Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes, 46s.
Naturally, now that I’ve finished writing my book, I’ve got a lot more time on my hands.
While brainstorming ideas for productivity experiments with a few friends the other day, we came to realize something curious: while I’ve experimented quite a bit with getting more done, I haven’t invested too much time into exploring the flip side of productivity: relaxation. There was my experiment to live like a total slob for a week, but that one was pretty extreme; in it I removed virtually every source of energy from my life, and my productivity obviously went to hell because of it.
After chatting about productivity for a bit, our conversation quickly turned to the new season of Orange Is the New Black. (My friends can only take so much productivity talk.) I’ve never seen the show, and I’ve never been one to watch a ton of TV or movies—I average only a few hours of TV and movie time on the typical week—but something hit me from that conversation: virtually everyone I know binge-watches TV shows. I include myself in the bunch; whenever a new season of House of Cards or Arrested Development comes out, even though I’m usually pretty busy, I somehow manage to find the time to squeeze the entire season into a week or two.
Productivity is great, of course—but so is switching off and vegging out every once in a while.
Thinking about this got me curious. Most people love both productivity and relaxing, but where’s the sweet spot between them? Do productivity and vegging out work together—as opposite sides of the same coin? Or do they have a more complicated relationship? Does vegging out make you lazier when you have to get back to work, or does it let you unwind and make you even more productive?
That’s what drove me to design this experiment.
The Experiment, and What I’m Measuring
The design of this experiment is relatively simple:
For the entire month of July, I’m alternating between watching eight hours of Netflix one day (the length of a typical work day), and then spending the entire next day working—while observing the impact this routine has on my productivity.
To observe how this impacts my productivity, like with most of my other experiments, I’ll be mindful of how the experiment affects how I spend my time, attention, and energy—the three ingredients of productivity. Over the course of the month I’ll have more than enough work to plow through, between working on a marketing plan for my book, writing articles for this here site, preparing for speaking engagements, and more. Because I have so much to do, I’ll also keep a running log of how much I accomplish by the end of the day, noting whether I achieve what I intend to, while being aware of how my willpower and motivation fluctuate between the start and end of the month.
If you think this experiment is an elaborate way to slack off for a month, you’re partly right. But it’s also a way to experiment with how relaxing and vegging out impacts how motivated we are, how much energy we have, and how productive we are.
Suggest Stuff!
Over the month, my plan is to watch a potpourri of TV series, documentaries, and movies, in order to play around with how different types of shows impact my productivity—and so I don’t quickly get bored halfway through the experiment.
That said, I’m a pretty out-of-touch guy, and I know next to nothing about what’s out there. That’s where I need your help, if you have a second. If you have a TV show, movie, documentary, or anything else that you recommend on Netflix, please send them in via the form below! I’ll crush as many of your recommendations as I possibly can. Please, though, for the sake of my sanity, suggest a favorite documentary or two if you know of something great. (I live in Canada, but will have access to U.S. Netflix for the experiment.)
Over the course of the experiment, I’ll also stream how many hours of Netflix I watch, what shows I watch, and how much internet bandwidth I consume.
This is going to be fun.
