When Productivity Culture Got A Glow-Up

Click above to hear this piece read aloud by the writer (with occasional, human errors)

Oh god, here we go again. Again. In times of stress — or when what I actually need is to slow down but I choose warp speed instead — I often turn to making. I am a maker. This should not be confused with being a hoarder and also didn’t you know that buying craft supplies and using them are different hobbies.

My main vices are sewing and knitting. Very demure, very proper.

So how did I find myself on the Weaver line, heading home with the hide of half a cow balanced precariously on one shoulder, lightly sweating and wondering how to sneak enough leather to make a suitcase into the house without my husband noticing?

I’d fallen foul to a justification of productivity trumping capitalism: It’s Ok To Have The Nice Thing If You Make It Yourself. Ooh, that’s a really really slippery slope.

It must be noted that the I Made It Myself defence is at best only a temporary triumph of toxic productivity over capitalism. You spend X on the supplies to make a product that costs X + Y, then spend 3Y in time, blood, sweat, tears and profanity and often come out at the end with a slightly wonky artefact and a ‘should just have bought it’ conclusion. But didya have fun, that’s the question. Maybe, maybe not.

Some people prepare meticulous plans before embarking on making a dupe. Instead I had that “now now do it now” voice in my head that operates on zero forethought apart from googling where to buy leather near me. So with zero forethought, and an hour rummaging around a Whitechapel showroom (sweet helpful staff but a windowless basement where you could definitely sow up a skin suit) I had access to half a cow and free will and who could stop me?

I mean, the answer to that would usually be “Me”, where I’d go and get lots of supplies then lose interest in whatever I was supposed to be making. That comes from perfectionism too and it’s just like when you accept that you’ve done all the possible research and preparation needed to write your book, and run away from your desk like it’s both pestilent and alight.

But in the moment, deciding to make something, and then assembling the supplies feels like taking action. Or maybe it looks like taking action. Does buying a new notebook actually mean you’ll start writing your novel?

The Louise Carmen journal — handcrafted, beautiful, expensive so that means it’s good, right - right? My social media algorithm understands my stationery weakness implicitly, and deploys it against me daily. I see so many posts from women extolling their LCs, usually part of an extensive journal ecosystem and productivity set-up. That’s social media speak for “a big pile of expensive journals.”

I’m guessing I’m right in their target market. It feels like they are sold almost exclusively to women. They were even featured in a recent NYT piece which was linked to analogue living, although it was in the fashion section and definitely profiled as an accessory, not a methodology.

An older article on Wirecutter, the affiliated recommendation site that’s part of NYTimes talked about leather journals, praised the versatility of the system. So which is it? A Productivity Tool or Parisian Fashion?

It’s neither, it’s a trap. Same expectations, just packaged better.

I want to say upfront that I’m casting zero aspersions here, because if I had the money — LC is a very expensive option in this mushrooming market — and opportunity, I could see myself buying one too, to solve my First World Problems.

For lots of their fans, buying one (or more) leather Louise Carmen journals seems to be something that gives them enormous pleasure, especially if they’ve had the experience of going in person to the atelier in Paris — doesn’t even the word “atelier” sound better than “workshop” — to choose all the personalisation and accessories in person. Listen, I don’t care about make-up, fashion, shoes, I don’t drink booze: but stationery and craft supplies are my financial kryptonite. But if the leather used is thin and the charms are from Temu, (both allegations made on social media) then that’s definitely going to drive me towards making my own, dammit. So that’s where I was.

Could this be the planner that helps me get my shit together? Sure! For a while.

Journals and journalling are signpost elements of Analog 2026 despite this style of refillable notebook existing for decades.

They’re not new. I don’t even think they’re retro and being rediscovered. Maybe I’m too deep into r/stationery.

I fell for the Traveler’s Co notebook and for years it was my work diary. I work from home. I haven’t been on an airplane since 2023. Why do I need a system?

Even with a couple of inserts in it, it’s heavy enough that I don’t often throw it into my bag but rely on my digital diary instead - WHICH TOTALLY DEFEATS THE PURPOSE. It means you don’t get the nice patina. It’s allll about the patina. It’s your proof of how much you use it and therefore how productive you are and how worthy. Do you see how we’re circling back to being performative again? We’re putting a patina on productivity. Oh and let’s make it expensive so that it’s less accessible too. You have to earn it.

But what if you do it your own way? What if you didn’t spend ALL the money but spent some time and some of your spoons instead, that would be ok, right? So you’ll make your own version. Except that it’s a treat cosplaying as a tool. It’s like the ‘you can have it good, fast or cheap, only you can only choose two’.

We’ve spent years duct-taping systems together because it’s more important to be perceived as working as hard as we can. The kicker is we already are.

We spent time and energy on getting into line rather than into our zones of genius.

It’s so easy to fall for aesthetic planner culture, but it’s toxic on a number of levels. First, who the hell has the time? All these content creators who are spending hours filming and editing their posts about their perfect diary entries - have they just got the most insanely sleek workflows or do they not actually do any of the tasks on the to-do lists?

Have they hacked time travel?

(Likely answer - interns. Or they’re vampires and don’t need sleep.)

Aestheticisation adds another layer of work on top, plus a layer of perfectionism. I’ve seen forum posts where people are distraught that they’ve “destroyed” their planner because they made a spelling mistake on their first page, or ruled a line with pen in the wrong place, or smudged the ink. Dear god, it’s just a journal, nobody is going to see it. Unless it was always supposed to serve as evidence of your worth and productivity, not as an organisation tool.

We’d love to be able to give you receipts of just how hard we’re working.

Maybe sometimes it’s on something that’s not the highest priority, but caught our attention. Or it’s a genius idea that we’ll never have the confidence to sell. It could be zoning in on a hyperfocus or special interest that isn’t going to produce a product, but will nudge our ping-pong ball brains towards that breakthrough that’s been brewing.

If you could see everything in our heads represented on paper, would you get it? Would you get us?

We can make it pretty. Or we can do the thinking. Jeez, do you think we have an army of interns behind us?

What if we keep aesthetically pleasing records, in our expensive journals, the full BTS? Do we get even more points for making our own?

No, because the journal isn’t the point. The journal and the push for perfection just serve to keep us focussed on the look and not on the substance. The planning rather than the work. Buying washi and white-out tape rather than overthrowing capitalism.

We’re saving that for next financial quarter.

I have a stationery soft-spot — or is it a blind spot? I keep getting reeled in by the notion that yes, the notebook, yes, the planner will Change Everything. Yup. Does it make me feel better that I’m clearly not alone?

What does make me feel a lot better is that I genuinely enjoy the ‘have a go’ part of it. I like identifying as a maker, much the same as ‘writer’ is baked into my identity. Maybe I’ll always enjoy the act of writing more than having a finished book in my hand (which might mean I needed to talk to people about it, and sell it. Terrifying.)

Another thing that helps is having a notebook to compile anything and everything that piques my interest. In time, when I cross reference what’s in there, I notice themes and patterns emerging which is both edifying and a relief - the switchboard is making connections.

My porous memory means it’s best for me to keep records but they don’t need to be in an expensive notebook or heavy leather journal.

Adam Smith may be best known as the father of modern economics and productivity, but they were not his only concern.

We wonder at all extraordinary and uncommon objects, at all the rarer phenomena of nature, at meteors, comets, eclipses, at singular plants and animals, and at every thing, in short, with which we have before been either little or not at all acquainted, and we still wonder, though forewarned of what we are to see.

Keep wondering at anything you find extraordinary and uncommon. Find ways to operate that suit better our minds and energy, spoons permitting. Continually iterating is a form of self-care because we’re generating dopamine by solving the puzzles of why we are like we are, rather than resisting those truths. Keep notes about anything that sparks your writer brain — from a fragment of conversation to an extrapolation of a newspaper article — but don’t feel like it has to be captured aesthetically. It just has to be somewhere you’ll trip over it again, and make something of it.

Once we also start from a foundation of self-acceptance (not broken, not too much, not annoying) we edit out the puzzle layer, and can use those spoons to go glimmer-foraging instead, in hope of finding every thing with which we have been not at all acquainted. Everything! All the rabbit holes!

So yes, hope. And stationery. Always.