By, Chloë Lane
Wake up at 5am. Journal. Ice bath. Protein. Gym. Strava. Meditation. Work. Protein.
Productivity maxxing has taken over the world, particularly in business, as we desperately try to keep up with our AI counterparts.
For those unfamiliar with it, Productivity maxxing is the practice of ruthlessly optimising your daily routines and energy to achieve the highest possible performance, effectively squeezing productivity out of every waking hour – think time blocking, listening to a self-improvement podcast while exercising, etc.
But apparently it’s all too easy to let your focus slip, as everyone’s favourite productivity-maxxer, Steven Bartlett recently found out. “I had a couple of glasses of wine, didn’t get drunk. It ruined three days of my life because of the domino effect that it caused,” he says in a now-viral clip.
“It meant that I got worse sleep that night, I ate more poorly the next day because my dopamine system or the cortisol system or whatever was all messed up. Then I podcasted worse and I didn’t go to the gym the day after and I could track all of this on my Whoop.”
Unsurprisingly, this was met with mockery online, with several TikTok users pretending to be the offended friend Bartlett met at the pub for this week-ruining couple of drinks.
BBC 1 DJ, Greg James, had something more serious to say on the subject: “So I’ve sort of been railing against this for years. Not the alcohol thing, fair enough if you want to give up alcohol, it can ruin lives, got that – that’s not what my issue is. My issue is this endless optimisation and measuring of everything to the point where it starts to make you feel a bit miserable if you don’t quite hit your own targets.”
He goes on to add that it is possible to have ambitions, goals and succeed professionally while still having a great time. “Not everything has to be like work, you can be on and then you can be off. […] Optimisation is killing fun. We absolutely need to rail against that. So phones down today. Go and have a nice time! And don’t log it,” he adds.
Is online culture to blame?
As we increasingly spend our lives online, with wearables documenting and analysing our every movement, it’s becoming harder to switch off.
Young people are seemingly replacing the time they used to spend with people in person with time spent on their phones. A recent study found that young people are spending 1000 fewer hours in person with other people than young people of the same age were a decade ago.
Meanwhile the hashtag #productivity has over 20 billion views on TikTok, and a 2024 survey by Adobe found that 58% of Gen Z have bought products or adopted habits recommended by influencers focused on self-improvement, productivity or wellness.
Similarly, YouTube searches for “morning routine”; “how to be productive”; “study with me”, and “deep work” have surged since the pandemic and remain among the video platform’s most popular self-improvement categories.
As every new generation gets swept up in new social media trends, the older generations do too as they trickle down from TikTok to Instagram to Facebook to LinkedIn.
The productivity maxxing trend is particularly appealing to office workers, as, on average, they lose around 58 percent of their day to “work about work” ie. Emails, meetings, and status updates, according to research from work management platform Asana.
It’s hardly surprising then that productivity creators are resonating so strongly.
Pushing productivity while scaling back employee wellbeing
Dedicated and engaged employees find it harder to psychologically detach from work when they need to do so to rest, recharge and replenish, explains Winnie Jiang, Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD.
“The difficulty they experience may find its origins in the “ideal worker culture” that has been dominating the modern workplace – a culture that expects and encourages employees to prioritise work above everything else in life and make themselves available for their work anytime, anywhere,” she says.
The feeling of being unable to switch off from work may also stem from the individual’s perception of work as the most important part of their identity: or an essential source of their self-worth, she adds, “almost as if they have no value as a human being if they stop working”.
In another recent study, Nthabeleng Mdhluli, a senior lecturer at the University of South Africa, explores how this constant digital connectivity erodes work-life boundaries and increases stress and burnout, despite being framed as productivity-enhancing.
The study argues that platforms like Slack, Teams and Zoom no longer function just as communication tools. Instead, they create a culture where workers feel they must constantly prove they are available and responsive. The tools, they say, became “instruments of continuous accountability” where employees increasingly associate quick responses with professional credibility and after-hours replies become an unspoken expectation.
This, ironically, is the opposite of what this technology was supposed to do, the study goes on to say, which was give workers autonomy, allow remote work and create better work-life balance. The reality is that this ‘flexibility’ often removes home/life boundaries entirely.
However, as employees strive to optimise their workload, companies are scaling back their wellbeing initiatives. A report from employee wellness company Wellable shows that 33 percent of companies are investing less in wellbeing initiatives, up from 25 percent last year.
Among those reducing their budgets are Google and Meta, once celebrated for perks such as free yoga classes, on-site meditation rooms and subsidised gym memberships.
The key question is: do these perks actually make a difference to employee wellbeing? Interestingly, Mdhluli’s study finds that wellness schemes rarely solve the underlying issue, and that deeper systematic reforms are needed instead.
Yet some of the wackier perks that these kinds of companies used to offer, such as nap pods, are proven to have productivity benefits, finds new research from Corvinus University of Budapest.
To boost wellbeing and productivity, managers should promote a workplace napping policy and culture that reduces harmful effects of sleep deprivation amongst employees, say researchers based on the review of workplace napping literature.
Taking a step back
Mdhlui’s research suggests different techniques for balancing productivity and well-being, such as time-sensitive communication protocols, open workload indicators and regulations enforcing the right to disengage.
But ultimately, just as the influencers promote it, it’s up to corporate role models – those at the top of the corporate ladder – to be the ones to make the first move.
“Leadership behaviours act as signicant indicators of the priorities within an organisation,” he says. “Research indicates that managers who exemplify respect for boundaries such as refraining from sending late-night emails and openly endorsing the importance of downtime can decrease team burnout rates by 30 percent”.
Dismantling this “always on” culture needs to be enforced and encouraged from those in leadership positions, as these organisations tend to have high power distance, with the strongest concentration of power at the top, writes Jiang’s colleague at INSEAD, Andy Yap, who is a Professor of Organisational Behaviour.
“It is also important to implement a new culture and specify what it entails, why it is better and how it’s going to impact employees’ day-to-day lives,” he adds. “In essence, you can’t just eradicate an old culture without replacing it with a new one. Leaders need to clearly explain the purpose of the new culture, and lead by example.”
It’s a message that can be applied to social media too. Only time will tell whether a new trend will soon replace the productivity era, and whether influencers like Bartlett will lead from the top and start to preach the benefits of slowing down and taking a much-needed rest.
Perhaps, as Greg James suggests, this weekend, instead of looking at LinkedIn and checking our emails, we should all put down our phones and have some fun.
Chloë Lane
Chloë Lane is a writer at BlueSky Thinking, covering careers, academic research and business education. She is an NCTJ Gold Standard journalist and holds a B.A. in Economics from The University of Reading.
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