The Frustration with Productivity Culture

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, &#x27;knowledge work&#x27;, growth, and so on.<p>Words that don&#x27;t show up once: freedom, exploration, curiosity, creativity (that does show up once in quotes technically).<p>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.<p>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.

It&#x27;s easy to have the wrong mindset around productivity. If an individual thinks that doing more always leads to better results, they&#x27;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&#x27;m doing and what impact it has on my day.<p>From what I&#x27;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.<p>If someone doesn&#x27;t care about career progression, which I&#x27;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&#x2F;life balance, and live a normal life.<p>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&#x27;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.

The problem with &quot;productivity gurus&quot; is that not one of them actually has any accomplishments in an actual specialized domain (other than marketing their stuff).<p>Conversely, as I look at all the accomplished people around me, they&#x27;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.

The line about asking individual knowledge workers to optimize their own work hits me hard. I&#x27;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&#x2F;faster. The problem is that the longest and most important part of what they do isn&#x27;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&#x27;s easier for me to &#x27;optimize&#x27; because I can manipulate how a physical computer operates. It&#x27;s hard for anyone to manipulate how their intuitive functions work besides slowly gaining experience and mastery.

Maybe I&#x27;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&#x27;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.

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.

&gt; 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.<p>The author&#x27;s book &quot;Deep Work&quot; was a great lecture for me and though it used the term &quot;productivity&quot;, I think its message lays elsewhere:<p>Cal deliberately talks for pages about the idea of working less but prioritizing deep work. It&#x27;s true that this is ultimately a &quot;productivity&quot; hack. Still, practicing this idea myself, I&#x27;d say I have more time of my day now &quot;not having to be productive&quot;.<p>I used to work shallowly for 8 hours a day. Since a year or so, I spend mostly 4 hours in the office. My &quot;products&quot; haven&#x27;t suffered. They&#x27;ve become better, and so have I.

Was alarmed to see an otherwise good article descend into a defense of Agile.<p>&quot;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&quot;<p>I think there are many coders here who would strongly disagree, and maybe even identify Agile as the ultimate manifestation of productivity culture.

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.<p>Its a tragedy how the model fails utterly at building frameworks to think about things, instead just popping out endless cliches or tips. There&#x27;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.

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&#x27;t want to face the pressure associated with being a productive teammate themselves. Ultimately the pressure comes from yourself, you don&#x27;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&#x27;t have any issues at all not being productive.

Reading a great book-- 4000 weeks by Oliver Burkeman.<p>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.<p>Instead, we need to start focusing on things that actually matter.<p>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.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;zaWTc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;zaWTc</a>

I think the problem is that people keep using industrial&#x2F;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&#x27;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&#x2F;clients have to do to benefit from your product. If your user&#x2F;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&#x27;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&#x27;t matter (usually the time frame of your biggest clients).

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 &quot;extra mile&quot;.

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

Is the article essentially arguing that work should be made easier for knowledge workers — so they aren&#x27;t as stressed out? I assume it&#x27;d fall on these knowledge workers to build the better systems that would simplify their day-to-day work.

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

Pretty much summed in two xkcds:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1319&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1319&#x2F;</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1205&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1205&#x2F;</a>

Hi, productive person here. I&#x27;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.