The Productivity Trap

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There is a specific hollowness of the ANU Law Library at 2:00 AM. I am sitting beneath the low, flickering lights, and the air is thick with the chemical sugar smell of my three empty Red Bulls mixed with that familiar scent of old law books. For a second, it’s comforting; it’s the smell of a library, after all, until you remember that you’re literally just breathing in the dust of 1980s case law.  Around me, a fortress of highlighters in varying states of dehydration, and a stack of textbooks so thick they could genuinely be used as supports for my collapsing posture. 

There are a few fellow ghosts haunting the stacks tonight. I hear the clicking of someone else’s typing and the occasional groan of a swivel chair. We don’t look at each other. To look is to acknowledge the shared absurdity of the hour, and that we have all willingly tethered our souls to the blue light of a screen, frantically feeding the machine enough output to justify our own existence for another day.

I wonder if this is what they could’ve predicted in the 1950s: that the real transformation wouldn’t be technological, but psychological. That we wouldn’t be enslaved by machines in any dramatic, cinematic “robots taking over” sense, but rather the need to always be proving that we deserve to occupy space. The future was supposed to be our liberation, a dream where technology handled the work and gave us our time back. But as I sit here, staring at a Google Calendar that looks like a game of Tetris gone wrong, I’ve realised we’ve been swindled.  We have mistaken efficiency for existence. The tools that were meant to contain labour have instead dissolved their edges. A lecture now can be paused and replayed—but that just means it can expand indefinitely, stretching to fill whatever time we give it. Technology has just ensured we never truly stop. And the worst part is how normal it feels.

We have built a world where every second can be optimised, tracked, and repurposed, where even rest begins to justify itself in terms of productivity. Sleep becomes “recovery”. Hobbies become “side hustles.” Every moment MUST account for itself. Even here, in the quiet of the library, the language of productivity lingers. I don’t read cases; I get through them. I don’t think; I revise. The goal is no longer to understand the law, but to process it quickly enough that I can move on to the next thing, and the next, and the next; like a conveyor belt that never stops running.

This is the real danger of productivity…not that it demands more time, but that it reshapes how we experience it. Time is no longer something we live in; it is something we spend. Or worse, something we waste. 

You begin to measure your worth in output. Pages read, notes typed, case rulings memorised just well enough to regurgitate under exam conditions a few weeks from now. There’s no time to sit with an idea, to let it stretch out and grow and breathe; everything is reduced to something that can fit neatly into an exam answer, formulated in perfect IRAC structure, of course.

Even the law itself starts to feel like this—less a system of justice and more a performance. We memorise ratios the way actors memorise lines, hoping we’ll deliver them convincingly when it matters. Somewhere along the way, the question of why begins to feel indulgent.

There isn’t time for why.

There is only what. What was held, what was said and most importantly, what will get you the mark. 

A soft buzz. My laptop battery dips into red. For a second, I consider closing it. Letting the machine die. Letting the night stay unmeasured and unfinished. It feels almost like a return to something… perhaps a version of time that isn’t divided into deadlines, or pages completed.

It feels rebellious.

But then I think about tomorrow. About the readings I haven’t finished, the notes I haven’t condensed, the version of myself I am still trying to construct through sheer accumulation of effort.

My hands move before I’ve fully registered the decision. The charger is in my bag. I’ve done this enough times to know exactly where it is without looking.

Take it. Plug in. Wait.

The screen brightens.

I stay. Not because I’m done, and not because I’m close, but because leaving would require a kind of decision I no longer feel entitled to make. I keep feeding it. Page after page, case after case, footnote after footnote. Just continuing. Continuation as proof of presence.

I glance around the library and think of how tragic this is. Technology that was meant to free time has instead consumed it; machines quietly running on human attention through endless tabs and notifications that never quite let anything rest.

And I’m still here. The screen waits like it knows I’ll respond…

And I continue.