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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!
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
"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.
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.
Calvinists are evil.
(that's what I got)
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Agreed. Nothing wrong with productivity itself.
My reading of the article:
Dedicating yourself to a carefully chosen purpose is cool, but the author is ranting against people who have become obsessed with productivity for it's own sake, as a form of idolatry.
My takeaway:
Stop being so damn busy all the time and spend more time reflecting on what's actually important.
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?
Perhaps he says that because Nestle is known for dressing saleswoman as nurses to encourage poor Africans not to breastfeed - which has a lot of health benefits for infants - but to spend money on baby formula.
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.
"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.
And you sound like a protestant cuck who's been slaved away their entire life. Stockholm syndrome. Look it up, bub.