On Productivity
Nearly three years of constant bad news stream and realization that the world is not going to become “better”, made me reflect deeply on my personal productivity. As usual, I started by revisiting the definition of productivity itself. What does it truly mean? That’s where I found myself stuck, right from the start.
Internet searches offered only vague and abstract explanations: words like quantity, quality, continuous learning, innovation, and responsibility for your work dominated the definitions. However, none of these descriptions included specific goals or metrics to measure productivity effectively. So, it appeared nobody knows how to define and measure it. Even Tom Davenport, who studied the performance of knowledge workers earlier in his career, seems to have abandoned this topic.
Knowledge work
“The economic activity in which knowledge is transformed into an artifact with market value through the application of cognitive effort.”
I was pleasantly surprised to discover Cal Newport’s book, Slow Productivity, which starts a conversation on such an important topic that no one wants to touch.
In this book, Cal highlights a critical issue: the absence of a standardized framework for measuring productivity in such a large economic sector as knowledge work and taking pseudo productivity as a default standard.
Pseudo productivity
“The use of visible activity as a measurement of productive effort.”
The Pseudo productivity reinforces not only getting thing done, but doing it at any cost. It does not take into account both natural human pace and disruptive life events, you suppose to remain productive even if your eyes are bleeding and the world is burning around you.
Technological advancements gave us the ability to stick more into our day. Ironically, the more we clear the deck, the more tasks seem to pile onto it. And no one is going to tell you how much is enough — that is up to you. Good luck with that!
This is where the most damaging outcome arises. Combination of an infinite list of tasks to do, no capacity to do these tasks with proper quality and no definition of how to measure the output can lead only to one thing - burnout. And let’s not forget that AI supposed to increase it to 60%, something that we do not know how to measure.
According to The State of Developer Ecosystem 2023, 75% of developers reported experiencing burnout — an extremely disturbing statistic. Last year, JetBrains didn’t include a survey question on burnout, which I find a bit disappointing. From my own conversations with developers, nearly all have admitted they were either close to burnout or had already experienced it.
The constant overload is generated by a belief that “good work” requires increasing busyness — faster responses to emails and chats, more meetings, more tasks, more commits, more hours. But we don’t need statistics to recognize that trying to complete as many tasks as possible, at all times, is neither humane nor effective.
Is there a more sustainable way of work? Cal Newport offers us to slow down and introduces us to the alternative “Slow Productivity” concept. Let’s take a look at its principles.
- Do fewer things. “Strive to reduce your obligations to the point where you can easily imagine accomplishing them with time to spare. Leverage this reduced load to more fully embrace and advance the small number of projects that matter most.”
Overloading yourself is exhausting, unsustainable, and a miserable way to exist. This principle tells us to prioritize the most important tasks and move them to the top of your list. Let go of the rest. Focusing on a small number of tasks, waiting to finish one task before bringing something new is a much better way to use our brains and produce valuable output.
- Work at natural pace. “Do not rush your most important work. Allow it instead to unfold along a sustainable timeline with variations in intensity in settings conductive to brilliance.”
The reality is that humans are terrible at estimating cognitive work. We are always going for the most optimistic scenario. This bias comes from a lack of physical intuition about mental effort. Cal advises us to double our “guessing” estimation and plan leisure time wisely. Additionally, cutting your task list from 25 to 50 % will also help to tackle wildly optimistic prejudice.
- Obsess over quality. “Obsess over the quality of what you produce, even if this means missing opportunities in the short term. Leverage the value of these results to gain more and more freedom in your efforts over the long term.”
Focus on the quality of the core activities in your professional life. This approach not only enhances your skills but also helps to escape a trap of pseudo-productivity. Quality demands slowness, which leads to a more meaningful outcome.
This is just a sneak peek into strategies for avoiding the chaos of pseudo-productivity. If you’re looking for more advice on creating a sustainable work life — or curious about how brewing beer once kept Jane Austen from writing “Sense and Sensibility” — I highly recommend reading a book by Cal Newport. It’s truly worth your time. I applied some of these principles in my life last year with partial success. However, implementing them fully requires a significant degree of autonomy — something most of us, if we’re honest, rarely have. But as I mentioned earlier, the world isn’t going to magically improve, so we need to focus on what we can change. We can take ownership of our priorities, learn to say no, and find genuine satisfaction in the work we do.
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