It occurred to me today that we need to establish what is worthy and what is not (as it we ever could).

My wife and I got into a slight disagreement the other morning, and the specifics of the argument are none of your business (hee hee).

But, what I can tell you is this: the argument got me to thinking about productivity. The dictionary definition of productivity goes something like this: “the effectiveness of productive effort, especially in industry, as measured in terms of the rate of output per unit of input.”

Wow, that seems a little technical, don’t you think?!?!

So, I guess we have to look at productivity in terms of what is produced. That’s unfortunate, because I’ve spent hundreds of hours at this keyboard this year, and I don’t know if you could make the argument that I’ve produced very much –> and before you go jumping to conclusions, my wife and I were NOT fighting about whether or not my writing is a decent use of my time (she’s one of my biggest fans). Nevertheless, she –or anyone else– could make the argument that I’ve not produced much.

Maybe, I should print it all out. Then, there would be a product.

Maybe, if we are to look at productivity, we can be a little less technical about it and modify our understanding of what a product is.

Look at the factory worker, who is able to, in one hour’s time, put out seventy-five pieces of whatever he is meant to be making. That’s more than one part per minute! Pretty productive, huh?

The guy next to him puts out ninety-eight pieces per hour.

Which of them is more productive?

What if the ‘seventy-five pieces per hour’ guy makes most of his fellow coworkers, during their lunch break, laugh and have a good time and relax, so that the afternoon productivity in the factory goes up because this guy is around, even though his ‘productivity’ on the assembly line isn’t that great. Tangible productivity vs. intangible productivity.

How about this: what if everyone is producing something?

* * *

The problem with this argument –whether some pursuit or another is a worthy pursuit, whether it’s productive– is that it’s subjective. I kind of touched on this topic a little bit when I wrote about gaming in THIS POST. When I was a kid, playing video games was, in my mind, a totally appropriate use of time. My parents were NOT of the same opinion.

Who gets to decide what is productive and what is not?

Society has a lot of influence on this matter, unfortunately, because we tend to look at our endeavors with the eyes of a society that promotes concepts like market value and popularity and conformity; therefore, productivity and products that don’t fit those norms are often not given a second glance.

My daughter recently came up with the idea to start a YouTube channel where she would share her theological thoughts with viewers. My wife and I encouraged her to record a first video, to show to us what she was planning on doing.

Well, her first video was a video where she read a passage of the Bible. When she showed us that video, I told her that there probably weren’t a lot of watchers on YouTube who were going to be interested in hearing her read passages from the Bible. She understood, and I tried to steer her in a different direction, and then she recorded a second video. It was a lot better, and it will be interesting to see where it goes from here.

In that first conversation, where I tried to help her to see that her first concept wasn’t going to be productive, I was careful to try not to extinguish her dream; I am ashamed to say that I have probably –more than once– not been supportive of all of her ideas. I tell myself that I am just being protective, when she comes to me with these crazy ideas, that I don’t want her to be hurt when she doesn’t get the results that she is expecting/wanting.

So rather than have her discover that no one in the world is going to be interested in watching a video of her looking down at her Bible, stumbling and struggling through a reading of a chapter, I break her heart, a little bit. Maybe the right thing to do is to let her try, so that she can discover whether or not her ideas have merit –by succeeding or failing– and then I could just make myself available to catch her if she falls.

The question of being productive, of creating something that people are going to want to have, is a struggle of my own. It would be one thing for me to come to terms with it, if everyone who is reading my daily blog stopped, because I’m an adult and I can use the coping mechanisms that I’ve learned to deal with the emotional fallout. I tell myself that I don’t really care if people read my writing, I tell myself that I am doing it because I enjoy the writing process –which I most certainly do. At the end of the day, though, I watch the numbers (people viewing the post) go up on some posts and I watch them go down on other posts, and I get emotionally attached when a post that I really loved writing does poorly. Just like I think my daughter would be crushed if her YouTube channel didn’t take off.

* * *

The concept of being productive is hard, because we aren’t the ones that make the determination whether or not our efforts are well-spent. When we create, and others evaluate that creation, there is something in us –whatever we ended up investing in the created thing– that is wide-open to attack when people subjectively decide that we’ve wasted our time, that our creations aren’t worthy.

I said, at the end of the first section of this post, that it might be the case that everyone is producing something. Some people have products that are more intangible than others. Let me go even a step further than that: I truly believe that it is the case that even bad things are productive, inasmuch as they could lead –down the road– to good things.

The drunk driver that kills the teenage daughter driving home; when that event draws a family closer together, while it’s certainly not ideal, it could be considered ‘productive’, in a sense. The moronic leader, who awakes the underlings by being so inept as a manager, that ‘boss’ has been productive, in a sense.

I guess that makes us all producers; congratulations on being a producer. Go out and be the kind of producer whose product reflects well on them.