Being Productive Isn’t The Same as Generating New Ideas

Three Lessons for Coming Up With Better Ideas

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“Work” is an aestheticized term in our media discourse. We associate work with beautiful desk setups, highly curated morning routines and a deep pride when we stay past our allocated work hours. The ideal human becomes an efficient working machine, while the ideal student becomes the one who spends the least amount of time producing the most amount of intellectual work.

My thesis advisor, during our first meeting, expressed his concerns about the future of university culture. “Just wait until you start marking essays from undergrads”, he said, “it’s repetitive work. Sometimes I wonder if the same person wrote all these essays under different names.” 

This repetition my professor alluded to results from vulgar readings or vulgar critiques. In literary criticism, for example, theories that were innovative in the 1960s are now routinely used in undergraduate essays. However, since the discourse has shifted from genuine critique to efficiency, it’s easy for students to sacrifice deeper insights to turn in work on time. French writer Michel Butor observed:

“For ten or twenty years almost nothing has happened in literature. There has been a deluge of publications, but no intellectual movement. [Communication] produce an enormous noise.”

My contention is this: our obsession with output (in academia and in general) stems from a misunderstanding of what produces genuine ideas. The assumption here is that if we optimize our workflow sufficiently and if we produce massive amounts of output, then we’d inevitably arrive at innovative ideas as a result of clocking in more hours. The reality, however, counters the discourse of efficient work entirely. And in this post, I’d like to summarise some lessons from my readings and experience.

Producing new ideas is a non-linear process