Slow Productivity

Intro

• John Mcphee - staring at branches for two weeks
• “I want to instead propose an entirely new way for you, your small business, or your large employer to think about what it means to get things done.”
  • Don’t think he really achieves this, feels more like one off tips. No talk about conversations to have or even how to define productivity in a new way. No mentions of ROWE or setting KPIs, and having those be the north star. Or how to have a convo with your boss about implementing something like this. Or clients if you’re a freelancer.

Foundations

The rise and fall of psuedo-productivity

• CBS - Leslie Moonves - half empty office at 330 friday
  • Zuiker shows up with CSI
  • Really confused as to how these might apply to the workplace. So far, these are about the people going all in on their one big idea, rather than all of the other workers at CBS managing their jobs & bosses. Zuiker wasn’t employed by CBS, he had a dream. He couldn’t get fired, just rejected. He’s not a counter to psuedo-productivity, it feels like he’s tangential.

A slower alternative

• Slow food movement
  • “Petrini’s two big ideas for developing reform movements — focus on alternatives to what’s wrong and draw these solutions from time-tested traditions — are obviously not restricted to food in any fundamental sense. They can apply to any setting in which a haphazard modernism is conflicting with the human experience.”
• Knowledge work definition
  • “The economic activity in which knowledge is transformed into an artifact with market value through the application of cognitive effort.”
    • Does Cal lose usefulness or practicality, by using such a broad definition here? ‘Artifact’ is so general, I feel like it would’ve been more helpful to break it down for different types of people, or create categories of artifacts one might create.
• Core Thesis
  • “By this definition, for example, writers are knowledge workers, as are philosophers, scientists, musicians, playwrights, and artists. These more traditional cognitive professions, of course, are often more rarefied than standard office jobs—professional musicians, or renaissance scientists supported by patrons, have way more flexibility and options in designing their work life than, say, an HR coordinator. It’s easy to therefore reject these case studies with a dismissive nod to privilege. (I can see the tweet now: “It must be nice to have Lorenzo de’ Medici paying your bills!”) Though satisfying, this isn’t a useful response, given our broader goals. It’s exactly these rarefied freedoms that make traditional knowledge workers interesting to our project, as it provides them the space and time needed to experiment and figure out what works best when it comes to sustainably creating valuable things using the human brain. Of course, most of us cannot directly replicate the specific details of, say, John McPhee’s workday. What we’re looking for, however, is not a blueprint to follow exactly, but general ideas that we can export from this exotic territory to the more pragmatic constraints of standard twenty-first-century knowledge sector jobs. I might not be able to spend two full weeks lying on a picnic table in my backyard, but there’s a key insight lurking in that story about the value of slowing down to prepare to tackle a hard project. If we can get over our frustration that these traditional knowledge workers enjoyed privileges that we don’t have access to, we might find in their experience the foundations for a conception of productivity that makes our harder jobs more manageable.”
• Who the book is for

  • “Though this book is about knowledge work productivity in general, it targets in particular anyone who has a reasonable degree of autonomy in their job. This obviously includes freelancers, solopreneurs, and those who run small businesses. Pseudo-productivity’s presence in these particular settings is not due to a boss’s demands but is instead largely self-imposed, which opens up vast potential for individual experimentation. My imagined audience, however, also includes those who might work for larger employers but still enjoy significant freedom in how they go about their work. As a professor, for example, I fall into this latter definition, as would, say, a product designer who is expected to effectively disappear until she’s ready to bring a new idea back to the team, or a fully remote worker whose output is tracked only at a rough granularity.

    Those who instead work in an office environment under close supervision might have a harder time fully instituting the strategies I suggest. As will those whose efforts are highly structured, such as a doctor moving through an inflexible patient schedule, or a first-year law associate evaluated primarily on their accumulation of billable hours.”