a lotus blossom with wide-spread leaves
Photo by Erol Ahmed on Unsplash

How I slowed down my hyper productivity

Making mental health and work morals go hand-in-hand

Kaya Olsen
6 min readApr 7, 2022

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I’m a human production machine. Not by active choice. Or because of ambitions. I’m just highly disciplined, relentlessly focused and very conscientious. As a consequence, I’m super efficient and hyper productive. I simply can’t help it.

And that’s great isn’t it? Productivity is a strongly praised virtue these days (and might always have been). Isn’t life great when I manage to get everything done in no time and I’m always ahead of my to-do list?

Sure. My professional life is easy. But my private life suffers.

Because my hyper productivity isn’t something I can switch on and off as needed. It never stops. I don’t just do what I need to do fast and well. I also need to do something all the time. I feel a constant pressure to get shit done, no matter whether there is any shit to be doing. There is no peace, there is no rest. There is only doing, doing, doing.

And that’s problematic.

So when I switched jobs at the beginning of the year, I took the opportunity to work on myself, to fight off this problematic productivity pressure. Not to kill my drive and passion. But to find more ease and peace in my life. This is the story of what I did and how that helped me slow…

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