Seeds Don't Set Deadlines

Bonjour 👨‍🎨

This Sunday's essay is about personal growth. Let's dive in. 🤿

↓ Level 1: Three types of productivity exist, but we obsess over the wrong one
↓ Level 2: Post-industrial measurements have altered our creative rhythms
↓ Level 3: True productivity mimics nature—seeds don't set deadlines, they respond to their environments and resources

Last year, I started reading Asimov again—books I hadn't touched since my teenage years. When I began reading, I realized not only that I had many unread books of his, but that I didn't really know Asimov well enough. I mean, I knew he was the prolific author who wrote tons of books, one of the fathers of modern science fiction, the great Asimov. But who was Asimov really? How did he write such good stories? What kind of life led him to develop such great ideas? How was he so productive?

Back when I read Asimov in my youth, YouTube didn't exist, and as one commenter under the old Asimov interview videos I started watching later put it: "we only knew him from the black and white photograph on the back of his books." Watching his interviews, I became a fan all over again. I had never seen a man so clear-minded, so sweet, so polite, so productive in my life. Later, I started reading his autobiography compiled by his wife from Asimov's own notes, and topics I never expected began to crystallize in my mind. Asimov wrote more than 500 books in total, not just science fiction but on every subject. In 1980, when he appeared as a guest on David Letterman's show, while making incredibly clear predictions about the future, he also gave details about how he could write so many books and articles. This man whose life was built around writing had a typewriter in every room. He could continue writing a piece he started in one room on another typewriter in another room.

But in the foundation of his autobiography, another deep theme emerged. A trait he thought he inherited from his father: always trying to learn in life. Asimov wrote not to be productive, not because he wanted to write a bunch of books, certainly not with the thought of becoming a famous writer, but because he genuinely wanted to research topics he was curious about and write about them to think, and because he took great pleasure in this. Because he read abundantly and thought while writing (aside from being a bit of a genius), his mind became so clear.

Looking at Asimov's lifetime achievements, I put the concept of productivity—which I've thought about a lot—back on the table. In my creative professional life, which I realized has exceeded twenty years, I've gone through many different phases and applied various methods in the name of productivity. But the place I've arrived at in recent years is close to Asimov's, which is why I wanted to start this topic with him.

Productivity is an Umbrella Term

Today we live in an era defined as "hustle culture"—briefly, a period that pressures individuals to be productive without stopping. This era, where technology is predominantly used as leverage and production tools have become cheap and accessible, expects everyone to work like mini factories from where they sit. When this individual productivity expectation isn't met, it creates great unhappiness and severe depression. The arrival of AI on top of all this toxic culture added salt and pepper to the situation. The rhetoric that AI will revolutionize every field makes us feel as if we have to learn a new skill every day. As if someone somewhere is handling their work very cleverly, working very "productively," and we don't quite know what to do. An endless FOMO loop prevents us from stopping and thinking calmly. So before getting caught in FOMO, let's try to unpack the term productivity together.

Here's what I've noticed after twenty years of creative work: when we say "productivity," we're actually talking about three completely different things, and we constantly confuse them.

First, there's the daily satisfaction game. You know this one—it's the dopamine hit of crossing things off your to-do list. "Had a productive day" usually means you knocked out a bunch of emails, organized your desk, maybe scheduled some meetings. It feels good in the moment, but here's the trap: you can spend entire weeks being "productive" this way without actually creating anything meaningful. I've seen creative people burn out chasing this feeling, filling their days with busy work while their real projects gather dust.

Then there's the optimization obsession. This is where we get seduced by productivity apps, life hacks, and systems that promise to help us do everything faster and smarter. The idea is that if you can just find the right tool or method, you'll magically have more time for what matters. But watch what happens: you spend more time tweaking your system than actually using it. You become a productivity hobbyist instead of a creator.

Finally, there's what I call lifetime creative output. This is Asimov writing 500 books. Or Prince producing 40 albums, or Picasso creating over 50,000 works of art. The tangible things that outlast you. This kind of productivity doesn't care about your daily task completion rate or how efficiently you organized your calendar. It emerges from something much deeper—a sustained engagement with work that feeds your soul rather than just your schedule.

The tragedy is that we've become obsessed with the first two types while completely neglecting the third. We measure our days by how many emails we answered instead of asking whether we moved our most important work forward. We download apps to help us do meaningless tasks more efficiently instead of questioning whether those tasks should exist at all.

Many other articles have written about how crowded task lists create busyness traps. Despite appearing to have a lot of work and appearing to handle a lot of work, the daily satisfaction game doesn't reveal whether you're actually making an impact. Beyond the importance of making an impact, in the name of handling those tasks, all life values—family, friendships, relationships, health—are pushed to the background for the sake of this productivity.

When it comes to optimization, just looking at the interfaces of productivity apps before they're filled with data makes one think "I guess I should have a bunch of tasks." But should you really?

Real creative output—the kind that creates lasting impact—can only happen when meaningful work consistently finds space in your life. Not through perfectly planned days or hyper-efficient weeks, but through a lifestyle that protects and nurtures your deepest creative impulses.

Those interested in these topics might immediately jump to the idea of creating 3-4 hour uninterrupted work periods like Cal Newport's popularized "deep work." Sorry, but Asimov had an objection to this decades ago:

In summary, if we adapt what Asimov did in writing to life, if you're doing other things besides producing what you want to produce, you're in the wrong place. Of course, this has also caused many artists to struggle quite a bit in the flow of life outside of what they do. However, I think we can find a solution somewhere in between in modern times.

Going with the Flow of Time

In Don Norman's book "Design for a Better World," in the "Precise—but Artificial—Measurements" section, he talks about how artificial time units like calendars, weeks, seasons, and clocks that entered human life after the industrial revolution force us, who are part of nature, into an unnatural productivity measurement. Inspired by Norman, in nature, no seed sets deadlines. Trees don't move according to calendars. The silent months a oak acorn spends in the soil are not "unproductive"—root systems are established, bonds with the soil develop, foundations for future growth are laid. The seed doesn't sprout saying "my sprouting time has come." It begins to sprout when it reaches the necessary resources for sprouting and when the climate is suitable for sprouting. The shoot that bursts in spring is the result of preparation during the months when it "did nothing" in winter. The prolific creator such as Asimov was like this too. Instead of optimizing daily task lists, they followed their natural rhythms and focused only on what they couldn't help but do.

In the current dominant culture, we're forced to be in "spring mode" constantly. Always growth, always visible results, always measurable progress. But the creative process doesn't work like this. The post-industrial lifestyle adopted and imposed by the West has a big impact on this. In western understanding of personal growth, everything becomes instrumentalized. If you read a book, you must gain something as a result. There's no such thing as just reading a book, just being curious, just getting lost in the story. There's no such thing as just learning. Learning must be useful for other thing. That's why, for example, meditation and yoga, which are part of life, went to very different places when they fell into Western hands. When Hindu stand-up comedian Zarna Garg criticizes yoga's transformation from a daily discipline done in boring pajamas to something people rush to classes wearing $100 leggings, she says, "If you're rushing to get to the yoga class, you're doing it wrong!"

How to Design Your Life Around Natural Rhythms

Of course, there are bills to pay, houses to clean, emails to answer. I stopped organizing my days around these and pushed them to a corner, cramming them into a day (Monday) that suits their spirit. When they come up in between, if they're not urgent, they wait for another day I choose; if urgent, they wait for the end of the day. For my remaining productions, I stopped setting deadlines and allocating block times. I start writing the moment I feel like it, or when I feel like programming, I sit and get lost in Xcode for hours.

Don't expect every day to be a spring day. Some days can be winter, some days autumn. They are necessary times that will push you to sprout again. Don't load yourself with productivity metrics from the machine age. We are not machines. If you think you have a procrastination problem, think and get to the source of the problem. Maybe there's an uncertainty you're unaware of and can't control that's keeping you from sitting down to produce. If the production topic you've chosen in life constantly pushes you to postponements, maybe you should try other things. Trust your instincts.

Tiny Challenge

Spend this week without making a task list and without immediately answering some emails, just as you feel like it. Let's see what happens.

Bright Minds

John Cage
Born in 1912, composer John Cage revolutionized music by embracing chance and silence. His most famous piece, "4'33"," consists entirely of ambient sound during four minutes and thirty-three seconds of "silence." Cage used the I Ching (Chinese Book of Changes) to compose music, removing his personal preferences from the creative process. He believed that "the purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, making it susceptible to divine influences." His approach to creativity was deeply influenced by Zen Buddhism—he studied with D.T. Suzuki for years, learning to let go of artistic ego and control.

Time Capsule

The Pomodoro Technique (1987)
Francesco Cirillo developed this time management method as a university student using a tomato-shaped kitchen timer. Revolutionary because it was the first productivity technique designed around human attention spans rather than work tasks. The 25-minute focused work periods with 5-minute breaks mimicked natural cognitive rhythms. Today Pommodoro spawned the entire "time-blocking" industry, though ironically became exactly the kind of scheduling that goes against natural creative flow.

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Peace,
Aydıncan.