Self Help: Addict or Recreational User?
As we’re all aware, I’m quite into productivity. I jumped on the bandwagon about a year ago when I was overrun with work and needed a way to deal with it all. Someone pointed me towards Dave Seah’s PCEO and through that I discovered GTD and the massive online productivity community that surrounds it.
Lately I’ve been looking into the more spiritual side of so-called “self-help”, reading about increasing energy, meditating and practicing Boabom . I’ve also developed an interest in psychology.
It seems to a lot of my friends that I spend a disproportionate amount of my time reading about and practicing the various life hacks I come across, especially when they see that my desk is still covered in clutter and I still fall behind with my work. I think that some of them would be quick to label me as one of Steve Pavlina’s Self Help Junkies . I’m not so sure.
Steve’s article talks about the all-too-common phenomenon where someone will spend months studying the Art of Productivity, and yet have nothing to show for it except some fancy office supplies and a whole bunch of lists. It is easy to get so wrapped up in the process of being productive that you lose sight of the reason you’re applying all these life hacks – to get more useful stuff done.
Steve says that he’d:
“be wary of anyone who claims his/her self-help results are purely internal and have no outward manifestations. If those inner breakthroughs are genuine, they must eventually manifest changes in the physical world.”
Although I agree with this statement in that the benefits of self help, whether spiritual or organizational will eventually manifest themselves in the real world, I’m not so sure that the benefits will always be those expected.
I spend a lot of my spare time reading about life hacks & productivity and implement (to one degree or another) a number of the ideas I read. However, most of the time I make notes on the ideas I’m reading but never actually apply them (I’ve a file full of printouts and notes on “great new productivity tips” and I hardly touch it). Only about 5 per cent of the information I read gets stored or remembered, and probably less than 10 per cent of that is ever put into practice for more than a few days. It’s true that sometimes after two hours reading productivity blogs and a half hour trip to buy some stationary (a self-confessed addiction of mine) I’ll sit down and spend an hour doing “introspective exercises, making journal entries”, or making yet another list.
In my eyes, this is okay – I’m aware that while I am playing around with ways to make me more productive it is just that: playing. I don’t consider the hours I spend reading through productivity blogs to be useful work, but instead a form of recreation. When I read a self-help book it’s for enjoyment, much like reading a novel. So if one of my new shiny organizational systems fails, it doesn’t matter – it was a fun little exercise for me. That’s the main benefit – I had fun. Of course occasionally I come across something which really does change the way I work: my own implementation of GTD encompasses ideas from hundreds of blogs and books and has increased my output and calmed my brain down.
I’m sure that (weird as it may seem) there are many people who spend their time studying “self-help” not for the “emotional high” but simply because it’s fun.
Steve suggests that “This enormous time investment in self-help is nothing but mental masturbation”.
Too true – but what’s wrong with that?
Despite all this I feel I should acknowledge that Steve makes a good point in his article – if you’re spending your life “reading books and going to seminars” to no avail, and you don’t see it as a form of recreation then perhaps you should stop with the quick-fixes and create some measurable outcomes.