Work a job you love and you'll work every day of your life
I bet you'd love that wouldn't you, you productivity pest you
Whether you’re a twenty-something TikTok fiend or a sixty-something retiree, you’ll have encountered some form of hustle culture or productivity routine and might even have felt inspired by their representatives – in modern parlance, the “boss bitches” and the “sigma males”.
Like me, you might also have laughed at them getting up to have an ice bath at 3am, shine red light on their genitalia at 4, hit the gym at 5 and their ascensions to their respective corporate heavens by 7, all before most people have considered whether to snooze or open their emails.
I’ve definitely rolled my eyes at a lot of these caricatures of productivity and success – all filler, leather and money talk – but recently I’ve wondered if, actually, my derision has been borne from both a place of jealousy and also becoming.
Working a remote job in lockdown, I became both a person who wiggled their mouse to appear online and someone who needlessly kept their laptop open outside of their salaried 9 to 5. And when there was nothing else to do outside of looking busy, while I did bake bread the idea of completing Netflix filled me with dread so I worked on an NVQ instead.
69% of directly-registered OU students work full or part-time during their studies
The Open University
It’s culturally acceptable to try to better yourself while working. Indeed, “continuous professional development” is expected on CVs and in offices across the country. And yet, while CPD or studying for a different job entirely necessitates working more than you usually might, the idea is ultimately to move onto the thing you’ve studied, ideally returning you a solid investment on those extra hours you put in.
But here’s where it went wrong for me
In 2021, I realised I could do my 35-hour-a-week job in 30 or less, so I pursued an online PT course while technically working full-time, meaning that I could work on an alternative future while freeing up time at the weekends. But there was nothing to do at the weekends, so I kept on studying.
And when I got my qualification, I made sure to take Saturdays off so I could handle the workload from my first online clients, checking them in for hourlong calls when they were free on Sundays. And in lieu of a pay-rise with a promotion in my day job, I asked to work a four day week to enable a better work/life balance, moving my studying to the Friday.
The thing is, if I was being honest with myself, while I felt like I was working hard because I spent some time sitting at a desk six days a week, I mistook quantity of time for quality: I could still have done all of this work and study in four and a half days.
In productivity literature, Parkinson’s law states that tasks take up the amount of time we give to them…
And, I think, rather than allow myself to do nothing – whether in a relationship in central London or single in my dream flat in Sheffield – I convinced myself that busy-ness was business and so inherently worthwhile.
If it don’t make cents, then it don’t make sense
In January 2023, I soon found out as an online and in-person coach that it’s endemic among PTs to work six days a week. Gym shifts pay your gym rent but they might not fall on the same days as the client sessions you’ll need to secure to actually make a living. And if you’re a people pleaser and/or financially anxious, this is a perfect recipe for life imbalance. Check out episode #5 of the Fitness & Thinking Podcast with champion bodybuilder and current PT, Sid Islam, for more on this.
After 18 months of working at PureGym in Sheffield City Centre Monday to Friday and checking in with my online clients throughout the week and on Sundays, I was earning enough money to go fully online in June 2024.
In my evenings and Saturdays off, I’d built community and a relationship and, here we go again, studied (this time beginner’s Spanish at the University of Sheffield). And then, when I landed in Bangkok on Wednesday 10th July 2024 as a newly realised digital nomad fully untethered from in-person commitments and my friends, more than ever, I felt guilty for taking time away from my laptop.
One year on from that trip, while I’m glad I did it – what a privilege it was to work and travel! – one hundred percent I’d do it differently, and maybe we can pick this up in a future newsletter or podcast episode.
When I got back to the UK in January 2025, I was living at home again, had no travelling to do or friends to hang out with, and anyway had no means of transportation without pestering a parent, and still was working every day but Saturday.
I think we’re getting closer to the why: If I’m not doing, I feel useless.
I don’t know if my clients noticed the changes I’d made to the colours or fonts of their worksheets, or if my social media followers recognised when I’d written captions and scripts based on questions they’d asked me rather than relying on ChatGPT to write everything by numbers.
But it didn’t matter.
By resizing fonts and writing captions that data suggested fewer and fewer people were reading, I could at least say I was working.
Are you what you are or what you do?
From July to October, I was an online coach who lost 10kgs in 10 weeks like he promised his prospective clients, but I did it all while island hopping and winning beer pong contests, never cooking a meal and barely getting a wink of sleep.
And my clients’ success rates didn’t falter either. At the time, everyone was on weight loss plans and ticking off the goals I set them – with guys, gals and NB pals reliably losing 5-10% of their bodyweight, all while reporting feeling stronger and more confident and happier in their skin.
I loved the texts and voicenotes and videocalls I had with my crew. I had increasing evidence to support my identity as a coach, and we showed that we could get results wherever we were in the world, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that my seemingly declining impact on Instagram was an indicator of my decreasing efficacy as on “online” coach.
While I was aware of religion growing up – my mum’s side are Catholic and my dad took my sister and I to a Protestant church on Sundays, and we even moved into a house whose appended kitchen was a former Wesleyan chapel – I never saw myself as religious. I loved that my mate Dan, a proud Catholic boy, used to describe me as a “crazy non-Catholic mystic” in the vein of Jack Kerouac. But what if I simply swapped my “god” for “work” and became as orthodox as anyone in my devotion?
My obsessing over the position of logos in social media videos or my all-or-nothing approach to posting schedules served [serves] no greater good, and has actually materially impacted mine and others’ enjoyment of the days we were living. A good example of this was in May last year when Beth and I found four days we could both take off to go to San Sebastian, and I insisted on posting a newsletter despite having both nothing meaningful to say and the biggest vanilla slice you’ve ever seen to get all over my face.
If I’d simply written “no newsletter this week because I’m on holiday” rather than a review of a film I’d seen at the cost of an hour or so of a perfect Spring day in Spain, I don’t think any of you would have begrudged me.
This inability to switch off is inherently capitalistic
In episode #3 of Fitness & Thinking, Alex Smith, a senior researcher at the University of Bern, and I discussed psychopathy in elite sports. And early on in, he posited that the often maniacal pursuit of greatness among professional athletes typifies neoliberalism and is inherently capitalistic. He blew my mind.
I’d not considered the ethical implications of sporting greatness in this way, and yet given the necessarily self-serving nature of elite competition – that one’s success is predicated on self-improvement and rising above – I now can’t un-see it.
Indeed, as Alex describes, in Western society, we are obsessed with a constant need for more. More performance, more results, more money, productivity, views.
For whoever has, to him more will be given, and he will have abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him.
Matthew 13:12, The Bible
I’m not for one second suggesting that you shouldn’t work. You must. Whether it’s for money or for a sense of purpose, humans sleep better when they’re physically and cognitively tired, and meaningful work can tick these boxes.
But recognising where your work ends and your non-work time starts is essential to being truly productive, i.e. getting more from less; letting your work become your life, and indeed, letting yourself become your work, as I absolutely did this past year, could be the reason why no matter how much we do, we’re never truly satisfied.

Being and becoming
I’ve always been envious of the people who can truly switch off, who can both work solidly and then enjoy their (well-earned) respite. Less non-Catholic mystic then, more non-Protestant orthodox, I can only smile [cry] at the time I’ve spent working hard on hardly working.
But nothing’s wasted if it’s learned from; there’s a difference between busy-ness and business, and hopefully, if you’re still with me, you can see it’s something I’m working on.
Podcast
Every Saturday morning, I post and host the F&T podcast, which is available on Spotify and YouTube from 8am BST.
Further reading
https://about.open.ac.uk/strategy-and-policies/facts-and-figures
https://biblehub.com/matthew/13-12.htm
https://www.indiependent.co.uk/album-review-mountainhead-everything-everything/