Shivering into Possibility
Margaret Renkl | Progressivity, not Productivity | Factoids | Elsewhere
From my Journal
I was searching for something in my journal, which led me to a daily note from 2021-11-03. The search was a dead end, but I noticed an entry at the top of the note, which I did not recall writing, even after rereading it, now, several years later:
A dream [about a talk] where I gave a short intro to some subject characterizing the various themes as all being on fire.
'The only difference' I said, 'is whether you decide to turn your attention to the fire that is hottest, brightest, or largest. Because everything is on fire.'
That metaphor still seems pertinent today, especially after a long weekend fighting a pernicious cold.
I offer this from Margaret Renkl as a spring offering and counterbalance.
Quote of the Moment
Turn your face up to the sky. Listen. The world is shivering into possibility. The world is reminding us that this is what the world does best. New life. Rebirth. The greenness that rises out of ashes.
| Margaret Renkl, Spring Brings Joy, Even in a World on Fire
Progressivity, Not Productivity
Yesterday, I saw this tweet by Anne-Laure Le Cunff:
Anne-Laure Le Cunff (@neuranne)
Many people think productivity is about getting work done. But it’s not. Instead, it’s about making intentional progress. Sometimes that means taking a break, making time for thinking, exploring ideas, chatting with a friend.
I replied:
One of the reasons I like the term 'progressivity' instead of 'productivity'.
This reminds me of Cal Newport’s disenchantment with the term ‘productivity’ — which he is trying to replace with ‘deep’ or ‘slow’ productivity. In 2021 he wrote:
Early in the pandemic, I received an e-mail from a reader who embraced my writing about the importance of deep work and the need to minimize distractions, but was thrown by my use of the term “productivity” to describe these efforts: “The productivity language is an impediment for me.” Intrigued, I posted a short essay on my Web site that reacted to her message, proposing that the term “productive” could be salvaged if we define it more carefully. There were, I wrote, positive aspects to the idea of productivity. For example, by better organizing administrative tasks that cannot be ignored—paying taxes, filing forms—you can reduce how much time you spend on such drudgery. On a larger scale, the structured “productive” pursuit of important projects, far from being soulless, can be an important source of meaning.
My readers didn’t buy my defense. The comments were filled with a growing distaste for the many implications and exhortations that had become associated with productivity culture. “The productivity terminology encodes not only getting things done, but doing them at all costs,” one reader wrote. Another commenter pushed back against the proliferation of early-pandemic business articles that encouraged workers to stay “productive” even as they were thrown unexpectedly into remote environments: “The true message behind these posts is clear: ignore your growing sense of existential dread, ignore your children, and produce value for our shareholders—or else!” Others advocated for alternative terms, such as “alive time,” or “productive creativity”—anything to cleave the relationship between “productivity” the signifier and all that it had come to signify.
After a long walk through the history of ‘productivity’ — Henry Ford, Adam Smith, knowledge work, etc. — he returns to the ugly ‘productivity’ word itself:
This brings us back to the original question of whether the term “productivity” has outgrown its utility. I don’t think we can abandon the word altogether.
Well, I believe we can.
We need to accept the difference in scale of individuals and small social groups at work who are not actively involved in making widgets, whose work cannot be effectively measured in so many units of output per hour, and people whose work involves something other than just striving to meet some objective goal but also the subjective goal of learning how to do their work better, and perhaps, therefore, to slow down in order to, later on, do things better.
Newport continues:
The precise economic property that it measures is important: we need to measure it, and we need to continue to seek to increase it. This proposition probably already puts me at odds with the recent anti-productivity movement, which often calls for a resistance to the capitalist imperative toward growth—a stance in which macroeconomic productivity is downgraded in importance. I think this goes too far, because at a large scale stagnant productivity is more likely to be recessionary than utopian. The problem is not productivity, per se, but the manner in which we seek to increase it.
One imperative of industrial-age capitalism is to break down work into the smallest possible tasks so that they are repeatable and can be assigned to less well-trained workers. Consider the assembly line in an automobile plant. Accomplishing that is one means of increasing productivity. At an aggregate level, the automobile company relies to a great extent on productivity of that sort, but activities like marketing or designing the car are not duplicates of the assembly line. Some sorts of work are not amenable to being broken to bits and handed off to an assemblage of individual workers and require starts and stops, talking with others, asking questions, and inventing answers.
Of course, the car company wants to be able to round up all the money spent this year on salaries relative to money earned selling cars and contrast that with other companies and other years, which serves a purpose in a market economy.
And Newport knows that:
I’m convinced that the solution to the justified exhaustion felt by so many in modern knowledge work can be found in part by relocating the obligation to optimize production away from the individual and back toward systems.
Pulling together these threads, it seems that our problem in this moment of overload is not our general interest in productivity but instead the specific targets to which we apply this objective. I’m still happy to use “productivity” when talking about a sector, or a company, or a system, but I’m increasingly empathetic to the resistance among my readers, and among critics such as Celeste Headlee, to applying this term to people.
Yes, you must look at larger organizational units for ‘productivity’ to be useful. But then he steps back:
We should strive to be good at our jobs—to work deeply, to be reliable, to lead with vision. But, if our employers need more output for each unit of input they employ, we should be more comfortable in replying that, although we understand their predicament, solving it is not really our problem.
Here’s where we disagree.
I believe, first, it is our problem, we being those of us thinking about it, not some rarefied class of employers.
Second, we need two sets of books. The productivity ledger makes sense only at the level of large organizational units that are created to make things or provide services. A second ledger must be employed at the fine-grained level for progressivity at the individual and small group level, where the metrics for accomplishing goals, making headway, and pushing forward work initiatives can’t be reduced to labor in and product out.
This is a scale where learning has to be accounted for, where reflection on problems in the system and how to right them is baked in. In other words, unlike productivity, we need a word that makes clear we’re talking about outcomes, not output. That’s why we should use ‘progressivity’, not ‘productivity’ when focused on human-scale work, not systems.
Newport’s new book is out—I’ll review it soon; he is a brilliant writer. But he is sticking with ‘Slow Productivity’. I wonder if he will address this distinction head-on or deflect it. More to follow.
Factoids
Just 47% of Americans report being “very satisfied” with their personal lives, a slight decrease from last year and alarmingly close to the all-time low.
This marks only the third time in over 20 years that less than half of the population feels a high degree of satisfaction with their personal lives. The record low was 46% in post-recession 2011, with another dip to 47% during the 2008 financial crisis, highlighting a correlation between economic challenges and personal contentment.
| Gallup
…
Global consumption of instant noodles rose to 121.2 billion servings in 2022, a 17% increase compared with 2018, according to the World Instant Noodles Association.
By the way, Daft Social is ‘The Anti-Social Social Network for Minimalists’. Microblogging without commenting, following, reposting, tags, deleting, or any of the other social networking goop. Posts are created by sending an email to a ‘secret’ email address, and whatever is in the subject line is published. My daft is daftsocial.com/stoweboyd if you want to see it. There is an RSS: daftsocial.com/rss?feed=stoweboyd. Very old school.
…
One study from economists at the Boston Federal Reserve estimated that the highest-income households profit over $1,000 a year tax-free from the [credit card] payment system, adjusted for inflation.
Until legislators are willing to change a system that showers tax-free rewards on the upper middle class, the cash register will continue to exacerbate the wealth gap and help big business get even bigger.
While the well-heeled get airline miles and other perqs from using their premium cards, all the other credit card users are subsidizing that system to their benefit since the swipe fees are reflected back in the prices we all pay.
…
The Constitution of Massachusetts is the oldest written constitution in the world still in effect.
| Historical Sketch of Massachusetts
Elsewhere
In Everybody’s a Sellout Now, Rebecca Jennings dissects the creative industrial context and how it turns musicians, writers, and creatives into marketing departments.
Kai Brach of Dense Discovery tipped me to this, writing
The focus on constant self-promotion in the service of algorithms certainly takes time away from perfecting one’s craft. Quoting a musician who experienced viral success on TikTok, Jennings writes: “Next thing you know, it’s been three years and you’ve spent almost no time on your art. You’re getting worse at it, but you’re becoming a great marketer for a product which is less and less good.”
And Jennings closes this incredible piece with:
A society made up of human beings who have turned themselves into small businesses is basically the logical endpoint of free market capitalism, anyway. To achieve the current iteration of the American dream, you’ve got to shout into the digital void and tell everyone how great you are. All that matters is how many people believe you.
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