You Are Not A Machine. Stop Treating Yourself Like One.
➡️➡️This Thursday 2nd October: Free Workshop on Moving From Firefighting to Focus. Reserve your free place here. ⬅️⬅️
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It never ceases to amaze me how much we believe we are machines.
And how little we are really like machines.
I had heard this for the first time about 13 years ago, from Tony Schwarz of The Energy Project.
But I only really learnt it after my daughter was born. After shutting down my business for a month for paternity leave, I realised I had the opportunity to remake it in a different way when I came back.
I reflected on what would leave me feeling at peace as a father, and realised I wanted to work less.
I had never wanted to work full-time, I thought to myself. That was never ‘the aim’, so let’s start now.
I moved my business to four days a week, and it has been that way ever since. Leah is nearly five now, so that tells you how long it’s been - half of my career as a coach.
In the last 5 years I’ve published 4 books (a fifth is coming before Christmas), written countless blogs, created almost 100 episodes for The Coach’s Journey Podcast, appeared on way over 100 podcasts myself, and made more money in all 4-days-a-week years than I did in any of my 5-days-a-week ones.
So, no matter how much I want to believe that if I just work harder and more things will turn out better… it clearly isn’t as simple as that.
Let’s be clear though: I do work hard. And if you’re working, putting in the graft is a very powerful skill to have at your disposal.
But it isn’t everyhing.
Efficiency isn’t effectiveness.
Harder and longer aren’t always best.
Because we aren’t machines.
It isn’t just about adding processing power or giving ourselves longer to crunch through a problem.
As I learned 13 years ago from Tony Schwarz, we think of ourselves as machines. But the problem we have there is that the world will keep asking more and more of us each day, week or month. The machines are getting faster. But there reaches a point where the returns on searching for more effort or efficiency have diminished almost to zero.
But the returns on creativity, innovation, thinking in new ways will always be available.
And they require something very different to effort.
Humans aren’t machines. Schwarz says they are more like waves.
We have to refuel as well as spend our energy. We have to repair as well as rupture.
We all know this.
We have all stressed and strained over a problem for hours. Only to come back the next morning and see a solution in seconds.
We have stepped out of the office for a few minutes and felt our nervous system shift.
If you’ve never noticed this, start paying attention.
If you’re feeling drained from a morning of Teams meetings, step outside, put your hands on the bark of a tree, and look up at the sky, whether its clouded or clear.
Notice what happens to you if you stay there for 30 seconds, a minute, five minutes. What is different?
Once you have stepped out of the system of organisations, like I have, it seems truly absurd when I hear clients or friends talking about the pressure to not take breaks at work.
If you run a company where that happens and are reading this, then this is important: if you encourage break taking, the quality of everyone’s thinking will improve.
If the quality of their thinking improves, then their work improves.
And your results improve.
This is one of the problems with the way we think about productivity in 2025. We are stuck with industrial definitions, where we think of ourselves as machines.
(My series of free Meaningful Productivity Workshops this October are all about this: we’ll get into the topic of this blog and much more. It all starts on Thursday 2nd October. More here and at the end of this article.)
What we need to do is transcend and include those definitions: yes, it’s important to work hard sometimes. Yes, it’s true that if everyone is taking a 2-hour lunch break and going on 15 ‘thinking walks’ a day, we won’t get as much done.
But there’s an integrated viewpoint here where we don’t run ourselves into the ground, where we do create the conditions for creativity, and where each individual and the organisation they work in together all thrive.
Almost everywhere, we need more breaks. More genuine connection. More time in nature. More wind on our faces.
If we get those things, we’ll think more clearly and see more things.
If we don’t, things might start breaking.
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PS I’d love you to join me for the Meaningful Productivity Workshop Series - free, live sessions starting THIS THURSDAY 2nd OCTOBER.
In these 60-minute workshops you’ll:
Rethink productivity so you can do more of what really matters.
Learn practical tools to reclaim your focus, reset your energy, and make change that sticks.
Explore the Six Pillars of Meaningful Productivity and start applying them right away.
The series culminates in an intimate VIP Deep Dive where we’ll uncover what truly matters to you and how to carry it into every part of your work and life.
👉 Reserve your free place here: https://www.robbieswale.com/meaningful-productivity-workshop-series
This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.