This is why the discipline of asking “what is actually blocking me?” outperforms many productivity systems on the market.
Lists treat tasks as equals. The critical path treats them as a queue with one true bottleneck at the front.
Identify it. Work on it. Everything else, however satisfying, is decoration on a foundation that may not yet exist.
......................................AI—or not.
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes wrote “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” predicting that productivity growth would be so powerful that by the early twenty-first century the workweek would fall to fifteen hours. He was directionally correct about productivity growth, but profoundly wrong about labor market implications. Rather than working dramatically less, societies consumed dramatically more. Why? Because rising productivity lowered costs and expanded the consumption frontier. Preferences shifted toward higher quality goods, new services, and previously unimaginable forms of expenditure. Leisure increased modestly, but material aspiration expanded far more. History suggests productivity gains do not automatically translate into labor withdrawal or demand collapse as they alter the composition of demand, expand real incomes and generate new industries. Keynes underestimated the elasticity of human wants.
Economists in the 19th
century described production as using tangible resources, notably land,
unskilled labor, factories, and business equipment. But by the 21st century, it
was evident that intangibles increasingly matter. Human skill level, business strategy,
innovation, and the institutional environment determine how wealth gets
created.
-Arnold Kling, from this episode
A done list isn't solely a way to feel better about yourself, though. When you start to view each day not as a matter of paying off a debt, but as an opportunity to move a small-but-meaningful number of items over to your done list, you'll find yourself making better choices about what to focus on; and you'll make more progress on them, too, since you'll be wasting less energy stressing about all the other tasks you're (inevitably) neglecting.
-Oliver Burkeman, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts
Fast is efficient; but sometimes slow is effective…
What is productivity for you anyway…
-Nicholas Bate, who always asks good questions
. . . we shouldn't underestimate the ability of our surroundings to transform our cognitive reality.
-Cal Newport, Slow Productivity
Working with unceasing intensity is artificial and unsustainable. . . . A more natural, slower, and varied pace to work is the foundation of true productivity in the long term.
-Cal Newport, Slow Productivity
The key to productivity is doing more of what matters and less of what doesn't. When you concentrate your mental and physical energy in one direction, you have the most impact. . . .
Being busy and being productive are not
the same thing. Running around in circles is busy. Going toward your
destination is productive. It's easy to be busy. It's hard to be productive.
Malthus had quite accurately foretold the one phenomenon [population explosion], but had missed the other altogether [productivity increases]. Why? Because of the systematic pessimistic bias to which prophecy is prone. . . . They all thought they were making sober predictions based on the best knowledge that was available to them. In reality they were all allowing themselves to be misled by the ineluctable fact of the human condition that we do not yet know what we have not yet discovered.
-David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity
Busyness is not the engine of production. It can, in many cases, instead be the obstacle to accomplishing your best work.
-Cal Newport, from here
Productive activity has nothing to do with being swept away by the inertia of busyness. It is not about quantity either. Rather, it is a deliberate choice of where and how to direct one's attention.
The significance of this choice cannot be overstated.
-Brad Stulberg, The Practice of Groundedness
The core mistake the automation-kills-jobs doomers keep making is called the Lump Of Labor Fallacy. This fallacy is the incorrect notion that there is a fixed amount of labor to be done in the economy at any given time, and either machines do it or people do it – and if machines do it, there will be no work for people to do.
The Lump Of Labor Fallacy flows naturally from naive intuition, but naive intuition here is wrong. When technology is applied to production, we get productivity growth – an increase in output generated by a reduction in inputs. The result is lower prices for goods and services. As prices for goods and services fall, we pay less for them, meaning that we now have extra spending power with which to buy other things. This increases demand in the economy, which drives the creation of new production – including new products and new industries – which then creates new jobs for the people who were replaced by machines in prior jobs. The result is a larger economy with higher material prosperity, more industries, more products, and more jobs.
-Marc Andreessen, from this Substack, why-ai-will-save-the-world
But my intuition is that the main problem in the U.S. economy is that too many highly educated people work for government and for non-profits, where they mostly make trouble for the productive sector.
-Arnold Kling, from here
Now, what we call technology is simply an array of tools laid out on the bench for us. Technology is therefore a form of wealth. The reason this is important is because the Bible says very little about technology as such, but it gives us a great deal of blunt and pointed teaching on the subject of wealth. If we learn how to deal with wealth scripturally, then we will have learned how to deal with technology. . . .
So if technology is wealth, then we are all surrounded with astounding amounts of it. This is what I refer to as tangible grace. If you have a smartphone, you have more wealth in your pocket than Nebuchadnezzar accumulated over the course of his lifetime. We have a responsibility to turn a profit on these astounding resources—and that is what is meant by productivity. We have a responsibility to do this methodically, deliberately, and intentionally. This is what I mean by ploductivity. This is deliberate faithfulness: working in the same direction over an extended period of time. Our electronic servants may be super fast, but we should be as deliberate as ever.
-Douglas Wilson, Ploductivity: A Practical Theology of Work & Wealth
Sometimes “productivity” feels like a country you’ve heard a lot about but never thought you’d get a chance to visit.
-from this Barking Up The Wrong Tree post
So often productivity advice is limiting. Narrowing. Just pushing us harder to be more like a machine. But we need to expand our minds. And to remember that we’re not computers. (The closest we get to being a machine is that taking a nap often resolves mental issues the way rebooting your laptop resolves computer issues.) Stop trying to be a machine and leverage your humanity to accomplish more. You may never be as efficient as Robocop or the Terminator but those two can’t solve a captcha and you can. When we broaden our minds and connect with others it’s not just productivity that improves. Life does.
-Eric Barker, from this post
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