Productivity systems often stop working.
Sometimes the collapse is sudden. Sometimes it’s gradual enough to be mistaken for personal failure. Sometimes the system appears to function for years before quietly giving way under conditions it was never designed to hold.
In some cases, the problem is not misuse or lack of discipline. It’s that the system itself rests on assumptions that no longer match the shape of everyday life—if they ever did.
The Promise Beneath the System
Most modern productivity frameworks share a quiet premise:
that life becomes manageable once it is organized correctly.
Make everything visible. Break it down. Prioritize. Execute.
When this works, it produces relief—sometimes even hope. The sense that anxiety can be tamed through technique. That clarity is a matter of process. That the self can stand above the demands of life and impose order through sufficient rigor.
This premise holds best under specific conditions: stable schedules, predictable energy, limited interruption, problems that resolve rather than persist. In those environments, structure can be genuinely helpful.
But many lives do not unfold there.
At a certain point, the central question shifts. It is no longer How can this be managed more efficiently? but something closer to What is actually being asked of me here, now, with the limits that exist?
That question does not translate easily into workflows or task hierarchies.
Life as Torrent
Modern life does not arrive in discrete, processable units.
It arrives as a torrent.
Messages, obligations, crises, requests—often layered, often simultaneous, often unresolved—move faster than reflection can keep pace. The volume alone exceeds what most systems can meaningfully contain.
This shows up even among highly competent people. Executives, professionals, caregivers—many move from meeting to meeting, inbox to inbox, decision to decision, not because of disorganization or laziness, but because the inputs never stop long enough for discernment to catch up.
The Desert Fathers anticipated something like this:
“A time is coming when people will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.’”
In a culture structured around reaction, pause appears irresponsible.
In an economy that equates worth with output, restraint looks like failure.
When the Systems Break
Getting Things Done was published in 2001.
The iPhone arrived five years later.
The information environment these systems were designed for no longer exists. But the deeper mismatch is not merely technological—it is anthropological.
Many productivity systems assume a self capable of standing above life, surveying it, and bringing it into order through technique. Control is treated as both goal and virtue.
That assumption collapses when life introduces realities that cannot be optimized away:
- chronic illness
- disability
- caregiving
- grief
- moral injury
- permanent uncertainty
Some suffering does not resolve. Some wounds do not close. Some lives are shaped irrevocably by limits that no amount of organization can remove.
At that point, technique dries out.
Grace preserves.
The Conflict That Cannot Be Organized Away
Jesus names a reality productivity culture avoids:
“You cannot serve both God and mammon.”
Not should not.
Cannot.
This is not moral exhortation. It is diagnosis.
Mammon names a system of extraction—endless productivity, constant availability, measurable output. It takes everything offered and demands more tomorrow.
The Kingdom operates differently. Seek first the Kingdom, and these things will be added. Not optimized. Not earned. Added.
This does not promise ease. It signals a shift in center of gravity.
Saint Joseph did not manage his way out of danger. He responded. He listened. He fled in the night without a transition plan or framework to justify the disruption.
Most lives will not involve flight into Egypt. But the same tension appears daily: the world’s metrics versus what actually matters. Production versus presence. Control versus trust.
These cannot be balanced indefinitely.
A choice is always being made.
What This Looks Like on the Ground
A small notebook helps.
Lists help.
Structure still has a place.
And then reality intervenes.
Plans shift. Energy runs out. Someone needs attention. Something breaks. Decisions are made imperfectly, in motion, without full clarity.
At certain moments, it becomes possible—briefly—to pause and ask a simpler question than What should be done next?
What is actually being asked of me right now?
Not by the system.
Not by the culture.
But by the life immediately present.
Sometimes the answer is clear. Often it is not. Movement happens anyway, guided less by certainty than by intention. Fidelity replaces mastery.
This way of living is slower. Messier. Less impressive.
It does not produce inbox zero.
But it preserves presence.
The Cross as Anchor
Some problems are not solvable.
That does not make them meaningless.
The cross is not a solution to suffering. It is God’s refusal to abandon the unsolvable parts of it.
To stand at the foot of the cross is not to fix anything. It is to attach wounds to Christ’s wounds and remain human in a world that rewards disintegration.
Wounded apples must be dipped in honey—not dried out and optimized.
Grace is not a technique. It does not replace clinical care. It names a different category of healing, one that begins precisely where checklists end.
Observations, Not Prescriptions
- The sense of not keeping up may be a reasonable response to unreasonable demands.
- Presence often matters more than productivity.
- Mystery and not-knowing are not planning failures; they are features of being human.
- Some forms of suffering are not problems to solve but realities to accompany.
- Intention—faithfulness in small, immediate actions—may matter more than visible results.
A Small Candle
A perfect system is not required.
What may be required is letting go of the belief that the right system will save what the system itself erodes.
The torrent is real.
The overwhelm is real.
But so is the anchor.
Not control.
Not mastery.
Trust.
The world may interpret this posture as irresponsibility or withdrawal.
It is neither.
It is a refusal to drown.
“Christ Calms the Storm” by Eugène Delacroix
Boyd Camak 