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'Productivity Is Dangerous' (theoutline.com)
Vincent Bevins, writing for The Outline: So every morning, I get messages asking me to click through to articles like "How I Optimized My Morning Routine To Get More Done Than ever -- before 8 a.m.!" The people posting links like this have a sickness, and we need to stop it before it gets out of hand. Of course, if you actually click through to this trash, it's a bit shocking to see what they actually do. Some guy is proud that he set aside his social life so that he could unleash four extremely psychologically damaging apps on the world by the age of 30. Or it's like, "Congratulate Lisa on her new job as advertising director for Nestle in Africa." Here's a productivity idea: Just, fucking, don't make shitty apps, or do advertising for Nestle, or really for anything. I often see shit like, "Ten Habits I Have QUIT to Get More Done," and I think, "Maybe quit writing posts like this." If you're waking up at 4 a.m. to write 1,000 words about how you write 1,000 words every day, what are you actually getting done? Just stay in bed. Whenever I am back in the Protestant centers of modern capitalism (New York or London, basically), it's especially jarring to remember what it feels like to treat being busy as if it were a virtue.
well that was a waste of time!
I have never really thought of productivity as how many hours of work I was able to fit into the day. It has always been how much output can I get for a given amount of input. Essentially how can I get more done with less effort. I'm not saying that is a better definition, but it is always how I have thought of it.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
"Without fail, it’s the most privileged people who feel the need to Do Something"
Yeah, maybe that's why they're "privileged".
How did this anti-capitalist bullshit rant make it to "news for nerds, stuff that matters"?
Do you have ESP?
"So every morning, I get messages asking me to click through to articles like "How I Optimized My Morning Routine To Get More Done Than ever -"
Well, just don't read these messages and you'll be amazed how much shit you can do during that time.
The author is incorrectly using "productive" (i.e. getting work done) and "busy" (i.e. doing stuff) interchangeably, when the two actually have distinct meanings. Which is somewhat ironic, since he's basically trying to argue that there's an important distinction being lost...which is exactly the distinction he seems to be unaware of.
Once you swap out "productivity" for "busyness", you quickly realize what he's really getting at: the pursuit of busyness without productivity is a waste of time. Which is an obvious fact that most of us figured out early in our careers, but I guess kudos to him for coming to that realization?
One of the early lessons in life I learned was, it wasn't how hard you worked, it was only important to work hard when the boss was looking. If you worked hard, and finished early, and the boss came around, you didn't do enough. If you didn't work at all when the boss wasn't looking but was busy when he showed up, you were okay.
That was 30 years ago, and it is still true today. Optics are the only thing that matters.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
My problem as I'm getting older (42 now...) is that I have a life outside of IT/technology. I've got a family, house and 2 children. That doesn't mean I'm some lazy middle manager or project manager clawing my way up the ladder to a no-work position and abandoning life-long learning. The issue I have is that younger people who haven't had the benefit of a life outside of tech are pumping out thing after thing after thing...and they're just different enough from each other and what's come before that you have to spend time looking at all of it or risk falling behind. The first dotcom bubble had the 25-year-old CEO, and this time we have relentless social media and DevOps tool companies. Amazon, Microsoft, Google and name-your-startup must have their employees permanently connected to a Red Bull IV to get that much work out of them.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with hard work...I do it every day. What I don't think the Millennial crowd has had yet is a good stomping from their employers to give them some perspective. Just like the last bubble, the VC funding is going to dry up for the startups, and the established tech companies are going to pull back and wait for a recovery. The free meals, bring-your-dog-to-work environments and concierge service are going to be replaced with layoff notices. And while these people will have many accomplishments under their belt, I'll bet some of them are going to wake up, look around and realize they've been giving 90 or 100 hours a week to an employer who just threw them out on the street.
Don't live to work...companies are not going to be loyal to you anymore. Work hard, give good value for money, but slow down and enjoy your life while you can.
The most important thing about the Protestant work ethic is not that Protestants think being busy is a virtue, it's that they use that so-called ethic to put people who don't fit their idea of "busy" down. It's there to ostracize people who don't fit into their mold. If they don't like you, you can't be busy or productive enough - they will find or invent a justification and persecute you with that.
Don't trust any concentration of power.