The Productivity Trap

As the new year triggers a fresh wave of goal setting, Kat Stoeffel takes a hard look at a genre aimed at illuminating how women “get it all done”

- Kat Stoeffel

The evidence that I am inadequate had been mounting for some time. But it reached a critical mass in October when an impressive young HSBC executive, Melania Edwards, revealed to Business Insider what a day in her life looks like. According to Edwards, her morning routine begins at 5.30am and includes meditation, green juice, and tennis. After a full day of work— spread between San Francisco and Palo Alto—Edwards enriches herself with classes at Stanford, yoga, and volunteer work. The travel time alone made me want to crawl back into bed. Edwards, meanwhile, relaxes by cooking dinner with her boyfriend and walking “down the tree-lined University Avenue, reflecting upon our key wins and challenges and preparing for the adventures of the next day.”

Aspirational day-in-the-life diaries have recently become ubiquitous. Presenting the daily habits of successful women, these articles are meant to offer the key to unlocking your own future potential. They’re nothing new: Male CEOs have been bragging to business magazines about how early they wake up for years. Optimisation obsessed Silicon Valley spawned a cottage industry of largely male productivity experts explaining how to get more done, faster, in email newsletters and podcasts. But around the time work life balance became a national public debate, women’s media outlets that once might have asked women what they wore, started asking powerful or simply cool women about how they get things done.