You Call It Productivity — I Call It Running From Yourself
The faster you move, the less chance you have to hear the question you are avoiding.
I read books, take notes, switch tools, optimize systems. Notion to Obsidian, GTD to Pomodoro, then on to something else. Every switch has a reason: this one fits me better, this one is more efficient, this one will get me there faster.
I never once asked myself: where is “there”?
Every productivity system carries an unspoken premise — that there exists a destination you must reach, and you are not there yet. Every methodology, every system upgrade, quietly votes for that premise. The longer you use it, the more solid the premise becomes, until it’s so solid you can’t question it, the way you can’t question gravity.
This isn’t a problem with the tools. Tools are neutral. The problem is that the moment you start learning how to use a tool, you’ve already accepted something: that the journey from A to B is real, even necessary, even true — and that you will always need to go faster.
So the acceleration begins. And it never ends.
As a baby, you could only crawl. Then you learned to walk, to run, to ride a bike, to drive a car, to board a plane. Speed keeps increasing. But point B moves back at the same rate. It stays exactly one step ahead — just close enough to make you think a little faster and I’ll get there.
The AI era has pushed this to the edge of absurdity. The tools are a hundred times more powerful than before, and yet I keep hearing the same half-frustrated confusion: why am I still exhausted as a dog after using all this AI? I’m not surprised. The stronger the tool, the further back B gets set, and the more refined the labor becomes. This isn’t an AI problem. It’s a problem with the logic itself. As long as you’re inside the A-to-B framework, acceleration is never the way out — it only gets you to the next B faster, where you discover, again, that the answer wasn’t there either.
But sometimes I slip into a different state.
No warning, no plan. I’m reading a book, I stop at something, start looking things up, the looking turns into writing, the writing turns into thinking — and I’m wandering between reading and searching and writing and thinking. Hours pass. Sometimes a whole day goes by.
There’s no efficiency in that state. I’m not completing anything. I’m not arriving anywhere. But in some sense, I’m more present than I’ve ever been.
What drives that state isn’t willpower, isn’t discipline, isn’t any tool. It’s that thinking itself is too interesting. Some question is pulling me, and I’m just following it. That’s gravity, not an engine. You don’t need to accelerate, because stopping never crosses your mind.
The difference between these two states isn’t a difference in efficiency. It isn’t a difference in how focused you are. They are two fundamentally different ways of being. In one, you are driving yourself. In the other, something is driving you. The first requires tools, requires systems, requires constant reminders of why you should be moving. The second requires nothing — because stopping is the thing that would take effort.
It took me years to notice this.
Not because I wasn’t paying attention. But because the A-to-B logic is so normal. It’s what school taught you. It’s what the workplace reinforces. It’s the foundational assumption of every productivity book ever written. It’s hard to step outside it and see it clearly, the way it’s hard to notice water when you’re already swimming.
This essay is almost over now.
If you skimmed it, or skipped ahead, or had an AI summarize it for you — this logic already lives inside you, so deep you didn’t notice yourself using it just now.
But if you read it word by word to this point, then for the last few minutes, you forgot about that infinitely retreating B.
And if this essay has a B at all, I hope it was those few minutes.