Every industry has its con, and writing’s con is productivity porn. You’ve seen it. The endless reels of people in spotless offices, typing on their glowing laptops, sipping their overpriced match like it fuels genius. The captions scream things like “Just wake up at 5AM and you’ll finish your novel in six weeks!” Sure. Let me add “change my entire DNA structure” to my to-do list.
Here’s the thing: productivity advice is written by people who’ve never once had to drag ADHD through a Tuesday. They act like discipline is a switch you can flip. No. My discipline is a toddler with a flamethrower. You can’t flip it. You negotiate with it, bribe it, hope it doesn’t burn the kitchen down.
But hustle culture won’t admit that. They’ll sell you planners, apps, subscriptions… Like salvation is just one bullet journal away. I’ve bought them all. Half my shelves are filled with planners that start with January and end before February because the novelty wore off and the dopamine ran dry. Productivity gurus would call that failure. I call it archaeological evidence. Proof that I tried to play their game and the game was rigged.
RAW Empire wasn’t built on productivity. It was built on breakdowns and rants exactly like this one. On spirals that turned into pages, on failed routines that turned into slogans. The glitch aesthetic isn’t decoration. It’s the receipts. The smudges. The errors. The times I tried to live the productivity gospel and instead wrote a manifesto on why the gospel was trash.
You want truth? Most of my writing happens after midnight when the world shuts up and no one is pretending they have their shit together. That’s when the empire expands. During the hours productivity coaches would tell you to sleep so you can “optimize your mornings.” Optimize for what? Another day of pretending? No thanks.
Every fake productivity hack makes me want to scream. Write in 25-minute sprints! (Sure, if I can stop refreshing my email every 2 minutes like it’s my own personal slot machine.) Block notifications! (I’ll just find a new distraction, thanks.) Set goals! (My goal is survival. Everything else is optional.)
Here’s my hack: I weaponize chaos. I don’t fight the spirals, I brand them. I don’t cure ADHD, I drag it along like the loud roommate it is. If my empire works, it’s not because I mastered productivity, it’s because I stopped letting it shame me.
RAW Empire rulebook would phrase it clean:
“Productivity is propaganda. Just follow the bunny.”
That’s it. That’s the whole sermon.