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We Design Most Knowledge Work To Optimize Relevance, Not Productivity
Cal Newport, who is probably best known for his ideas around “deep work” and I believe may now work for The New York Times, has a good new article (it’s basically just an interview) about what digital work has done to us. It’s all pretty good, although some aspects of it probably wouldn’t make sense to a guy that runs a carpeting business in Topeka, but the entire thing kinda comes down to this:
Visible activity as a proxy for productivity spiraled out of control and led to this culture of exhaustion, of I’m working all the time, I’m context shifting all over the place, most of my work feels performative, it’s not even that useful. Slow productivity is all about identifying alternatives. I’m trying to develop this notion of productivity that’s based on, at the large time scales, the production of things you’re proud of and that have high impact, but on the small time scale, there’s periods where you’re…
