Please Don’t Be Guilted Into Being More Productive During The Coronavirus

If you have been scrolling through the bad and worse news about the coronavirus pandemic on Twitter, you may have seen the viral tweets about how famous artists innovated during quarantines, like when Shakespeare wrote “King Lear” while theaters were shuttered for plague or when Isaac Newton created calculus while social distancing.

These facts are intended to reassure and motivate, but they carry an inherent judgment: You could be making the most of this time; are you rising to the challenge?

Maybe you have felt some version of this judgment from friends and family who are using their time indoors social distancing to exercise more, expand their cooking repertoire or come out of this global pandemic with a new skill like a language or sleek and sanitized arms. Hustle culture never stops, quarantine or not.

I feel pressured to keep hustling despite knowing better. My concentration is shot with each coronavirus update, which is entirely understandable. I will be typing diligently away on my laptop, then suddenly overtaken with worry for my parents who are doctors seeing sick patients and over 60 years old. And despite these normal concerns, I still feel twinges of guilt for falling behind on deadlines and promises to pick up a hobby. “Why aren’t I working more quickly, doing more?” thinks the capitalist part of my brain.

“There is a tendency in this country and in Western society and within capitalism to be self-critical, as opposed to being self-compassionate,” said Cynthia Pong, founder of Embrace Change, a coaching business that focuses on helping women of color to transition in their careers. “We have crafted a lot of our feelings of self-worth on achievement, accomplishment and being prolific in stuff that we do. If you take that away, there’s a void. And voids are so hard to deal with.”

When I talked with career experts about the self-imposed productivity guilt I feel, they offered me helpful, more compassionate ways of reframing the pressure to stay focused and produce.

“The fact that your attention is all over the place is you being empathetic and responding to what’s happening,” Pong said. “If you weren’t, I might be a little bit concerned … ‘Are you not affected by what’s happening right now?’”