The drone of productivity

Wel­come to 2009. Emer­gency exits are loc­ated here, here and there. For­get women and chil­dren first; it’s every soul for them­selves now. Dog eat dog, cat eat cat, stock­broker eat stock­broker, city trader stab city trader and roast the car­cass on an open spit.

So this is the bright light of the future that I was pre­par­ing for in 1984, dur­ing the dark days of the Cold War and the raging teen­age hor­mones that didn’t care a jot for immin­ent mutu­ally assured destruc­tion. And how exceed­ingly dull it is. I fondly ima­gined, thanks to a mis­spent youth listen­ing to The Smiths and Joy Divi­sion, that the light at the end of the tun­nel was a train. It wasn’t. Noth­ing nearly as excit­ing or final. It was merely a lone rail­way engin­eer car­ry­ing a flash­light and look­ing for the wrong sort of leaves on the line. Twenty-five years on from the start of all our tomor­rows, we still don’t have jet­packs or the abil­ity to tele­port instead of com­mute, and the last time I checked I didn’t have a per­sonal com­puter embed­ded in my eye­ball either. Disappointing.

Enough neg­at­iv­ity, how­ever. New year, new you. And by ‘you’, I obvi­ously mean ‘me’, because this is my self-centred plat­form on the web. If you want to be self-centred too, get your own blog.

I have recently been scour­ing the best and worst that the inter­net has to offer, search­ing for some guid­ance on mak­ing res­ol­u­tions that will lead me into the new year full of hope and refresh­ingly drained of bile. Frankly, I didn’t like what I found. Most of the perma-tanned, perma-grinned, perma-positive gurus out there seem to be ped­dling vari­ous inter­pret­a­tions of that insi­di­ous, creep­ing 21st cen­tury can­cer called Pro­ductiv­ity. How I loathe and des­pise and spit yel­low­ing phlegm on pro­ductiv­ity. I demand my inali­en­able right — as a free human being under God, Allah and The Other One — to stare at a wall for twelve hours on end, if I so choose.

Thus, I soon dis­missed the whole ridicu­lous notion of new year res­ol­u­tions, and have instead decided to stick by my ori­ginal and reas­sur­ingly failsafe plan to spend the forth­com­ing twelve months in much the same way as I spent the pre­vi­ous twelve — joy­ously plagued by the nox­ious cock­tail of a bad mood, an under­cur­rent of despic­able hatred, an ongo­ing state of filthy passive-aggression, and an atti­tude which bemoans everything that is wrong with the world at least four times an hour. Oh, and I may engage in some think­ing, too.

I’m good at think­ing, of that there can be no doubt. I don’t neg­lect my greatest tal­ent. No, I nur­ture it like a sickly child or for­cibly smother it with a pil­low like an espe­cially decrepit rel­at­ive. I adore think­ing — and though you may not real­ise it, think­ing is in fact what I’m doing when I’m star­ing at that afore­men­tioned wall for half a day or more. I am think­ing. Very hard. Very, very hard. Think, think, think: that’s all I do, from dawn until dusk. I aim to strike a pose that echoes the beauty and intens­ity of Rodin’s Le Pen­seur, yet I con­tinu­ally fall tra­gic­ally but hero­ic­ally short and merely end up resem­bling a sil­hou­et­ted Bruce For­syth circa 1976.

Recent months have seen me so ded­ic­ated to the oft-neglected art and arti­fice of deep thought that a new fur­row has formed across my mois­tur­ised, male groomed brow; my face has taken on a par­tic­u­larly agon­ised expres­sion, the likes of which I haven’t worn since my chin force­fully came into con­tact with the pro­trud­ing corner of a metal counter in an Indian res­taur­ant in darkest (as in dis­mal) Toot­ing, lead­ing to me spend­ing the rest of the even­ing piti­fully bleed­ing into a Chicken Jalfrezi. I believe I left a tooth in the Sag Aloo, too.

This is a lie. The think­ing, I mean. Not the Indian res­taur­ant escapade. That, dear read­ers, was merely a glimpse into the life and times of An Unre­li­able Wit­ness, about which — so my lurid, some­times eye-watering, some­times stomach-lurching search terms reg­u­larly inform me — you remain almost unhealth­ily fascinated.

So I have not been think­ing. I have been devoid of thought. In truth, I still am. Like any pre­ten­tious lover of words, I har­bour a vain and pre­ten­tious desire to attach the label of Writer’s Block to my hum­drum afflic­tion, were it not for the fact that (a) I could not look myself in the face without guf­faw­ing; (b) I am not a writer; and © what ails me is not so much a block­age, but more of a vacuum. Indeed, I am a vir­tual Hoover, just without the cru­cial suck­ing action. I am empty of brain. When my front door slams shut, I hear it echoed pre­cisely seventy-three times between left ear and right. Insects fre­quently use me as a vaguely scenic short­cut across the pil­lows at night.

I am doing noth­ing of use. Noth­ing. Out­wardly, of course, I am giv­ing the illu­sion of use­ful­ness, because that is the done thing in polite soci­ety. I exist, I breathe, I tap away, I com­mu­nic­ate. But I am just going through the motions from six forty-five in the morn­ing until approx­im­ately eleven o’clock at night. For the other seven and three-quarter hours, I am at least giv­ing my full atten­tion to the task in hand, though I am con­vinced that I stepped out of a par­tic­u­larly dan­ger­ous, white knuckle ride of a dream the other night because I was moment­ar­ily dis­trac­ted by another dream in which I was utterly com­pelled to watch a homemade video of dan­cing squir­rels on You­tube. Then I woke up. And it wasn’t a dream. It was the most excit­ing thing I had seen in years. There and then I vowed to give it all up and move to a deser­ted corner of Ari­zona, where I would become the cha­ris­matic leader of the Holy Church of the Dan­cing Squir­rel, pre­dict the almost cer­tain end of the world on the second Thursday in June in The Year Of Our Squir­rel 2012 (around teatime), and shortly after die in a hail of FBI bul­lets as I attemp­ted to leap from the roof of our cult com­pound dressed in a squir­rel out­fit. Then I woke up. Again.

In sum­mary — and even if you don’t need a sum­mary by now, I cer­tainly do — I am no longer a pro­duct­ive mem­ber of soci­ety. Or of the human race. Or of the inhu­man race. I need res­cuing from myself, from the cesspit of point­less­ness into which I find myself tum­bling, flail­ing around, swal­low­ing toxic efflu­ent mixed with tinned peaches, and wash­ing it all down with indus­trial quant­it­ies of black-hearted caffeine.

Thank heav­ens, then, for my latest dis­cov­ery. It’s Pro­duct­ive! Magazine. That’s Pro­duct­ive Exclam­a­tion Magazine! (The exclam­a­tion mark, I believe, is abso­lutely essen­tial. Sorry, I mean: essential!)

Pro­duct­ive! Magazine is going to help us all be more pro­duct­ive! I can feel its mys­tical ener­gies sur­ging through my veins already! There! Yes! Yes! Yes! I want to timetable my week­ends! I want to make sure that I don’t waste a single moment of my jour­ney to work! I want to shave mil­li­seconds off my web surf­ing! I want to use Face­book in a more rational and organ­ised way! I want to stream­line my vis­its to the bath­room! Empty­ing my bowels must become a more con­cise and com­pact pro­cess! I want to take less blinks per minute! Or I might miss some­thing! I have an insa­ti­able desire to learn how to eat toast more effi­ciently! And pro­duct­ively! I won’t just make lists; I will live, breathe and eat lists! A thun­der­ing orgasm will wrack my entire body whenever I place a tick against another task com­pleted in a timely and pro­duct­ive fash­ion! I will have so much free time that I won’t know what to do with it, and then I will have to get even more pro­duct­ive with every spare minute so that I don’t merely waste them all in a bout of leth­ar­gic and unpro­duct­ive beha­viour! God, I feel good! The pro­duct­ive will inherit the Earth! Who needs dan­cing squir­rels any­way, when there exists the insi­di­ous cult of Get­ting Things Done! I am a believer! Praise the GTD! Gimme a P! Gimme an R! Gimme an O! Gimme a D! Gimme a … I feel slightly ill. I have lurched from being merely high on pro­ductiv­ity to being entirely drug-addled and shit­faced thanks to its addict­ive, hal­lu­cino­genic pois­ons freely flow­ing through my veins.

Indeed, there is only one prob­lem with this exclam­at­ory publication:

“Pro­duct­ive! Magazine is a plat­form where the top pro­ductiv­ity blog­gers will share their best pro­ductiv­ity prin­ciples and tips and tricks. Let’s help every­one get more done and be more productive!”

Blog­gers. Being pro­duct­ive. Yes, you read it correctly.

In the urban dic­tion­ary of our col­lect­ive con­scious­ness, blog­ging is — quite rightly — syn­onym­ous with time­wast­ing. Let’s face it, if you wanted a blog­ger to do some­thing right now, right this minute, right this second — like put out the fire that was about to engulf your home and thor­oughly bar­be­cue your entire fam­ily into unsightly hunks of char­grilled flesh and bone — he or she would want to first sit down and write a post about being asked to put out the fire, and why they hate being asked to put out fires. They would most likely want to include some Flickr pho­tos of them­selves put­ting out the last fire they were called upon to extin­guish. The entry might also include a poem of sixth form navel-gazing stand­ards. And a pho­to­graph of a kit­ten. And quote some Thom Yorke lyr­ics. (I am gen­er­al­ising hugely, obvi­ously. It’s for effect, before you accuse me of being a cul­tural snob and a hypo­crite. I have my fin­ger on the pulse, so I know that nobody includes Thom Yorke lyr­ics any more. It’s My Com­ical (sic) Romance now, isn’t it?)

But no, Appar­ently there is a new breed of blog­ger whose chosen sub­ject is pro­ductiv­ity. Who knew? I cer­tainly didn’t. To appraise myself of that sort of inform­a­tion would have required me to, well, be pro­duct­ive with my web surf­ing. Which, pat­ently, I am not:

“Look! Dan­cing squir­rels! So cute! Me wanna dan­cing squir­rel! But where’s the ham­ster on the piano? Where’s the fuck­ing ham­ster on the fuck­ing piano? Give me the bloody ham­ster! Give it to me! Can’t you tell I’m hyper­vent­il­at­ing here? The Four Horse­men of the Pro­ductiv­ity Apo­ca­lypse are beat­ing their brains against my ram­parts, and I need the dan­cing squir­rel to sur­vive! And the ham­ster! Any­one fancy a coffee?”

I am a blog­ger, yet I am also proudly — and as this new year dawns, appar­ently res­ol­utely — unpro­duct­ive. This is a double blow to my already weak and enfeebled self-esteem, and I may as well just turn the oven onto Gas Mark 5, push the M&S ready meal to one side, and place my head on the middle shelf. It’s been emotional.