Productivity . . . (and Pronouns 🤫)

Because this article is about productivity, I am required to disclaim towards you that the ideas expressed within it are my own opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, “The Student Movement,” Andrews University, or the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Productivity is, of course, a very serious and contentious subject that should never be made light of. Therefore, read forth only in the knowledge that you have been warned.

Ah, November! The leaves are falling, it’s getting colder, snow is ever hoped for yet never realized on the horizon, and my life is falling apart. For many of us, it seems, this semester has hit especially hard, and I personally have found that amidst all the stress, I’ve declined into some bad habits and neglected the productivity systems I aspire to uphold. In this light, since I have an ever so slight yielding in workload at present, I resolved to pick myself up, reinstate my systems, and meet my article quota for “The Student Movement” this month by telling you all what such a process constitutes.

The first big thing is scheduling, which I find to be one of the largest factors of productivity in my life. It is your past–responsible–self telling your current–unmotivated–self what to do. For myself, this manifests as a daily schedule laying out every moment of every day in the work week. For some, this amount of granularity would be quite constricting, and they may prefer to only specify working times, but I enjoy the specificity of outlining everything. Due to the fact that I am a rather large nerd, I do this first in a spreadsheet and then use a script I wrote to automatically add each period as a calendar event on my phone. I then use an iOS shortcut I also designed to tell me what I’m supposed to be doing at the current time, and what’s coming up next, whenever I should want to know. Unfortunately, Apple Calendar doesn’t allow one to specify the colour of individual events to create a nice view, but I do colour code things by type in the spreadsheet for easy identification.

And oh hey, speaking of colours, the other day I was reminded of the plasticity of language. A friend of mine needed to know how to spell the colour fuchsia. So, as one does, I Googled it, and I found that, while the technically correct spelling is fuchsia, so many people misspell it as fuschia that you can probably get away with it (and in fact neither iOS nor Google Docs flags either spelling as incorrect). And this kind of thing happens a lot in language. For instance, while I write colour and favourite and behaviour, y’all south of the border write color and favorite and behavior. There are a lot of differences in English that people either expressly chose to change or simply did accidentally until they stuck, such as slang words, pronunciations like aluminum vs. aluminium or the just-now-omitted Oxford comma. Things that were once technically incorrect become correct. It’s almost as if language doesn’t have inherent correctness, and what is currently proper adapts over time. Huh. That’s an interesting idea. I wonder if it could ever be relevant to any other ideas that may rear up in the future . . .

Probably not! Let’s continue!

The second systemic aspect I am revamping is my time tracking. Oh, and if you’ve never come across the concept of time tracking, it’s the practice of timing what you do. One starts a stopwatch at the beginning of an activity, then records the time once complete, all of which is performed with a specific app (I enjoy Toggl). The purpose of such ostensibly obsessive seeming behaviour is to determine what you actually do, rather than what you think you do. It also has the effect of focusing you, forcing you to commit to studying or whatever else. While I have kept reasonably in tune with time tracking, I want to return to tracking more, as I’ve only been tracking working time recently. I need also take the time to reconfigure the automations I’ve set up in the past to start and specify timers, all in all to make my life more efficient.

Oh, and in that vein, do you know some words are more efficient than others? What forthright comes to mind are pronouns. Not only is the purpose of pronouns to prevent our saying cumbersome names over and over or to refer to someone we don’t know the name of, they also carry a certain tidbit of information, which is of course sex/gender. This is a rather similar situation to how some languages have gender spread across the majority of their nounage, familiarly French, Spanish, and German. As speakers of a language without gendered words, though, we garner an intuitive understanding of why all nouns carrying that tidbit of information is not necessary. There’s nothing inherent about the things themselves that require carrying gender around with them, and that point is driven harder home when you realize that those languages don’t even agree about which nouns are which gender. So I wonder if pronouns need to?

What’s interesting is that various other languages, like Korean and Finnish, don’t use gendered pronouns; they have a single pronoun regardless of one’s perceived gender. And, I mean, it works for them. In effect, like other nouns, there’s nothing that says pronouns must carry a sex feature. We simply do it because we’ve done it. Fascinating.

But enough of this existential language nonsense; let’s get back to the good stuff, shall we: checklists. One of the worst things to attempt is to hold everything in one’s own fleshy brain. While our biological processors are quite proficient at just that, they are actually rather poor storage devices. And therefore, when it comes to remembering important things, it is wise to delegate the task to a reliable system.

So you know how sometimes you just forget about homework? (Or perhaps you’re one of these “good students” I keep hearing about, in which case you are granted permission to feel smug for the rest of this section). But anyways, yeah, all my assignments are now going into a system so I don’t forget about them, and in my case, that system will probably be the task-manager app, Todoist. Notion is also a very interesting system, though a tad involved. Pen and paper planners work well, as also do apps like Things 3, OmniFocus 3, Apple’s Reminders, Google Tasks, Microsoft To Do, Do!, Due, 2Do, To Do List, ToDo List, ToDoIt, Todo Cloud, and yada, yada, yada. Ok, I’ve come now to the conclusion that to-do lists are kind of boring to talk about. But you know what isn’t boring? Pronouns!

It is well-documented both that some people ask to be called different pronouns than what their sex assigned at birth would initially inspire and also that some people refuse to accommodate such. In my experience, the most common reason people do not want to use others’ preferred pronouns is that they think it’s incorrect, and they don’t want to be incorrect; therefore, they feel that asking them to use certain pronouns is asking them to lie. I suppose those are understandable emotions. I also don’t like being incorrect, and I wouldn’t want to be forced to lie. . .

So, people don’t want to be forced into agreeing with something they don’t actually agree with. But is that really what pronouns are doing? Pronouns in English have historically denoted one’s biological sex, certainly, but we’ve seen that they don’t have to–we’ve seen that language changes based on how people use it. And so, how do people use them today, and moreover, how should we use them today?

Well, our society is collectively moving our language towards pronouns not carrying the tidbit of information that indicates one’s biological sex, but instead the tidbit of information that indicates how one wants to be considered. (Note: this doesn’t make them any less efficient. They’re still carrying extra information–it’s just different. Productivity, am I right!) Using she/her pronouns indicates the individual wishes to be considered a woman, just as using he/him pronouns indicates they wish to be considered a man and using they/them pronouns indicates they wish to be considered neither one or the other, but possibly something in between or wholly separate. Note that cis women (women whose sex assigned at birth was also female) also wish to be considered as women, and so also use she/her pronouns, and vice-versa with the manfolk.

What this means is that using someone’s preferred pronouns is not lying, no matter what your view of sex and gender is. Using preferred pronouns is an acknowledgement of their request to be considered a certain way. It is saying, “I respect you, as a human being, and your right to request”, not saying anything about agreement. Whether or not one agrees with and chooses to honour their request is a whole separate debate, but it should not come into consideration when deciding to use preferred pronouns.

Ok, sure. It may not be lying to use preferred pronouns, but why should we take the effort to change language in this way? The fact is because not doing so legitimately hurts people. And whether or not we agree with their reason for pain (which, one must admit is a strange statement), it is indisputable that they are in pain–pain we could lessen by doing this simple thing. Is not choosing to cause people pain, simply because it is of a slight inconvenience to oneself to remember pronouns, cruel, in a way . . . sinful? That goes against everything we believe about love and selflessness. It is our duty as Christians to do what we can to reduce others’ suffering: in this case, to use preferred pronouns. What possible reason could we have of going against God’s commission to love?