Knowledge work as an emotional act

Part I: An integrated approach to emotions, work, and productivity

This essay is Part I of a series where we explore the current state of productivity & modern work and shine a light on a new way of knowledge working: emotional embracement.

• Part 2: Emotions in motion is a tactical guide to embracing your emotions while working

The most productive people work at a pace somewhere between the monk and the stock trader, fast enough to get everything done, and slowly enough so they can identify what's important and then work deliberately and with intention.

— Chris Bailey, The Productivity Project

Productivity has long been viewed as a delicate dance between time and energy management. Buoyed by hustle culture and a world that demands speed, we tether ourselves to high output at all costs, silencing resistance and pushing through procrastination. In an attempt to show up professionally, we train ourselves to celebrate victories with “positive” emotions and dissociate under stress and uncertainty in an effort to maintain composure. In pursuit of flow, we strive to optimize our external environments via productivity hacks while suppressing our internal landscape and “negative” emotions. As a result, we find ourselves trading our humanity for professionalism.

In this series, we’re investigating the question: what if those “bad” emotions and resistance are actually the gateway to inner wisdom, self-expression, and a sense of aliveness in the work we most enjoy?

But first, how did we get here?

current state of productivity

In modern society, we wear “being busy” like a badge of honor. When asked how you’re doing, how often do you default to sharing how busy you are? And how good being busy is?

Despite putting systems in place to turbocharge our efficiency and tackle everything on our to-do list, some days, it feels like we’ve worked or ruminated all day with nothing to show for it.

To keep pace with growing demands on our time and energy, we look to productivity gurus who advise us that it’s all about Getting Things Done starting by Eat[ing] That Frog in pursuit of Four Hour Work Weeks. While productivity hacks and apps promise to keep us afloat, there’s a better way. 

A new, more integrated approach to productivity and work is emerging as a result of a societal trend towards prioritizing mental health and emotional well-being – one where you’re not just trying to stay afloat, you’re gliding through the water.

the history of output-driven productivity

The model of measuring work by input and output is a relic of the Industrial Revolution. 

Fifty years ago, about a third of all US employees worked in factories. In a factory, or in a methodical, assembly-line kind of job, productivity was simpler: the more widgets you produced in the same amount of time, the more efficient and productive you were.

— Chris Bailey, The Productivity Project

Contrast that with modern work where, as a result of massive advancements in technology, a significant portion of the US workforce has shifted to service and knowledge work. Jobs that can’t as easily be measured by inputs and outputs although the Bureau of Labor Statistics certainly tries.

The reality of 21st century knowledge work is that the quantity of output itself matters much less — it’s the quality of what is being outputted that matters.

It may have been possible to brute force our way through manual labor on the factory line, but meaningful knowledge work demands a level of problem solving and creativity that can’t be summoned through sheer force. We won’t find the genius we seek at the bottom of an empty inbox.

The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control – when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer…and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about. Let’s start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen. But you know what? That’s excellent news.

—

Oliver Burkeman

, Four Thousand Weeks

The ways we’ve been conditioned to work and our relationship with work haven’t caught up with modern work — we’re here to propose a new way of working.

imagining a new way of working

Work has been an act of brute force since the dawn of time. We’re evolved from humans whose next meal was at stake if they spent time tapping into their emotions. As we’ve advanced, knowledge work has inadvertently adopted this same approach: focus on the task at hand, suppress emotional responses, and get through as many to-dos as possible.

After all, work emerged as a means of survival and continues to serve that function today — only now we’ve ascended up the hierarchy of needs, trading the threat of starvation for the pursuit of meaning, purpose, and community. Our ancestors once approached their work in fight-or-flight states — and in the 21st century, we continue to accept these outdated standards which manifest through a culture of numbing ourselves to chase productivity.

Beneath the conflicting drive to be productive and our sticky feelings of procrastination lie unexamined emotions and desires. What if we turned inward and gave ourselves the space to understand what our body and those emotions are telling us? What wisdom have we been ignoring by shoving our emotions to the side when we work?

The idea that our work is emotional may sound counterintuitive if we’ve spent years fighting resistance. The same can be said for the paradoxical act of shining a light on the parts of ourselves that we avoid at all costs as the path to dissolving inner conflict. Bringing awareness to our emotions is the first step in embracing them to understand them, feel them, and accept them.

work 🤝 emotions

What does this look like today?

Many factors contribute to how “productive” we are on any given day: how well we slept the night before, the state of our relationships, the news cycle, the enthusiasm we feel for the work we’re doing, our mood right before we sit down at our desk, etc. 

The adage “Leave your problems at the door” suggests we separate our work and life, hitting pause on our emotional and mental states during the work day. The issue with this philosophy is that compartmentalizing encourages subduing our reality, suppressing creative energy and access to our truest desires.

Detaching ourselves from our internal state and body may feel like a worthwhile trade for getting more done — after all, knowledge work involves being one with our mind, right? 

Turns out, our bodies are far more in tune than we realize which can manifest as:

• Email apnea: shallow breathing and clenching while doing emails, reducing our oxygen intake and increasing stress levels

• Computer vision syndrome: eye strain or headaches as a result of extended periods of time staring at computer screens, causing dry eyes and funny vision

• Tech neck: pain from looking down at a computer, impacting posture and causing neck strain

Our bodies keep the score. When we increase physical tightness, we inadvertently stifle our emotional awareness. Mental tension leads to physical tightness in our bodies and vice versa.

knowledge work as an emotional act

By bringing awareness to our body and processing emotions while we work, we can deepen our understanding of how we relate to work, creating more intentionality around how we spend our time.

When we tune into our emotional state, we’re giving ourselves the permission to feel the waves of discomfort and the negative sensations in our body we’ve been clenching all along. If you find yourself sitting down at your desk, only to feel a sense of dread, there are paths forward other than spiraling into procrastination. Where are you feeling the dread in your body? What is the procrastination trying to tell you?

When we’re feeling disengaged with our work, how do we break a monolithic feeling into pieces? What are we feeling disconnected from? Are we feeling burnt out from repeatable tasks that can be automated? Or frustrated by conversations we’re having? Spending time sifting through these questions allows us to get to a better state where we can move towards work that energizes us. 

Think of it as continual emotional plumbing. By suppressing how we’re feeling, we’re allowing our pipes to back up, slowing the flow of energy and momentum. By taking the time to face and bring loving kindness to our emotions throughout our work days, we’re freeing trapped energy and opening up capacity to work more mindfully.

Beneath our drive to get more done are clues that hold the answers to why we do what we do and how we feel about it. The more emotionally aware we are, the more we can uncover where we want to go with work. Rather than allowing work to become a distraction from dealing with inner conflict, approaching knowledge work as an emotional act enables us to draw wisdom from within and fuel our drive with a clean source of energy.

our origin stories

Pranab’s story

This year has been one of the hardest in my life. For most of my adult life, my family’s been my first priority. This past year, we suffered from increasingly dysfunctional dynamics. While we’re now on the path to healing, Things Fell Apart along the way. It proved impossible to compartmentalize and shield away from work and it exacerbated patterns of avoidance and procrastination that I’ve been long undoing.

Thankfully, I had an amazing support system and an ecology of practices to support me in grounding, healing, and reconnecting to my greater Self.

One such practice was somatic parts work, informed by my non-dual meditation practice. I’d go in feeling stuck and tangled, and leave with a sense of clarity, love, and spaciousness that would last for hours after. The problem was bringing these qualities to the rest of my life. Work often triggered feelings of shame that led to nervous system activation, cognitive thrashing, and acting out old, avoidant patterns.

For example: I procrastinated on a client report for about 2 months. I was grasping for why I just couldn’t do it, and even after bringing it up in a therapeutic session, I continued to not make time for the task.

I eventually paid my emotional coach friend to sit with me on Zoom for a session where the goal was to start the project and embrace the mess of emotions that came with it.

I dropped into my body and asked, “What is this avoidance protecting me from?”

It responded, “Shame.”

I let the emotions flow through my body and started the task. Every couple minutes, tension and constriction would resurface, and I’d repeat the process. When less difficult, I just journaled in our zoom chat, and eventually a silent, focused flow emerged. Though we only talked for 15 of the 60 minute session, I finished the task with more ease than I thought possible, fully completing a cycle of memory reconsolidation.

The act of drawing actionable insight from concept to daily embodiment is called integration. And while I can’t afford to pay a coach every time there was work stuckness, I know there’s a way to get closer to it.

Cissy’s story

I’ve been obsessed with optimizing productivity for as long as I can remember, devouring books about hacking time, beta testing new apps, and redesigning my days in search of flow. I was drawn to this illusion that if I assembled the perfect system, I’d finally be able to tackle everything on my plate. The challenge was that I tied much of my self-worth to work so I had no problem expanding my to-do list, but rarely had the courage to let go of undone to-dos. I found myself on a treadmill running towards a moving goalpost.

As a result of identifying with my work output, I find it quite easy to start working and being in motion. The trouble comes with taking a break to reset and setting boundaries. During particularly intense periods of my career, I’d prioritize work over every other aspect of my life. Rather than tapping out to recharge when I’d hit a wall, I’d further bury myself in work. My anxious attachment to work manifested as me brute-forcing my way to impact, mistaking it for discipline. When I numbed the signals my body was sending me, it rebelled in the form of taking on inconsequential tasks to procrastinate meaningful projects for fear of failure.

The most essential and energizing work was often left sitting on my to-do list until the end of the day when I was drained. I’d chug away at it until it was time to wind down and head to bed, disappointed once again that I hadn’t made meaningful progress on the thing I’d actually wanted to do or was supposed to complete.

The connection between disassociating from my body and the emotional pain of never having enough time eluded me. I supposed I’d just gotten used to living with a perpetual sense of scarcity in time and energy.

Then, over the summer, I started my sabbatical and began to reevaluate my relationship with work. I noticed my body starting to unclench. I had spent the first half of the year in an embodiment mastermind and partnering with a somatic coach, learning to thaw the numbness I’d developed as a defense mechanism. While I was making headway, it wasn’t until the summer where noticeable changes began emerging. For the first time, I had space to differentiate what work I wanted to do vs what I should do, viewing work as an act of self-expression. I hadn’t realized how much I’d subdued my intuition until I came face to face with spending my days doing only the work I cared about.

As I’ve dropped into my body and surrendered to it to help guide me towards my inner truth — infusing meditation, Internal Family Systems (IFS) parts work, and shadow practices with my work — I’ve moved closer and closer to the work that lights up my soul.

introducing emotional embracement

Emotional embracement is all about tapping into the wisdom of our bodies and allowing it to guide us toward finding sustainable ways to work in the days, weeks, months, and years of our one precious life. We’ve drawn from varying introspection practices including meditation, breathwork, IFS parts work, shadow work, and somatic experiencing to unlock a new dimension of capacity within us. Despite having widely different work styles, the act of integrating our minds and bodies has freed up bandwidth for both of us in new ways that allowed us to experiment with new and meaningful approaches to how we work.

We’re in the early days of tinkering with bringing emotional embracement to reality, exploring co-working, asynchronous and synchronous, casual and structured. For now, our community lives in Slack and we’re beginning to host in-person sessions. In the future, we’ll experiment with working with coaches.

So far, the key components are:

1. Cultivate awareness 🧘

   • Bring awareness to your body and emotional state

2. Journal interstitially ✍️

   • Take notes on resistance and insights that arise

3. Process emotions 😮‍💨

   • Address and process emotions using your existing introspection practices (e.g., meditation, breathwork, Internal Family Systems (IFS) parts work)

4. Update approach 🔁

   • Integrate learnings from Steps 1-3 into your work routine

Gone are the days that productivity was all about time management. We’re here to help you build the muscle of tuning into your emotions and move towards unearthing new levels of flow in work and life.

Thanks for reading! Check out Part 2: Emotions in motion where we share the tactics of emotional embracement and invite you to experiment with integrating emotional awareness into your day-to-day work.

Currently, we’re beta testing emotional embracement co-working sessions (virtual and in-person) with our communities. We’re gauging interest more broadly as we roll out new ways to experiment and get involved — if you’re interested in learning more, sign up below (separate from subscribing to the Substack). We’ll be in touch.

Thanks to Melody Song, Dennis Xiao, and Maggie H. for helping us shape this essay and to many others for joining us as we experiment with bringing emotional embracement to life.