An Important Hustle that Productivity Experts Don’t Talk About
And why I decided to reprioritize my relationships.
Hustling is real, and it can become an addiction. Thousands of authors, podcasters, online content creators are pushing the gospel of continuous productivity and hustling. They sometimes allude to this hustle as the primary source of happiness in our lives.
We are bombarded with tutorial after tutorial on apps and systems, all under the guise of self-improvement and self-help. Everywhere I look, everything is pushing the same message: if I want to improve and be happy, productivity is the key. I need to start planning every second of my life.
“I’m supposed to wake up 3 hours before my workday starts and spend time figuring out how to make the most of life by working on my passion. I should spend all my idle time consuming content, tracking habits, making lists, documenting everything I’m learning, and multitasking on ten other things. And then, when the workday ends, I need to get back to cramming all my remaining time with an audiobook or a podcast, updating my to-do lists, and planning my next day.” — My Brain
I downloaded all the productivity apps you’re familiar with and the ones you’ve never heard of. I made all the templates that you have read about on the internet. I designed complex systems that tracked every single piece of content I consumed.
Spending all this time in digital mode made me feel like I was busy. And because it was hard, it seemed like it was the right thing to do. I did all this because I thought I was progressing towards a productive and happier life.
, Jo Eckler, PsyD, a licensed clinical psychologist, says that “Our sense of value fluctuates wildly depending on how much we were able to do that day.” We tend to establish our self-worth based on how many boxes we’ve checked or how many notes we’ve taken.
“Hustle culture is about being a human doing rather than a human being, which is dangerous in many ways,” says April Wilson, MD, chair of the preventative medicine department at Loma Linda University Health in California. Constant hustling ends up contradicting the very goal of hustling and productivity: happiness.
, Krissy Brady explains:
“[B]ecause self-fulfillment comes from attunement, and hustle culture doesn’t allow for that, you end up feeling more hollow by the day, and paradoxically, hustle more in an attempt to fill the void that it’s creating.
This perpetual search for systems and hacks to seemingly improve our lives has pushed us towards a much more individualistic society. We retract from our social lives and move all our correspondence to digital mediums, all while telling ourselves that we are improving our lives through our constant state of busyness.
If you look at the , two in five Americans report that they sometimes or always feel their social relationships are not meaningful. , nearly half reported always or sometimes feeling lonely or left out. Young adults ages 18 to 22 are the loneliest generation of all, the survey found.
We spend our time with our heads buried in our digital lives, hoping we can to-do our way to happiness. We do all this because it feels tough, and as we all know, if something is challenging, it means it’s worth doing. Right?
Maybe not. There is one hustle that’s worth all the effort we put in and more. And it’s one that no productivity expert ever speaks about:
The Hustle to Maintain Relationships
The time and effort it takes to nurture and grow our relationships with our friends, families, and partners. The hard work to connect with people.
No online video about productivity ever mentions how relationships are a vital pillar for leading a satisfied and fulfilled life. Isn’t the purpose of all this content on the internet to teach us how to be happier? So why isn’t social connectedness ever mentioned?
Why do experts opt for digital methods for tracking our work with apps and software rather than talking about a hustle that might actually help pave the path to happiness?
Robert Waldinger, a professor at Harvard Medical School, told The Harvard Gazette in 2017, “Taking care of your body is important, but tending to your relationships is a form of self-care too. That, I think, is the revelation.”
suggests our social circles start to shrink from the age of 25. But instead of forging new relationships and maintaining our existing ones, we spend so much time and effort on hustling, trying to improve our lives and ourselves, without ever realizing that the toughest hustles worth our time and investment are our relationships.
“Relationships are messy and they’re complicated and the hard work of tending to family and friends, it’s not sexy or glamorous,” says Waldinger. “It’s also lifelong. It never ends.”
Just like any other hustle or daily practice, building and maintaining relationships requires commitment, effort and time. This hustle brings with it challenges that no other type of work provides. There are multiple reasons why maintaining social connectedness is so tough.
Lack Of Time
As we grow older, our priorities change. We get busier with responsibilities. We can’t message our friends or see each other every day anymore, as we did at school or university. We start to get lost in our schedules.
Meeting friends becomes yet another event in our busy calendars. Maintaining friendships and relationships ends up becoming an item on our to-do list.
And as we focus so much of our time on things we think will increase our happiness, we end up missing out on something that we know for sure will help improve our well-being.
Deciding as a Unit
As mentioned earlier, maintaining relationships takes time and effort. We often decide, either consciously or not, that the time and effort we would be putting in could be used for something that might feel more important.
When you’re focused on the hustle, you’re usually only thinking individually. It’s easy to get lost in your own space and time. But when you focus on your relationships, you have to make decisions with another person, working as a cohesive unit.
This is a lot harder than you might think.
Conflicts
The moment you involve more than one person in your plan, you open the doors to potential conflict. We all have our own ways of thinking, and sometimes that’s enough to create a non-amicable situation. Opposing thoughts, views, decisions, feelings all end up actively creating difficult situations.
These conflicts end up taking time away from the things we might consider our priorities. Conflicts within relationships make it harder to concentrate on our day-to-day. Our routines can be disrupted when our energy is spent on relationship issues.
But here’s the thing: It’s worth it! We’re social creatures. As humans, we feel the need to relate to others in order to feel worthy and that we belong. Our relationships with our partners, friends, family, and colleagues all provide us with a sort of internal life energy that will never fail to keep us going. That’s what makes this hustle so worth it.
There’s an that is considered one of the world’s longest studies of adult life, having started in 1938. The study says:
“The people who fared the best were the people who leaned in to relationships, with family, with friends, with the community.”
If you want to be happier and have stronger, positive relationships, Waldinger recommended “replacing screen time with people time, or reaching out to that family member who you haven’t spoken to in years.”
Studies indicate that strong relationships contribute to health at any age. Our relationships offer several mental health benefits, such as increased feelings of belonging and purpose, which leads to increased happiness levels. Strong relationships also help us feel improved self-worth and confidence.
Not only does it impact your mental health, but your physical health as well. (308,849 participants) indicated that the individuals with stronger social relationships had a 50% increased likelihood of survival. There are few facets of community that are more powerful than the degree of connectedness and social support for individuals.
It’s worth taking time out from our daily hustling to put some of that focus and energy into our relationships. Having close and trusting relationships allows us to be ourselves; it enables us to be truly happy.
When you look back on your life, it’s not the checkmarks on your to-do list or all the notes you took that make you smile. Thinking about the moments we spent with friends and family is what brings us the most joy.
It’s the time we’ve spent nurturing our relationships that ends up being worth remembering.
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