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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.
"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.
Just swap their morning joe with decaf. Epidemic averted.
It is the most productive use you will ever find for your time.
First law of people: People are generally stupid.
well that was a waste of time!
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.
Yet, there were movies starring real actors about fake actors making fake movies. There are stage-shows starring real actors about making fake stage shows. There are movies starring real actors about fake actors making fake shows. Same for television shows, etc. The point is, if they're being paid then who are they to not take the easy approach? Write or otherwise create content for what you know if they'll pay for for it.
Now, it's pretty stupid for everyone else (or anyone else) to pay good money for this kind of stuff, but that's another discussion.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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
It reads like an extended /. rant that gets modded up to +3 before finally being modded back down to -1 troll. Who greenlit this?
People are more productive because we live in an incredibly competitive world. There's 6 billion+ people out there are most are dirt poor and a good chunk of them can work 12 hr/day 7 days a week for 20 years before dying of a heart attack. That's your competition. And as productivity increases there's less work to go around and more competition for what's left.
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I'm gone fishing
I got me a line
Nothing I do is gonna make the difference
So I'm taking the time
And you ain't never gonna be happy
Anyhow, anyway
So I'm gone fishing
And I'm going today
L'Idiot
WTF is this clown yapping about??? I honestly don't get what his point is, if anything.
"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.
NT ;)
200+ words to say...what, again?
Productivity Is Dangerous
That's why I spend my day reading /.
[ And to chill from reading the news, which, more often than not nowadays, makes me angry. ]
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
as stated in title
Remember if you aren't using your time productively to bring about the singularity in the future the singularity may resurrect you and punish you for your frivolous waste of time (humbug advertising for Nestle indeed).
The more productive people we have, the more the rest of us slackers can sit around enjoying cheap tech (and no jobs)!
Hit the "spam" button on your email client and move on with your day.
I don't respond to AC's.
Your Facebook user name and data are scraped to be added to whatever a company may have on you, when clicking on these liked spam links. The information will sit forever growing, or be used to target ads at you and your friends. Never click on these links, or take an "IQ" or "trivia" test on Facebook. People that do that are unwittingly giving a little bit more of their privacy, including their thought processes, away.
... and for them, productivity is important. I agree that most productivity *advice* is BS, but productivity itself, is not. People differ. If you're happy to accomplish little in your life - fine. Enjoy. Other people are different. They're just as entitled as you are to their own goals and priorities - whatever they are. Don't go telling them their goals are not important, or wrong. That's rude.
"Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff."
Actually Communism's usual failure mode is the opposite.
In general the problem is that "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" rewards the needy and punishes the capable. You very quickly get people manufacturing needs and faking their hard work under communism.
Capitalisms main failure modes are that it can't really handle anything that you can't exclude others from using unless they pay (which includes most art, any sort of large scale infrastructure subject to network effects, and) and that it degrades badly if individual actors can lie to each other (snake oil salsemen, bait and switch, etc.) Under capitalism you tend to get essential infrastructure owned by huge monopolies and rampant scamming.
That's why most modern economies are a hybrid with a private sector that is regulated to prevent monopolies and fraud, and a public sector that collects taxes and pays for some amount of infrastructure.
"There's a sucker born every minute" W.C. Fields
All the Internet did is to make it easier to find an exponentially greater number of suckers. Can you blame them, really?
The whole Protestant Work Ethic is based on the premise that if you're successful, then God will favor you and you'll be guaranteed entry to Heaven.
Where on earth did you get that idea? You have it backwards. The concept behind the Protestant Work Ethic is that is that hard work, discipline and frugality are a result of belief in the values espoused by the Protestant faith. In other words, doing what you need to do to get into Heaven will also bring you material rewards in this life.
exactly what he is ranting about?
The grammar is too horrific to discern the exact subject.
You very quickly get people manufacturing needs and faking their hard work under communism.
Well, maybe the latter, but asking for simple toilet paper is hardly "manufacturing needs".
Ezekiel 23:20
If you let anyone say what they want in an attention-seeking environment, you get overloaded with garbage. To paraphrase, "A thousand bloggers, given infinite time, will eventually produce a collection of worthwhile and well-considered life hacks." These articles are distracting clickbait masquerading as productivity tips... wholly counterproductive.
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?
I realized this in my 20s. I decided that there was something called "the non-product" that society produces to make up for the fact that we can produce necessary goods with so few people.
Another way I've put it here on Slashdot is that in our search for a better substitute, so far all we've come up with is "war and Facebook".
So. As obnoxious and pointless as their blog, or app, or whatever other "productivity" is, at least it's not raining actual fire down on you... yet.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
ROTFLMAO
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.
Next up on Slashdot, "Old Man Yells At Cloud". What happened next will astonish you!
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
A corollary is that when you come in early or stay late, make sure everyone knows. When you come in late or leave early, sneak out the back.
mostly because it's so badly written. By 'Do Something' here means to work really hard and not get anything really worth while out of it. e.g. the whole 'keeping up with the Jones'. It's like that line from Clerks (I think, you can keep me honest here if I'm wrong): "I may not live well but at least I don't have to work hard to do it".
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"You very quickly get people manufacturing needs and faking their hard work under communism."
Sure, capitalism doesn't have anybody manufacturing needs and faking their hard work.
Except, in the world's capitalist bastion (the USA) research suggests anybody who says they work more than 40 hours a week is lying, most white collar workers actually do more like two or three cumulative hours of productive work a day, the performance you get from an executive is inversely proportional to their salary, and entire job classes, many of them "elite," are demonstrably no better than flipping coins (e.g. financial managers).
Lying about your usefulness and inventing make work to keep the proles in line isn't a communist thing. It's a more-than-one-person-in-a-group thing. Actually, I bet most people isolated in the wilderness would also lie to themselves about how much work they actually did.
Your definition isn't quite correct, but it's better than that of the subject of the article. Yours is the definition of efficiency. Productivity would be the total output. The one in the article is something else... stupidity?
Exactly. In my field of academia, the only thing that really counts is number of publications. So you have a couple of people that sit at their desk from 9-5, but many that do 99% of their best work in the middle of the night and never show up at the office. Both get good work done.
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wrong. Productivity is output per unit of input. Usually the input is labour hours.
Funnily enough there's a word for output. Can you guess what it is?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Boost your productivity with this one neat trick.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
And you sound like a protestant cuck who's been slaved away their entire life. Stockholm syndrome. Look it up, bub.
Only if you live in an uncivilized culture where people *use toilet paper*. Gross.
You know what works a million times better? Not slacking off when you're done. Go ask your boss for more work and pretty soon you'll be a favorite rather than just coasting along. That is, unless he's a terrible boss in which case you should find another job.
Your advice seems like a solid path towards mediocrity. Take some pride in your work.
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Your strategy have probably worked out fine towards your bosses. However, have you considered your team mates?
If I ask you for something, but get the fifth lousy excuse as to why you cannot and will not do anything, I'll just start working around you instead. And if I get to chance, I'll happily back-stab you to get rid of the drag on the team.
How many jobs and teams did you say you've been with over the last 30 years?
Stop shilling for Big Toilet Paper. Stick it to The Man and get a bidet.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
And it's free too:
Imagine that you're going to die today when you lie in bed and close your eyes, it's going to be forever. Try to be able to say "Yup. Had a good run, it's been worth it".
If you can say that: You win.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
https://xkcd.com/874/
It's just like we saw the flaws in colonialism. You not only have to pacify the area, you have to do administration and these ingrates hate you for bringing civilization, progress and diseases.
It's way better to let them administer themselves and pay for their resources with guns so they can shoot each other instead of your soldiers.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I want to be able when I close my eyes forever to say that I got the most enjoyment out of what's been possible. I want to be able to look back and say "Yup. Was worth it."
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Unlike the heaven lie, people can see through the materialistic one. That's why communism failed while religion still works. They both technically promise the same thing: Work hard today and you'll be living in paradise tomorrow.
Communism was just stupid enough to claim that this paradise will be while people are still alive, so they could easily see that they're bullshitted. Way harder to do with religions that promise the whole paradise bit for an afterlife where you can't simply debunk their lie.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Read this.
Or watch the movie if you don't have time for a childrens book.
bickerdyke
You seem to think of work as something that's somehow "done" at some point.
Eat the rich.
I often see shit like, "Ten Habits I Have QUIT to Get More Done," and I think, "Maybe quit writing posts like this."
Why? How would it make the person more productive if they stopped doing their job of writing articles that get page hits and likes? Is this guy too stupid to realise that these articles exist not because someone wants to share some amazing fact about their life, but rather that they want to put food on their table?
The promises of Capitalism and Communism are similar, with subtle but very important differences. The Capitalist promise and lure is "Work hard, and one day you will be living in paradise". The Communist promise is "Work hard, and one day we'll all be living in paradise".
While it looks similar, it has a vastly different psychological effect when (not if) failure sets in. In the communist system, due to us all being affected, we all failed, and thus the system did. The capitalist lure is a much more personal one: If YOU didn't get rich, YOU failed. The Capitalist system can still claim that the system itself isn't faulty because the promise it makes is a personal one, not a collective one.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Take some pride in your work
I learned that when I was fired from my very first job. The good job (pride) I was doing when the boss wasn't looking was immaterial. I was 15 when I learned that lesson. It sucked. Pride doesn't bring in a paycheck.
There is no failure if you learn something in the process. I learned how to never get fired again.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
We can't all afford to have our arses licked clean by a virgin, sorry.
Define productive. Yes, in a good workday you might only get 3 really good hours of productive work - but there's ab unch of other scutt work that needs doing like administrivia that also consumes time. I daresay that the definition of 'productive' matters.
Exactly. In my field of academia, the only thing that really counts is number of publications.
Which isn't fundamentally much better than counting office hours. Both are ways of appearing busy.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
It does, but IIRC the definition of productive was pretty broad. Basically, work related to the job. What they found was that there's a lot of socializing, Facebook, etc. that goes on. The point of the study wasn't that we're all goofing off at work, it was that we really don't work as much as we claim to, and in fact can't work as much as we claim to. When, for example, a programmer puts on headphones and does a few hours of no distractions, intense coding, that might easily be equivalent to the amount of actual work that other people did that day, just concentrated in one go.
I agree with this one!
Have you taken a good look at optics lately?
New optical fibres for high-capacity optical communications — 2016
That's enough bandwidth growth to support a personal productivity panopticon, where everything you do is summarized and assessed by Santa's little HR elves.
But I get it. You've wedged a wooden shoe into your PPP link, and the pan-optical future has not yet arrived at your particular below C-level employment backwater.
Dutch proverb: a swelling ocean which does not go through the dike will ultimately go over the dike—in one giant Nike offshoring swoosh.
Wow, way to ignore everything I said but one point. As I stated before, your advice is the pathway to mediocrity. If you have significant amounts of time to slack off then you should be asking for more work and not just looking busy otherwise you just look like everyone else who took longer to finish. This is how I have advanced my own career and it is the people who do this whose careers I now help to advance.
Your boss in your initial story had the same problem with you that I would have, you don't seem to have a strong work ethic. The worst part is that in a 15 year old this is understandable, as an adult though, stating that was what you learned from that event I find disconcerting.
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Yeah, that's why I suggest asking for more when what is assigned is finished. That's just a brilliant deduction you have come up with there.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?...