What did you do last week?

On the OPM email, the toxicity of productivity discourse, and decoupling productivity from self-worth

Last Saturday, workers across the federal government received a brusque email from hr@opm.gov:

On X, wannabe shadow king Elon Musk tweeted (do we still say tweeted?) “failure to respond [to the email] will be taken as a resignation.” I am not an employee of the federal government, or an employee anywhere at the moment, but nevertheless felt panic shoot through me when I first saw a screenshot of the email on Instagram, as if my own productivity were under scrutiny too. Had it been a week where I accomplished a lot or a week where I accomplished little? Have I ever accomplished anything? My memories of the previous week were suddenly ungraspable, like a dream upon waking. But my anxiety was surely symptomatic of an engrained notion that to have done—or accomplished—nothing would be not merely a sign of indolence, but of sinfulness.

“Did you have a productive day?” is a question regularly asked in my family of origin. I know what my mother is really trying to ask is whether I feel good about my day, if I can put my feet up on the coffee table and watch TV after dinner, without work creeping into my evening. I know she cares more about how I feel more than what I accomplished, and yet the framing of the question suggests that the only aspect of my day worth discussing is whether I produced something, that whether or not the day was a “success” turns on whether I crossed a sufficient number of things off of my to-do list. The question never struck me as odd until I became a mother, when the notion of a “productive” day became laughable, when I found myself doing the absolute bare minimum necessary to survive in every realm of my life. There were too many realms! And yet, my productivity mindset was deeply entrenched, exacerbated by ten years of working in the law, where I was required to keep track of how I spent every six minute increment. I am only now slowly working to dismantle the belief system that shackled my sense of self-worth to my “productivity” for so many years.

It’s not that I’m unproductive. The irony is perhaps that, in motherhood, I experience spurts of uber productivity. These spurts make feel like Super Mario when he collects the Star in Mario Kart and can go extra fast. It’s that focusing on productivity as the measure of my value as a human is … pretty bizarre, if you stop to think about it. When I was still practicing law, I got all of my work done, but I did it efficiently—though the billable hour model creates a perverse incentive to be inefficient, where the firm generates more revenue the more hours you bill. I only had eight hours of childcare a day in which to do all of my work and any errand or task that required stepping foot in a business establishment between 9 and 5. And I felt SO BAD ABOUT MYSELF ALL THE TIME. I was billing fewer hours, despite accomplishing the same volume of work, and could barely keep up with the demands of feeding, clothing, and caring for a baby, let alone a dog and a house. As for writing, I was lucky if I had an hour or two a week to even think about writing. I was constantly self-flagellating for my lack of creative output; I carried around with me the weight of my failure to write, a weight that lifted only for the 24 hour period after publishing something on Substack. Only then did I allow myself to coast on the high of having been productive in a way that mattered to me.

Productivity mindset is a toxic trap! Spending time with a young child can be very challenging—grating, or painful even—if you measure your self-worth through productive output. Hours with a child are spent accomplishing nothing at all, at least in a tangible, measurable, remunerative sense. On the off-chance I am able to fold some laundry while my daughter busies herself with some toys, there is a good chance that she will begin throwing neatly folded clothes out of the laundry basket when I am not looking. This is perhaps a good metaphor for motherhood. When my daughter came along, she disrupted all of my neatly stacked academic accomplishments and hard-won professional experiences. They’re in a heap on the floor and I’m not sure when I’ll have the time or the will to re-fold them.

But she is also my best teacher. It is a gift to witness her relationship with time, which is to say, to witness her non-relationship with time. She will want to hear the same nursery rhyme 27 times in a row. She will want to climb up the stairs to our deck as many times as I will let her. Sometimes, it feels like she engages with a single toy or book for no longer than 18 seconds, and at the end of a half hour, the living room floor is strewn with rejected objects. She knows nothing of productivity. Her only job is to explore her environment and to learn. As a toddler, she is expected to take in, rather than put out. And this has been a really lovely reminder for me of a different way of being, one in which we allow ourselves to be mere vessels of experience rather than cogs in a capitalist machine of production. I still derive immense satisfaction from crossing things off my to-do list. (Writing this essay is one of them.) But my worth as a person—the worthiness of our lives—is not determined by how “productive” we are. I know we know this. But so many of us struggle to live by it.

In solidarity with our federal workforce, I wanted to compile a brief accounting of what I did last week. I struggled to draft five bulletpoints worth of “work,” even though I wrote a lot last week. Deep creative work takes a lot of time and writing a single 2000 word essay can take me an entire day, just as I could have spent an entire week during my years as a lawyer to governmental entities writing a single appellate brief. I doubt whatever AI tool is chewing up federal employees’ responses would deem me productive after such a week.

If I were scared for my job, I would tell Elon Musk that I drafted two 800 word columns on parenting for the local paper, and drafted and published a 2600 word essay on generative AI. I suppose I could identify the time that I spent revising and editing the columns as additional tasks. I could say that I conducted market research on comparative titles for my nonfiction book proposal (i.e., finally finishing Invisible Labor: The Untold Story of the Cesarean Section by Rachel Somerstein) and that I conducted research for an essay on visiting sites of white supremacy and my recent trip to Jamaica (reading In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space by Irvin Weathersby Jr.)

That would be an honest account of my week. I have no idea whether it would look sufficiently productive to whoever or whatever is applying an unknown metric. (In any event, writing about white supremacy would certainly be enough to get me fired.) But of course what is left out of these five bulletpoints is the actual story of my week—that Monday was a federal holiday, as it was for all of the federal workers who received the OPM email, and I didn’t have childcare. That I returned from a solo trip with my daughter, one that bonded us but that also sent her into a tailspin of separation anxiety. That my husband was fulfilled but depleted after a weekend hosting his best friends at our house. That our dog needed medical attention after cutting his paw over the weekend and I had to take him to the vet on Tuesday afternoon. That our daughter needed to go to the doctor twice this week—once for a well visit on Tuesday, and once for a sick visit on Friday after she came home with a terrifying heavy rattling breath on Thursday. That I slept on the couch outside her room Thursday night with the baby monitor pressed to my cheek. That I really didn’t want to send her to daycare on Friday, even though the doctor said her lungs sounded okay. That she experienced an explosion in language and focus this week—that she made a pancake out of play-doh and blew on it before pretending to take a bite, just as she does her real pancakes. That she outgrew all of her 12-18 month clothes overnight and that I’ve been trying to find new clothes for her before our trip to LA next week. That my parents arrived on Friday and my brother and sister-in-law arrived on Saturday and we had a full house all weekend.

I’m still chewing on last week’s conversation about ChatGPT and generative AI. If I were still practicing law full-time, my daughter still would have needed to go to the doctor and my dog still would have needed to go to the vet last week. I still would have had only three days of childcare. The tech optimists might point to the ways in which I could have used AI tools to enhance my productivity at work during a week when I had fewer hours to sit at my desk. Maybe I could have had AI help me research or edit. But the seemingly endless tech bro discourse around productivity hacks depresses me, because it means that the pressure to be productive is no longer limited by what I, a human, am physically capable of accomplishing as a human within a 24 hour period. The tech optimists say that if we use AI, we’ll have to spend less time working, more time to do what we please. But I don’t buy it. We’ll just be expected to be more productive. And I’m not interested.