Beehiiv is the new place where I’ll be sharing a selection of posts from “But anyway, I digress…” which is my regular blog over on my personal website — to see all my posts in full, and for more information about my writing, head over to philipholyman.com
16th September 2025
[Note, added in February 2026 — by now, I’ve completed the writing retreats I talk about in this original post, and learned a thing or two in the process. Much of what I wrote about here did, in fact, find its way into the session content.]
I’ve been commissioned to facilitate a writing retreat at a university later in the year for a group of Alt-Acs — yes, that was an entirely new term to me as well. We’re talking about Alternative Academics — namely, people who have actively chosen not to follow traditional academic careers and who continue researching despite not being contractually obliged to do so.
One of the key challenges I think I need to address for the participants is how they might carve out the time and hold onto the motivation for writing in the face of everything else in their lives that conspires to stop them — simply put, how to be writers who write.
[Note — the slide where I outlined my main overarching purpose for the session read as follows: TODAY IS ALL ABOUT SUPPORTING AND EMPOWERING YOU TO BE WRITERS WHO WRITE, TOO. (On the basis that I am a writer who writes, and the presumption that they want to be, as well.)]
It’s put me in mind of a seemingly quite woo-woo self-help quote I screenshotted a few months ago, which struck a chord with me then and still does now:
What would it look like to end the year feeling proud, and not just productive?
I despise the language and culture of productivity, which is merely a codified way of referring to the process by which someone else imposes their priorities on you, meaning you’re left so busy/broken/beleaguered that you have no energy or enthusiasm left to prioritise your own priorities anymore. (If that sounds in any way reminiscent of your own current working environment, or a working environment you’ve known at some point in your life, you’re not on your own.)
[Note — I absolutely stand by this. Mistrust anyone who uses the word “productivity” casually or repeatedly, or worse, who gets a strange glow in their eyes when they say it. Such people will never, NEVER have your best interests at heart.]
It’s what drives people to work longer hours; to work through lunch breaks at their desks, if they eat lunch at all; to never claim TOIL (usually because there’s been some kind of missive circulated to discourage people from doing so.) It’s why people check work emails at home and why they’re reachable 24/7 by unboundaried colleagues who have no concept at all of why someone else would NOT want to be reachable 24/7. I would go so far as to say that productivity is the enemy of wellbeing. So many employers profess to value wellbeing — until it comes into conflict with the productivity which they value even more.
Oliver Burkeman wrote about the dreaded P word in a post on his blog The Imperfectionist:
“Apparently I struck a chord on Twitter the other day when I observed that many people (by which I meant me) seem to feel as if they start off each morning in a kind of “productivity debt”, which they must struggle to pay off through the day, in hopes of reaching a zero balance by the time evening comes.
Few things feel more basic to my experience of adulthood than this vague sense that I’m falling behind, and need to claw my way back up to some minimum standard of output. It’s as if I need to justify my existence, by staying “on top of things”, in order to stave off some ill-defined catastrophe that might otherwise come crashing down upon my head.”
I don’t think anyone should aspire to be proud of themselves for being productive; I think they should just aspire to be proud of themselves, and one of the surest ways to do that would be to abandon any aspiration to be productive. I’m not at all in favour of “WORK SMARTER, NOT HARDER”. I’m in favour of just doing less, and doing it in a way that is fulfilling. (A good reinforcing technique around this also came to me via Oliver Burkeman — the notion of knowing when you’re done for the day.)
So I’m going to end by reformulating that woo-woo quote into something I can totally get onboard with:
What would it look like to end the year feeling proud, and not just productive?
[Note — telling people that I’m not in favour of “WORK SMARTER, NOT HARDER”, but that I am in favour of just doing less, always seems to provoke laughter. I have a few theories as to why that might be. I sometimes wonder if they think I’m saying it for effect, to be contentious and provocative, but not intending to be taken seriously. Trust me, I take it very seriously.
Possibly there’s a bit of “It’s all very well and good for you to say that, Phil, but I couldn’t possibly do that in my situation,” a sense that I haven’t understood them and their context well enough, and so I’m dispensing hokey bullshit advice.
I prefer to think that the laughter is a reflex of pained recognition, of awareness that I’m dead right and speaking an absolute truth, followed a split second later by the panic that comes with them imagining what it would mean to try putting “JUST DO LESS” into practice.]