Has optimisation come for connection?

Or what productivity did next

Photo by Matt Artz on Unsplash

Last Sunday, I did something a bit mad, even by my flimsily-boundaried standards. Having decided to dedicate the day to socialising, I leant into my theme. Then ran with it. First, I took a train to my friend’s house on the other side of town to spend a few hours with her and her toddler. Next, I took two trains and a bus to reach the north London suburb of another friend. I was ostensibly there to warm her new home, but the November chill still lingered in my fingers when I put my gloves back on 90 minutes later to pop in on my sister. By the time I slammed the front door and slipped into my tracksuit bottoms, I’d put in a social nine to five; the items on the day’s agenda having been fulfilled, if not wholeheartedly enjoyed. 

The week before, a piece I wrote about the value of meandering social time was selected as a Substack Read. Overnight, I went from speaking to a digital hamlet populated almost exclusively by my parents and pals to sharing my ideas with a…village? teeny tiny town? The most interesting aspect of reading the comments and shares was seeing which bit of the story was landing with people. Unquestionably, it was the rejection of productivity that hanging out represents; sticking two fingers up at a culture that’s placed such unreasonable demands on our time, that the onus falls to us to better ‘optimise it’. Tellingly, the most liked comment articulated this idea succinctly: ‘Can't we set aside some small space of happiness in our lives, safe from the ceaseless demands of late-stage capitalism?’ Quite.

This idea landed in my own brain with a thud. I listened to the book that informed that newsletter on my morning runs. When Sheila Liming articulated the concept of hanging out as asserting your right to be non-productive, the idea quite literally stopped me in my tracks, before navigating my thumbs to the notes app on my phone to commit those words to memory (albeit the one belonging to my iCloud). God knows I need them. When I’m not listening to audiobooks while exercising (at 1.5 speed, if the author speaks too slowly) I’m sitting in the train carriage that delivers me right to my exit and cleaning the shower while I’m still in it.

So it felt like something suspiciously like growth when I sacked off a day of writing in order to spend time with my friends; it felt like hanging out. The plans were loose and casual, albeit back-to-back – the only barrier to the meandering quality being that London is obnoxiously large. It wasn’t until I plodded home from the station eight weary hours later that I realised I hadn’t broken up with productivity at all, I’d brought it along with me. Like getting my 10,000 steps and clocking up eight hours of sleep, time spent socialising had become a metric - and with it, I’d acquired another productivity stick to beat myself with. 

Only connect

Has optimisation come for connection? My WhatsApp threads whiff of the trait. As-yet-unscheduled December dates are flying about with a frantic energy usually reserved for landing Glastonbury tickets. With the turning of the calendar, my social boundaries have been abandoned faster than Sober October. Monday evenings are up for grabs, mid-week lunches are a thing and taking two trains and a bus is considered fair game is there’s a glass of mulled wine at the other end. I know it’s an invented urgency; my friends aren’t going anywhere. But on and on I go – throwing festive emojis at plans with people I could have just as easily seen in January.

But if my social productivity is peaking now, it’s been building for a while. It was mid-September when this frenzied social energy first descended - coincidentally (or not) around the same time I launched this newsletter. I’d been turning friendship over in my mind for months by the time I pressed ‘publish’. And the more I learnt about its power, the more obsessed I became with optimising it. When I learnt that face-to-face contact is the gold standard for forging connection, I started diarising multiple meet-ups every weekend. After making the case for the mid-week catch-up, I started filling my five-to-nine hours, too. By the time I reported on the very good reasons for checking in on your ghosts, there was barely any time in my diary to see the friends I was still speaking to, let alone the ones I wasn’t.

If I didn’t see this coming, those who’ve been studying this stuff for a while were more prophetic about the repercussions of reporting on connection. In one of my first conversations with Jeffrey Hall, professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas, he articulated friendship’s productivity paradox perfectly, albeit without using the ‘p’ word. ‘On the one hand, people like myself and others are trying to say we should prioritise our friendships,’ he began, referring to the recent wave of books, podcasts and, yes, newsletters on the topic. ‘But then you have the unintended consequences of elevating expectations of friendship to a place where modern life can’t really meet them.’ In order to prioritise our friendships, he explained, we need resources that are beyond our control: time, money, energy. ‘Because pushing people to prioritise friendship if they don’t have the resources is only going to make matters worse.’ Basically, I was warned.

Perfect friend

To find out if optimisation has crept into anyone else’ friendships, I reach out to a fellow journalist for whom both are front of mind. In her book I Didn’t Do The Thing Today, Madeleine Dore took a forensic approach to productivity guilt. Now, she’s turning her attention to our social lives in her newly-launched podcast and newsletter A Social Life With Friends. (I know she’s a fellow optimiser when she suggests tagging my questions onto the end of a podcast episode we’re recording.) ‘A theme I encountered when I was interviewing successful people was some iteration of: I work a lot but I don’t see my friends,’ she tells me, on the question of why she pivoted from productivity to connection. When she found herself experiencing the same feelings of guilt around her social life that she once felt towards her working life (‘Am I getting it wrong? Do I have enough friends?’) she adopted a professional curiosity to the topic. Like Jeff, she has concerns. ‘I suppose it’s going to be quite treacherous because whether it’s productivity or connection, if we’re looking for these things that work for other people and we feel disappointed that they don’t work for us, that’s a cycle that we can get stuck in.’  

When I ask Madeleine what drives this desire to feel like we’re being socially productive, she lands on the same word Sheila used when examining her own failure to hang out; a word that pours petrol over productivity no matter what area of your life you’re applying it to; a word I reluctantly relate to: perfectionism. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with productivity, she tells me, it’s the expectation that you’ll get through your to do list perfectly each day that turns it into something unattainable; the same is true for connection. ‘We think we have to do friendship perfectly, whether that means waiting for the perfect time or environment to host our friends, scheduling in time with them or following the latest hack on how to connect.’ See: my imperfect attempt to ‘hang out’ with three people in one day (four if you count the smallest one).

Seasons change

I ask Madeleine what we lose when we attempt to optimise connection, but I think I already know; I think I felt it that Sunday each time I cut one conversation short to go and start another one. ‘We miss the whole picture,’ she tells me. ‘When we look at productivity as being a linear, upward trajectory, we miss that things can be more cyclical; we miss the ebb and flow in our attention, energy, focus and desire…’ Apply that same mindset to friendship, she explains, and we also miss out on the ebb and flow inherent in being a human around other humans. ‘There are seasons in our friendships - there can be real value in times of retreat and there’s real value in times of openness, too.’

This idea that we have ‘seasons’ feels particularly pertinent right now, when an ostensibly social season collides with an evolutionarily anti-social one. That leaning into our social seasons can help us achieve that illusive work/social life balance was the conclusion of the journalist Olga Khazan in a piece for The Atlantic ‘The joy of underperforming’, published yesterday. In it, she cites research which demonstrates that, when presented with a problem (a desire to feel more connected to your friends, for example) we’re more likely to add elements (make more plans) than subtract them (streamline our schedules in order to strengthen our connections with a few select people). We do this, explained Leidy Klotz, a professor at the University of Virginia, in order to exhibit competence – which is easier to do by adding elements than removing them. His strategy for breaking up with the belief that more equals better – and the one he named his book after – is subtracting things from your life, one at a time.

And yet, the very idea of connection-enhancing strategies could be contributing to the problem (says the person with a newsletter premised on them). Back to Jeff Hall: ‘I try to be cautious about treating my research as being directives about how people should act - despite the fact that almost everybody wants me to give direct action.’ I read this retinence in two ways: firstly, that offering up copy-paste strategies when we lack the resources to fulfil them risks fanning the flames of productivity culture; secondly, that it reinforces the idea that it’s up to us to solve the problem. But that doesn’t mean there’s isn’t value to be found in the sharing of ideas - or joy to be found in the trying. ‘Our work is never complete and our friendships are never complete,’ adds Madeleine, on the thought that’s helped her break up with productivity guilt. ‘It’s an ongoing process, so it’s about finding a way to love that process.’ And in matters of making festive plans, sometimes, it’s a process of elimination.