducing, but now it’s like having “financial proprioception”—I always know where I stand relative to my money.
For work, there’s:
Asana for project management. I’m still wrapping my head around the fact that I willingly re-entered a relationship with a task management app, but Asana feels like an ally rather than a dictator. It helps me manage deadlines without the looming sense of dread I used to feel.
ChatGPT for…a little bit of everything, honestly. I use it as part career coach, part editor, part administrative assistant. It’s great at helping me to step outside myself and observe my own thought processes and move past cognitive blocks.
And for everything:
Google Calendar. I used to look at my calendar like it was the enemy, but now I’ve learned the key is to embrace the blank spaces. Turns out, a little white space is just as important as the color-coded blocks. (This shoutout also goes to Reclaim.ai, which kept those downtimes after calls sacred and helped me avoid the dreaded double-book.)
Relationship status: It’s complicated
So here we are, the final act of our love story. Me and productivity tools—who would’ve thought those two crazy kids would wind up together?
Of course, my relationship with productivity tools isn’t perfect. There are still days when I miss deadlines or can’t get it together to take a shower. And I want to emphasize that all of this is happening against a backdrop of mental health care provided by experts—a privilege not everyone is fortunate enough to have access to.
But the truth is, I need productivity tools. Not in the clingy, can’t-live-without-them kind of way, but in the “they make my life better” way. I used to think I was winning some kind of prize by not using them, but there’s no Pulitzer for panic attacks. Using tools to track the mundane doesn’t make me less capable; it makes me a person who gets things done.
I’ll probably never have a flawless relationship with productivity tools—there will always be missed deadlines, chaotic days, and times when my kitchen sink is far from empty. But now, I see them for what they are: tools. Not oppressive systems, but resources that I can shape and control. It may be a bit much to say productivity tools “gave me my life back,” but they’ve certainly helped me take back a piece of my mind—and for that, I’m grateful.
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