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The Frustration with Productivity Culture

191 points by x43b 5y ago

q_andrew 5y ago
The line about asking individual knowledge workers to optimize their own work hits me hard. I'm the only programmer in the office I work at. My boss has started telling people that they should take an hour every week to stop and think about how a small process can be done better/faster. The problem is that the longest and most important part of what they do isn't some manual task, but a mental process (they are digital artists). I doubt most people are going to intuitively solve the complexity of their own brains through introspection (as some early psychologists thought we could do). It's easier for me to 'optimize' because I can manipulate how a physical computer operates. It's hard for anyone to manipulate how their intuitive functions work besides slowly gaining experience and mastery.
- krisoft 5y ago
  I don’t know what your digital artist coworkers produce, but unless it is pure l'art pour l'art they can think about ways how to streamline processes outside of their art. How do they receive their “brief”? How is the work batched? Does it ever happen that they are asked to produce something which then gets thrown away and wasted for reasons the company could better control? Are there any missunderstandings? If the artist see themselves as simple “brief -> bitmap” converters then this is of course beyond their pigeonhole, but if they are smart and creative people, as I belive they are, they might already have ideas how to improve things. And the boss basically encouraged that those with ideas come forward, so he might believe the same! Also this “the only way to improve is slowly gaining experience and mastery” is not true. (I was paraphrasing your words) I watch many videos of great artist sharing tips. Again I don’t know what medium they work in, but in 3d work one can improve a lot by better organizing their asset library. In digital painting work I have seen people use posable human models to start sketching from. Ian Hubert shares great “lazy tutorials” on how he learned to cheat and animate complex looking things in super simple way. Just spending an hour a week reading up on tricks from others can improve ones “craft”. And what is the worst? You goof around an hour and can’t think of anything. You tell the boss that when he asks, what is he going to do? Fire you for not trying hard enough? If he does, he wanted to fire you anyway and was just fishing for an excuse.
  - q_andrew 5y ago
    This makes a lot of sense. I guess I just wondered if people end up degrading the quality of their work to maximize speed instead of inspecting their process which is another part of the artistic flow. Everything you've said here is a good refutation of my original comment.
jb1991 5y ago
Hi, productive person here. I'm also frustrated by my own productivity, tbh... some days I wish I languished more, to take in the moments as they come without any influence on my part to their outcome.
- nefitty 5y ago
  Take some of my languishing. I have plenty to spare at the moment.
mcbishop 5y ago
Is the article essentially arguing that work should be made easier for knowledge workers — so they aren't as stressed out? I assume it'd fall on these knowledge workers to build the better systems that would simplify their day-to-day work.
- stemlord 5y ago
  Yes and that's exactly what the author is saying is wrong with our current productivity culture.
jbkcc 5y ago
https://archive.is/zaWTc https://archive.is/zaWTc
mikkergp 5y ago
Maybe I'm workaholic, but do people like friction in their work? I mean, we should certainly push back against anyone that thinks that we should increase productivity through sheer force of will (or hours, or sacrificing mind and body). But I've always found the meta-work to be the most interesting part of the work. Especially if it means I can spend more time in a state of productive flow.
- hnzix 5y ago
  TFA is essentially saying orgs should have a framework that enables their staff to work smarter not harder, and that the org's ROI is not a coder's problem to solve.
theonlybutlet 5y ago
Definitely room for improving processes, think there is large scope for productivity increases just in our wider work culture. Too many people trying to CYA (Cover Your A*), things like email acknowledgments and people requesting things when they know the answer is no, but solely so they can prove they actioned something or tried to go the "extra mile".
jh0486 5y ago
It's easy to have the wrong mindset around productivity. If an individual thinks that doing more always leads to better results, they're going to have a bad time. I use productivity as a tool to have __more__ personal time and reduce stress. I really think about what I'm doing and what impact it has on my day. From what I've seen, working in large corporate environments, is that people make their own productivity prisons doing things that no one asked for or working late hours on something no one is waiting for. Individuals create the stress for themselves by trying to standout or impress others. If someone doesn't care about career progression, which I'm assuming is most of the anti-productivity crowd, they can get along just fine at almost any company doing only the minimum requirements of a role, have a fair work/life balance, and live a normal life. If someone takes a mid six figure comp package from a major tech company, they should expect to work hard going into that role. Those jobs aren't for everyone. There are plenty of less stressful work environments in technology that will pay someone a decent salary and will be much less demanding.
- uselesscynicism 5y ago
  > There are plenty of less stressful work environments in technology that will pay someone a decent salary and will be much less demanding. There are?! Could you list some examples? I would take a pay cut for fewer responsibilities if I could stay in tech and if it didn't pay like thirty grand, which is what you will make in support. How do I transition from a high stress high pay software engineer to a medium pay low stress other kind of technology worker like you have described???
  - tcoff91 5y ago
    Go work for some bigco that is coasting on a great market position of a SaaS project and you can definitely find software jobs where you can work about 30hrs a week, make around 130-180k a year, and chill hard. Only problem is that after a while you'll get really complacent and your skills may suffer. If there are layoffs and you have to find another job, you might be in trouble.
    - ehnto 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
golemiprague 5y ago
I have never felt a pressure to be more productive except from my own judgement of myself. I know when I am being lazy...
throwaway_2009 5y ago
"Sick system" effect as far as I've seen is far more prevalent at low-paid, low-status workplaces. The more you stand up for your time, both within a specific job and via choice of employer, the less stressful your life will be. In my experience, this extends to, well, everything. Put up with bullshit relationships and they'll consume you. Entertain rogue family members' nonsense and they'll push until you can no longer. You can respect yourself and be kind at the same time. Charity begins at home and all that.
Barrin92 5y ago
The problem with the entire productivity culture is just how industrialized, bureaucratic and formulaic it is. You read the piece by Newport and there is Henry Ford, the assembly line, 'knowledge work', growth, and so on. Words that don't show up once: freedom, exploration, curiosity, creativity (that does show up once in quotes technically). Everything that makes life interesting is discontinuous and surprising and unique. Productivity culture is an attempt to bureaucratize human action, a sort of individual Whig history. Newton was a genius, yet the man spent most of his life doing alchemy, trying to forecast the future with the help of the bible, and chasing dragons in the Swiss Alps, put simply, he was batshit insane and probably a failure by the standards of modern productivity gurus. Yet he also made contributions larger than anyone will ever do by filling up note-taking apps and tracking how much time they spent on their breakfast with a stopwatch.
- levinb 5y ago
  >tracking how much time they spent on their breakfast with a stopwatch Masterfully stated. One of the primary problems with this culture, and the general culture of quantified self/everything, is that the data doesn’t inform or change actual actions. Most quantification is proffered as a solution by the Anxiety Alleviation Industrial Complex. I’d argue a significant portion of consumer SaaS is just that.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    That line reminded me of the Pajama Game (1954): https://www.allmusicals.com/lyrics/pajamagamethe/thinkofthetimeisave.htm https://www.allmusicals.com/lyrics/pajamagamethe/thinkofthet... At breakfast time, I grab a bowl. And in the bowl I drop an egg, and add some juice. A poor excuse for what I crave. And then I add some oatmeal too and it comes out tasting just like glue, But think of the time I save.
  - Viliam1234 5y ago
    > One of the primary problems with this culture, and the general culture of quantified self/everything, is that the data doesn’t inform or change actual actions. It depends on how you use the collected data. I think it is psychologically similar to investing in stock market or cryptocurrencies: Some people keep refreshing the screen every minute and get crazy about microscopic increases or decreases of the stuff they own, read all the clickbait with related keywords, and after a few weeks they burn out. Other people invest some money, then forget about the whole thing for a few months, then spend one afternoon looking at the numbers and making small adjustments, then again forget about the whole thing for a few months. Just because you collect a lot of data about yourself (as the quantified-self people like to do), doesn't mean you need to review it every day. You could simply spend the minimum effort to collect the data, and then summarize it and draw conclusions once a year. I know people who collect various body statistics every day, and they just upload the logs to their computer, and later write a script that generates graphs over longer periods of time. And their conclusions are like: "hey, I made this lifestyle change a few months ago, and here my health data have improved significantly, so it was the right move"; where the health data is something like a weekly average of blood pressure. Collecting million trivial details does not necessarily prevent you from seeing the big picture. Though I guess for some personality types, the temptation to obsess over the details is irresistible. It is not enough that the big picture is okay, they need to maximize the pressure at every single detail... until the thing somehow explodes. Congratulate yourself on successfully shortening the bathroom breaks, and then get surprised when in a few months half of your workforce quits.
gandalfgeek 5y ago
The problem with "productivity gurus" is that not one of them actually has any accomplishments in an actual specialized domain (other than marketing their stuff). Conversely, as I look at all the accomplished people around me, they've quietly built a mountain of expertise and achievement with cobbled systems held together by spit and glue that a productivity hustler would scoff at.
- jh0486 5y ago
  I can't say that I agree with this. There are the productivity "influencers" who say a lot of things but don't actually live it. There is a high correlation between being a productivity based person and being successful. Most of the leaders you admire are highly productive people and employ practices to increase their productivity, they're just too busy to soapbox about it.
  - bee_rider 5y ago
    I suspect the "influencers" and the "productivity gurus" you two are talking about are the same people. A guru is a type of teacher -- the really productive people don't have time to teach anyone other than, at best, their successors.
    - adamisom 5y ago
      Or perhaps they leveraged their success to reduce the amount of “busy” they have so as to make time to amplify the mindset or practices that helped them, because they think that can be their biggest gift to the world.
  - killtimeatwork 5y ago
    > Most of the leaders you admire Perhaps you admire them. I don't, and I suspect a lot of the anti-productivity people don't as well.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  Yes. Much better to look at people who have achieved excellence in their specialty and see how they do things.
908B64B197 5y ago
Pretty much summed in two xkcds: https://xkcd.com/1319/ https://xkcd.com/1319/ https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/
aj7 5y ago
It is absurd to tie productivity to workers. An example suffices. A technician running a pair of horizontal machining centers accomplishes the finish machining of eighty automobile engine blocks in an eight hour shift. Now, he’s replaced by a robot and automatic gauging. There are two fundamental problems. In the technician reference frame, his productivity has suddenly and discontinuously fallen to zero, as he sits in fear at home. From the company reference frame, productivity has increased. I used the term reference frame, from physics, on purpose. The idea of productivity is fundamentally flawed- in our system the two views cannot be reconciled, and the discontinuity in the worker frame is also highly problematic.
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  Economic rationalism, globalism, etc have always justified that by saying the net productivity in society has increased, so the technician can be taken care of (or at worst, is collateral damage in service of the greater good). The problem is they don't account for other damage caused by that. People get a sense of purpose from work, many would actually rather work than get a welfare check. Communities are built around industries. Uncertainty and changing circumstances can have big impacts on people, more than can just be measured by subtracting their income from some balance sheet.
  - aj7 5y ago
    It’s more than that. Because of advances in technology and science, “productivity” will always increase. But to whom go the spoils? And when will we take responsibility for the losers?
    - robertlagrant 5y ago
      Not necessarily - it could be that a lot of effort goes into (for example) how products look, and how polished they are, to increase products' relative positions in their markets, instead of prioritising absolute increases in productivity for mankind.
  - mellavora 5y ago
gerdesj 5y ago
"A growing portion of my audience was clearly fed up with “productivity,” and they are not alone."
zaptheimpaler 5y ago
Ugh. Talking about the same thing over and over and over again for decades, with 5000 different books and gurus and TED talks about it does not yield ANY insight whatsoever. In fact more and more information = more noise making it even harder to find the few things that do work. Its a tragedy how the model fails utterly at building frameworks to think about things, instead just popping out endless cliches or tips. There's a reason anything you learn in college is structured and professors work hard at defining course plans - it builds up a framework, piece by piece, making sure you understand each piece before moving on to the next. The framework lets you reason about X in many contexts. The framework for productivity is not all that complicated.
Jensson 5y ago
The frustration is mostly that people want to keep and eat their cookie. They want to get selected by productive teams and work with productive teammates, but they don't want to face the pressure associated with being a productive teammate themselves. Ultimately the pressure comes from yourself, you don't have to be better than the team you are willing to work with. If you want to work on a world class team then you now put world class expectations on yourself, if you are fine working on menial tasks then you don't have any issues at all not being productive.
- Viliam1234 5y ago
  > If you want to work on a world class team then you now put world class expectations on yourself, if you are fine working on menial tasks then you don't have any issues at all not being productive. In open source it works naturally. I can contribute a trivial improvement to a project where geniuses do magic. Hey, I am not a genius, but I can still improve the documentation, or add a translation, and my humble contribution is still an improvement to the overall project; the geniuses don't mind me doing this. It just somehow doesn't work at a job. Speaking for myself, I absolutely wouldn't mind if the geniuses get 10x the salary I get; that would be completely fair. Sadly, the geniuses usually don't get paid significantly more... if you are 10x more productive, your salary is maybe 2x higher. And then the company resents having to pay 50% of the genius salary to a person who is clearly not in the same league. Also, managers love treating people as replaceable, so they e.g. estimate the effort in man-days, ignoring the fact that one person's man-day could be another person's man-week or more. From this perspective, working with geniuses is exhausting.
fergie 5y ago
Was alarmed to see an otherwise good article descend into a defense of Agile. "Agile project-management methodologies didn’t alleviate the need for programmers to strive to be better coders, but they did prevent the developers from having to excessively worry about what they should be coding and whether they had done enough" I think there are many coders here who would strongly disagree, and maybe even identify Agile as the ultimate manifestation of productivity culture.
- nickd2001 5y ago
  I agree with this, though personally I'd distinguish between Scrum (continuously sprinting, people mindlessly trying to grab as many story points as possible to impress their boss, getting in trouble if a story overruns a sprint or takes longer than the estimate), and Kanban, which to me seems less stressful and more realistic and what the author was getting at.. IMHO at least..
- Viliam1234 5y ago
  At the risk of being the No-True-Agileman... The original idea of sprint planning was to choose only as many tasks as you feel comfortable doing in given time frame. The customer specifies priority, the developers estimate effort. Also, measuring individual productivity is strictly forbidden; the team is supposed to operate as a "black box" from the management perspective. In theory, that is. In real life, in most companies there is pressure on the team to take more tasks than they feel comfortable doing. Sometimes there are external deadlines, like "all these tasks must be completed in the next two sprints, but hey guys, enjoy your AgileTM freedom to decide which ones get done in the first sprint, and which ones get done in the second sprint". Or you measure individual productivity by number of story points completed, and say "hey guys, feel free to set your own sustainable pace an enjoy your work-life ballance, but the 20% of you with least story points completed will get fired at the end of the year". Agile was meant to be a replacement for management. Instead it became management's another weapon. Because management makes the ultimate decisions about how exactly agile gets implemented at your company.
timdaub 5y ago
> Much of the professional self-improvement literature that is often hastily summarized as being about “productivity” really is not, in the sense that it focusses less on increasing your output above all else and more on nuanced goals, such as reducing stress through better organization, making smarter decisions about your time, being a good leader, or producing higher-quality results. The author's book "Deep Work" was a great lecture for me and though it used the term "productivity", I think its message lays elsewhere: Cal deliberately talks for pages about the idea of working less but prioritizing deep work. It's true that this is ultimately a "productivity" hack. Still, practicing this idea myself, I'd say I have more time of my day now "not having to be productive". I used to work shallowly for 8 hours a day. Since a year or so, I spend mostly 4 hours in the office. My "products" haven't suffered. They've become better, and so have I.
shantnutiwari 5y ago
Reading a great book-- 4000 weeks by Oliver Burkeman. He makes the great point that no matter how productive we get, we will never feel satisfied, as there will always be more to do. Instead, we need to start focusing on things that actually matter. The title 4000 weeks is the average lifespan of a human-- and Oliver make the point we get stuck in the race to be more productive, and forget to enjoy life, which is usually the reason we start the productivity race in the first place.
- playpause 5y ago
  That seems like a fatuous point to me. The productive mindset is not about satisfaction, it’s about striving. Who suggested you’ll feel more satisfied by spending more time striving? And why is ‘feeling satisfied’ assumed to be a general goal anyway? For me satisfaction is just one emotional state, one that I want to experience sometimes but not as often as a feeling of striving and achievement. For someone else it might be the other way round, and that’s fine too. There is no need to declare what “actually matters” as if you speak for everyone.
- korax_nyx 5y ago
  +1. I'm reading it too, great book, very recommended and necessary. His old writing on The Guardian: This column will change your life, never failed to made me think.
  - shantnutiwari 5y ago
    Yes, Oliver Burkeman is on my list of "Read or buy anything he writes" His book "The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking" is one my favourite books
- SyzygistSix 5y ago
  We don't forget to enjoy life; employment is offered on the basis of work 40 (or more) hours a week or you don't work at all. Working less hours for less money is rarely, if ever, a choice professionals get to make. The benefits of productivity have not gone to workers at all, even professional workers. In fact, it has been the opposite, with even high value workers being squeezed for more hours.
loughnane 5y ago
I feel like our desire for “more” is a contributor. One could just as easily use personal productivity improvements to work less. But many of us want more money, a bigger house in the right neighborhood, travel across the globe, acclaim from others, etc. If there’s no end to your wants there’s no end to the work.
ladyattis 5y ago
I think the problem is that people keep using industrial/factory models of productivity to figure out if non-industrial workers are productive (have you upsold X amount of times at the drive-thru, have you done Y commits to the repo, etc). These attempts to produce meaningful enumeration of work ultimately misses the point of what the work is about. In software development, we're largely tasked with either solving a novel scenario or automating drudgery (usually the latter but the former does happen). In either case the metric that should be used is how little work your users/clients have to do to benefit from your product. If your user/clients have to do more work to make sure their use of the app is reliable then you have problems and you should track that. But you can't track it with arbitrary measurements of commits per developer or how many weeks it takes to fix the problem (it could be multiple problems). At best, you can measure how reliable your developers are at solving those problems. How fast beyond a certain point doesn't matter (usually the time frame of your biggest clients).

191 points by x43b 5y ago

The line about asking individual knowledge workers to optimize their own work hits me hard. I'm the only programmer in the office I work at. My boss has started telling people that they should take an hour every week to stop and think about how a small process can be done better/faster. The problem is that the longest and most important part of what they do isn't some manual task, but a mental process (they are digital artists). I doubt most people are going to intuitively solve the complexity of their own brains through introspection (as some early psychologists thought we could do). It's easier for me to 'optimize' because I can manipulate how a physical computer operates. It's hard for anyone to manipulate how their intuitive functions work besides slowly gaining experience and mastery.

krisoft 5y ago
I don’t know what your digital artist coworkers produce, but unless it is pure l'art pour l'art they can think about ways how to streamline processes outside of their art. How do they receive their “brief”? How is the work batched? Does it ever happen that they are asked to produce something which then gets thrown away and wasted for reasons the company could better control? Are there any missunderstandings? If the artist see themselves as simple “brief -> bitmap” converters then this is of course beyond their pigeonhole, but if they are smart and creative people, as I belive they are, they might already have ideas how to improve things. And the boss basically encouraged that those with ideas come forward, so he might believe the same! Also this “the only way to improve is slowly gaining experience and mastery” is not true. (I was paraphrasing your words) I watch many videos of great artist sharing tips. Again I don’t know what medium they work in, but in 3d work one can improve a lot by better organizing their asset library. In digital painting work I have seen people use posable human models to start sketching from. Ian Hubert shares great “lazy tutorials” on how he learned to cheat and animate complex looking things in super simple way. Just spending an hour a week reading up on tricks from others can improve ones “craft”. And what is the worst? You goof around an hour and can’t think of anything. You tell the boss that when he asks, what is he going to do? Fire you for not trying hard enough? If he does, he wanted to fire you anyway and was just fishing for an excuse.
- q_andrew 5y ago
  This makes a lot of sense. I guess I just wondered if people end up degrading the quality of their work to maximize speed instead of inspecting their process which is another part of the artistic flow. Everything you've said here is a good refutation of my original comment.

jb1991 5y ago

Hi, productive person here. I'm also frustrated by my own productivity, tbh... some days I wish I languished more, to take in the moments as they come without any influence on my part to their outcome.

nefitty 5y ago
Take some of my languishing. I have plenty to spare at the moment.

mcbishop 5y ago

Is the article essentially arguing that work should be made easier for knowledge workers — so they aren't as stressed out? I assume it'd fall on these knowledge workers to build the better systems that would simplify their day-to-day work.

stemlord 5y ago
Yes and that's exactly what the author is saying is wrong with our current productivity culture.

jbkcc 5y ago

https://archive.is/zaWTc https://archive.is/zaWTc

mikkergp 5y ago

Maybe I'm workaholic, but do people like friction in their work? I mean, we should certainly push back against anyone that thinks that we should increase productivity through sheer force of will (or hours, or sacrificing mind and body). But I've always found the meta-work to be the most interesting part of the work. Especially if it means I can spend more time in a state of productive flow.

hnzix 5y ago
TFA is essentially saying orgs should have a framework that enables their staff to work smarter not harder, and that the org's ROI is not a coder's problem to solve.

theonlybutlet 5y ago

Definitely room for improving processes, think there is large scope for productivity increases just in our wider work culture. Too many people trying to CYA (Cover Your A*), things like email acknowledgments and people requesting things when they know the answer is no, but solely so they can prove they actioned something or tried to go the "extra mile".

jh0486 5y ago

It's easy to have the wrong mindset around productivity. If an individual thinks that doing more always leads to better results, they're going to have a bad time. I use productivity as a tool to have __more__ personal time and reduce stress. I really think about what I'm doing and what impact it has on my day. From what I've seen, working in large corporate environments, is that people make their own productivity prisons doing things that no one asked for or working late hours on something no one is waiting for. Individuals create the stress for themselves by trying to standout or impress others. If someone doesn't care about career progression, which I'm assuming is most of the anti-productivity crowd, they can get along just fine at almost any company doing only the minimum requirements of a role, have a fair work/life balance, and live a normal life. If someone takes a mid six figure comp package from a major tech company, they should expect to work hard going into that role. Those jobs aren't for everyone. There are plenty of less stressful work environments in technology that will pay someone a decent salary and will be much less demanding.

uselesscynicism 5y ago
> There are plenty of less stressful work environments in technology that will pay someone a decent salary and will be much less demanding. There are?! Could you list some examples? I would take a pay cut for fewer responsibilities if I could stay in tech and if it didn't pay like thirty grand, which is what you will make in support. How do I transition from a high stress high pay software engineer to a medium pay low stress other kind of technology worker like you have described???
- tcoff91 5y ago
  Go work for some bigco that is coasting on a great market position of a SaaS project and you can definitely find software jobs where you can work about 30hrs a week, make around 130-180k a year, and chill hard. Only problem is that after a while you'll get really complacent and your skills may suffer. If there are layoffs and you have to find another job, you might be in trouble.
  - ehnto 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

golemiprague 5y ago

I have never felt a pressure to be more productive except from my own judgement of myself. I know when I am being lazy...

throwaway_2009 5y ago

"Sick system" effect as far as I've seen is far more prevalent at low-paid, low-status workplaces. The more you stand up for your time, both within a specific job and via choice of employer, the less stressful your life will be. In my experience, this extends to, well, everything. Put up with bullshit relationships and they'll consume you. Entertain rogue family members' nonsense and they'll push until you can no longer. You can respect yourself and be kind at the same time. Charity begins at home and all that.

Barrin92 5y ago

The problem with the entire productivity culture is just how industrialized, bureaucratic and formulaic it is. You read the piece by Newport and there is Henry Ford, the assembly line, 'knowledge work', growth, and so on. Words that don't show up once: freedom, exploration, curiosity, creativity (that does show up once in quotes technically). Everything that makes life interesting is discontinuous and surprising and unique. Productivity culture is an attempt to bureaucratize human action, a sort of individual Whig history. Newton was a genius, yet the man spent most of his life doing alchemy, trying to forecast the future with the help of the bible, and chasing dragons in the Swiss Alps, put simply, he was batshit insane and probably a failure by the standards of modern productivity gurus. Yet he also made contributions larger than anyone will ever do by filling up note-taking apps and tracking how much time they spent on their breakfast with a stopwatch.

levinb 5y ago
>tracking how much time they spent on their breakfast with a stopwatch Masterfully stated. One of the primary problems with this culture, and the general culture of quantified self/everything, is that the data doesn’t inform or change actual actions. Most quantification is proffered as a solution by the Anxiety Alleviation Industrial Complex. I’d argue a significant portion of consumer SaaS is just that.
- pjc50 5y ago
  That line reminded me of the Pajama Game (1954): https://www.allmusicals.com/lyrics/pajamagamethe/thinkofthetimeisave.htm https://www.allmusicals.com/lyrics/pajamagamethe/thinkofthet... At breakfast time, I grab a bowl. And in the bowl I drop an egg, and add some juice. A poor excuse for what I crave. And then I add some oatmeal too and it comes out tasting just like glue, But think of the time I save.
- Viliam1234 5y ago
  > One of the primary problems with this culture, and the general culture of quantified self/everything, is that the data doesn’t inform or change actual actions. It depends on how you use the collected data. I think it is psychologically similar to investing in stock market or cryptocurrencies: Some people keep refreshing the screen every minute and get crazy about microscopic increases or decreases of the stuff they own, read all the clickbait with related keywords, and after a few weeks they burn out. Other people invest some money, then forget about the whole thing for a few months, then spend one afternoon looking at the numbers and making small adjustments, then again forget about the whole thing for a few months. Just because you collect a lot of data about yourself (as the quantified-self people like to do), doesn't mean you need to review it every day. You could simply spend the minimum effort to collect the data, and then summarize it and draw conclusions once a year. I know people who collect various body statistics every day, and they just upload the logs to their computer, and later write a script that generates graphs over longer periods of time. And their conclusions are like: "hey, I made this lifestyle change a few months ago, and here my health data have improved significantly, so it was the right move"; where the health data is something like a weekly average of blood pressure. Collecting million trivial details does not necessarily prevent you from seeing the big picture. Though I guess for some personality types, the temptation to obsess over the details is irresistible. It is not enough that the big picture is okay, they need to maximize the pressure at every single detail... until the thing somehow explodes. Congratulate yourself on successfully shortening the bathroom breaks, and then get surprised when in a few months half of your workforce quits.

gandalfgeek 5y ago

The problem with "productivity gurus" is that not one of them actually has any accomplishments in an actual specialized domain (other than marketing their stuff). Conversely, as I look at all the accomplished people around me, they've quietly built a mountain of expertise and achievement with cobbled systems held together by spit and glue that a productivity hustler would scoff at.

jh0486 5y ago
I can't say that I agree with this. There are the productivity "influencers" who say a lot of things but don't actually live it. There is a high correlation between being a productivity based person and being successful. Most of the leaders you admire are highly productive people and employ practices to increase their productivity, they're just too busy to soapbox about it.
- bee_rider 5y ago
  I suspect the "influencers" and the "productivity gurus" you two are talking about are the same people. A guru is a type of teacher -- the really productive people don't have time to teach anyone other than, at best, their successors.
  - adamisom 5y ago
    Or perhaps they leveraged their success to reduce the amount of “busy” they have so as to make time to amplify the mindset or practices that helped them, because they think that can be their biggest gift to the world.
- killtimeatwork 5y ago
  > Most of the leaders you admire Perhaps you admire them. I don't, and I suspect a lot of the anti-productivity people don't as well.
spaetzleesser 5y ago
Yes. Much better to look at people who have achieved excellence in their specialty and see how they do things.

908B64B197 5y ago

Pretty much summed in two xkcds: https://xkcd.com/1319/ https://xkcd.com/1319/ https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/

aj7 5y ago

It is absurd to tie productivity to workers. An example suffices. A technician running a pair of horizontal machining centers accomplishes the finish machining of eighty automobile engine blocks in an eight hour shift. Now, he’s replaced by a robot and automatic gauging. There are two fundamental problems. In the technician reference frame, his productivity has suddenly and discontinuously fallen to zero, as he sits in fear at home. From the company reference frame, productivity has increased. I used the term reference frame, from physics, on purpose. The idea of productivity is fundamentally flawed- in our system the two views cannot be reconciled, and the discontinuity in the worker frame is also highly problematic.

throwawaylinux 5y ago
Economic rationalism, globalism, etc have always justified that by saying the net productivity in society has increased, so the technician can be taken care of (or at worst, is collateral damage in service of the greater good). The problem is they don't account for other damage caused by that. People get a sense of purpose from work, many would actually rather work than get a welfare check. Communities are built around industries. Uncertainty and changing circumstances can have big impacts on people, more than can just be measured by subtracting their income from some balance sheet.
- aj7 5y ago
  It’s more than that. Because of advances in technology and science, “productivity” will always increase. But to whom go the spoils? And when will we take responsibility for the losers?
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    Not necessarily - it could be that a lot of effort goes into (for example) how products look, and how polished they are, to increase products' relative positions in their markets, instead of prioritising absolute increases in productivity for mankind.
- mellavora 5y ago

gerdesj 5y ago

"A growing portion of my audience was clearly fed up with “productivity,” and they are not alone."

zaptheimpaler 5y ago

Ugh. Talking about the same thing over and over and over again for decades, with 5000 different books and gurus and TED talks about it does not yield ANY insight whatsoever. In fact more and more information = more noise making it even harder to find the few things that do work. Its a tragedy how the model fails utterly at building frameworks to think about things, instead just popping out endless cliches or tips. There's a reason anything you learn in college is structured and professors work hard at defining course plans - it builds up a framework, piece by piece, making sure you understand each piece before moving on to the next. The framework lets you reason about X in many contexts. The framework for productivity is not all that complicated.

Jensson 5y ago

The frustration is mostly that people want to keep and eat their cookie. They want to get selected by productive teams and work with productive teammates, but they don't want to face the pressure associated with being a productive teammate themselves. Ultimately the pressure comes from yourself, you don't have to be better than the team you are willing to work with. If you want to work on a world class team then you now put world class expectations on yourself, if you are fine working on menial tasks then you don't have any issues at all not being productive.

Viliam1234 5y ago
> If you want to work on a world class team then you now put world class expectations on yourself, if you are fine working on menial tasks then you don't have any issues at all not being productive. In open source it works naturally. I can contribute a trivial improvement to a project where geniuses do magic. Hey, I am not a genius, but I can still improve the documentation, or add a translation, and my humble contribution is still an improvement to the overall project; the geniuses don't mind me doing this. It just somehow doesn't work at a job. Speaking for myself, I absolutely wouldn't mind if the geniuses get 10x the salary I get; that would be completely fair. Sadly, the geniuses usually don't get paid significantly more... if you are 10x more productive, your salary is maybe 2x higher. And then the company resents having to pay 50% of the genius salary to a person who is clearly not in the same league. Also, managers love treating people as replaceable, so they e.g. estimate the effort in man-days, ignoring the fact that one person's man-day could be another person's man-week or more. From this perspective, working with geniuses is exhausting.

fergie 5y ago

Was alarmed to see an otherwise good article descend into a defense of Agile. "Agile project-management methodologies didn’t alleviate the need for programmers to strive to be better coders, but they did prevent the developers from having to excessively worry about what they should be coding and whether they had done enough" I think there are many coders here who would strongly disagree, and maybe even identify Agile as the ultimate manifestation of productivity culture.

nickd2001 5y ago
I agree with this, though personally I'd distinguish between Scrum (continuously sprinting, people mindlessly trying to grab as many story points as possible to impress their boss, getting in trouble if a story overruns a sprint or takes longer than the estimate), and Kanban, which to me seems less stressful and more realistic and what the author was getting at.. IMHO at least..
Viliam1234 5y ago
At the risk of being the No-True-Agileman... The original idea of sprint planning was to choose only as many tasks as you feel comfortable doing in given time frame. The customer specifies priority, the developers estimate effort. Also, measuring individual productivity is strictly forbidden; the team is supposed to operate as a "black box" from the management perspective. In theory, that is. In real life, in most companies there is pressure on the team to take more tasks than they feel comfortable doing. Sometimes there are external deadlines, like "all these tasks must be completed in the next two sprints, but hey guys, enjoy your AgileTM freedom to decide which ones get done in the first sprint, and which ones get done in the second sprint". Or you measure individual productivity by number of story points completed, and say "hey guys, feel free to set your own sustainable pace an enjoy your work-life ballance, but the 20% of you with least story points completed will get fired at the end of the year". Agile was meant to be a replacement for management. Instead it became management's another weapon. Because management makes the ultimate decisions about how exactly agile gets implemented at your company.

timdaub 5y ago

> Much of the professional self-improvement literature that is often hastily summarized as being about “productivity” really is not, in the sense that it focusses less on increasing your output above all else and more on nuanced goals, such as reducing stress through better organization, making smarter decisions about your time, being a good leader, or producing higher-quality results. The author's book "Deep Work" was a great lecture for me and though it used the term "productivity", I think its message lays elsewhere: Cal deliberately talks for pages about the idea of working less but prioritizing deep work. It's true that this is ultimately a "productivity" hack. Still, practicing this idea myself, I'd say I have more time of my day now "not having to be productive". I used to work shallowly for 8 hours a day. Since a year or so, I spend mostly 4 hours in the office. My "products" haven't suffered. They've become better, and so have I.

shantnutiwari 5y ago

Reading a great book-- 4000 weeks by Oliver Burkeman. He makes the great point that no matter how productive we get, we will never feel satisfied, as there will always be more to do. Instead, we need to start focusing on things that actually matter. The title 4000 weeks is the average lifespan of a human-- and Oliver make the point we get stuck in the race to be more productive, and forget to enjoy life, which is usually the reason we start the productivity race in the first place.

playpause 5y ago
That seems like a fatuous point to me. The productive mindset is not about satisfaction, it’s about striving. Who suggested you’ll feel more satisfied by spending more time striving? And why is ‘feeling satisfied’ assumed to be a general goal anyway? For me satisfaction is just one emotional state, one that I want to experience sometimes but not as often as a feeling of striving and achievement. For someone else it might be the other way round, and that’s fine too. There is no need to declare what “actually matters” as if you speak for everyone.
korax_nyx 5y ago
+1. I'm reading it too, great book, very recommended and necessary. His old writing on The Guardian: This column will change your life, never failed to made me think.
- shantnutiwari 5y ago
  Yes, Oliver Burkeman is on my list of "Read or buy anything he writes" His book "The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking" is one my favourite books
SyzygistSix 5y ago
We don't forget to enjoy life; employment is offered on the basis of work 40 (or more) hours a week or you don't work at all. Working less hours for less money is rarely, if ever, a choice professionals get to make. The benefits of productivity have not gone to workers at all, even professional workers. In fact, it has been the opposite, with even high value workers being squeezed for more hours.

loughnane 5y ago

I feel like our desire for “more” is a contributor. One could just as easily use personal productivity improvements to work less. But many of us want more money, a bigger house in the right neighborhood, travel across the globe, acclaim from others, etc. If there’s no end to your wants there’s no end to the work.

ladyattis 5y ago

I think the problem is that people keep using industrial/factory models of productivity to figure out if non-industrial workers are productive (have you upsold X amount of times at the drive-thru, have you done Y commits to the repo, etc). These attempts to produce meaningful enumeration of work ultimately misses the point of what the work is about. In software development, we're largely tasked with either solving a novel scenario or automating drudgery (usually the latter but the former does happen). In either case the metric that should be used is how little work your users/clients have to do to benefit from your product. If your user/clients have to do more work to make sure their use of the app is reliable then you have problems and you should track that. But you can't track it with arbitrary measurements of commits per developer or how many weeks it takes to fix the problem (it could be multiple problems). At best, you can measure how reliable your developers are at solving those problems. How fast beyond a certain point doesn't matter (usually the time frame of your biggest clients).