Personal productivity has increased, but it comes at a cost of a lost sense of purpose.

Ever since I joined the corporate workforce, I have found myself obsessing over the p-word: productivity. How do I maximize my commute to squeeze in a chapter of that self-help book? How do I maximize sleeping behaviour to get 8 hours of rest in 5 hours? How do I maximize my time at work to be a top performer? The list goes on. As you have probably gathered, I’m an overachiever who suffers from chronic burnout. So, you can imagine the euphoria I felt when we were told to work from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I was over the moon at the prospect of cutting down 3 hours of commute time. Three extra hours. Every day! 

As an accountant (and planner), my societally ingrained P cells rushed me to create a list of all the ways I could maximize those three hours to live my best life possible. I could get some more sleep, exercise, make Michelin star quality meals (well, learn to cook first, then make the Michelin-star meals), become a concert pianist via YouTube tutorials… I had my days planned down to the hour; I couldn’t wait to make the most of this extra time.

This past year I’ve had more “flexibility” in my hours than ever. I’ve had more time on my hand, but I still find myself scrambling to even get through my pre-COVID routine. What’s happening? 

For starters, conversations that could have ended in under a minute at the office have now turned into meetings that take a couple of minutes just to set up based on everyone’s availability. Pre-COVID, my largest barrier to cooking at home was time. I blamed the suburban city model and uncapped rent prices for my long commute, which left me drained and in a deficit for precious time. Now that I have more time, I am still unable to find the energy to cook. Although contrary to my expectations, I was glad to know that it was not merely my irresponsibility leading to excessive waste of time, but rather an increasing blurring of the work-life balance barrier. One recent study by Raffaella Sadun, Jeffrey Polzer and others, conducted across 16 global cities with 3.1M people found that the length of the average workday increased by 48.5 minutes during a lockdown. I think this study forgot to account for the time it often takes us to get our technology to work since I find myself spending quite a bit of time trying to find my teammates on-line. 

Personally, these side-effects of working from home have me yearning for the workplace once again. I think I might just miss my daily commuting hours and those awkward conversations and in-person meetings (at least they served food!). However, I also find myself hesitant as I am not sure I can go back to working from the office for 5/6 days a week. After all, I have achieved more than usual to prove my efficiency to managers who aren’t able to supervise me in person. I am still burnt out but since working from home, I’ve gotten more done than I did the previous year. Thus, it's clear my work productivity has risen. 

 It seems I am not alone. According to this research by Microsoft on building resilience & maintaining innovation in a hybrid world, Dr. Michael Parke (Assistant Professor of Management at the Wharton School) writes that during the pandemic personal productivity has increased, but it comes at the cost of a lost sense of purpose. In the office, I’m surrounded by colleagues who are working like me, managers who guide me, and company-sponsored events that remind me of corporate values and company goals that are supposedly aligned with mine. However, without the symbiotic sense of purpose we gain from our colleagues, employees have started to reconsider their lifestyle and sense of personal purpose. I have had check-ins with myself on whether I am content with my current lifestyle and the choices I have made. Or whether my life’s goals align with the company that I work for. This has been a growing trend in the current workforce as more and more young adults ask themselves the same questions: Are we leading our optimal lives?

 A simple internet search on productivity and COVID yields many fascinating results. Channels such as Forbes, BBC, Harvard Business Review, and Microsoft have published a number of articles on productivity during COVID; how the pandemic is widening a corporate productivity gap; and tips and tricks on productivity trends that will ensure companies can continue to remain relevant and productive during COVID and navigate the tricky waters after the pandemic. One article went as far as to advise workplaces to reconstruct their corporate policies by listening to Gen Z, the future of the workforce, by paying attention to their demands for a healthy work-life balance. One such article goes on to say that if companies insist on the status quo pre-COVID normal, it will “lead to conflict between hiring companies and the talent pool”. 

 My personal experiences echo the findings of these recent studies and although I am on the youngest end of the millennial era, I can assure you that it is not only Gen Z who have expectations of a healthier work-life balance. After nearly a year of working from home, I can safely say that this is not all that it was chalked up to be. Consequently, I also know that pre-COVID life was also not the goal. While experts and academics are advising companies on how to maximize productivity while achieving creating healthy work-life balance in the post-COVID days, I think it also worthwhile for us, the employees, to also be a guiding voice in this movement. In order to avoid another pre-COVID life where I am productive but ignoring my sense of purpose, I feel a personal responsibility to ask myself this daunting question: what does a healthy, productive workplace look like to me? What does it look like for you?