Newport, Cal. “The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done.” The New Yorker, November 17, 2020. accessed 9/26/23
Overview
Cal Newport, author of Deep Work talks about the history of GTD, personal productivity and the dangers of hyper-optimizing. Notable points:
- Personal Productivity can only go so far, the systems we work within need to change to combat the endless deluge of information
- The obsession with productivity is an addiction in itself and becomes distracting from actual work.
takeaway: Rather than trying to optimize our productivity by ourselves- there should be a top down change in the way work is dealt with to allow each worker the space to focus and work without constantly dealing with incoming tasks and emails.
Notes
Autonomy of Knowledge workers
Newport references a Mid-Century writer, Peter Drucker who was influential in the modern conception of the workplace. Drucker notes that workers would need more and more autonomy to be able to work effectively as the nature of modern work has changed from repetitive factory floor actions into something that required more insight and problem solving to react to novel situations. Drucker coined to term Knowledge Workers to describe this type of worker. Someone who's job could not be distilled into a sequence of assembly line style tasks
“The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail,” Drucker wrote, in “The Effective Executive,” from 1967. “He must direct himself.”
Productivity for Productivity sake can have mental blowback
Merlin Mann, the author behind 43 Folders and the Inbox Zero movement is a notable leader in the productivity movement who became disenchanted and left the movement entirely.
Productivity pr0n, he suggested, was becoming a bewildering, complexifying end in itself—list-making as a “cargo cult,” system-tweaking as an addiction. “On more than a few days, I wondered what, precisely, I was trying to accomplish,” he wrote. Part of the problem was the recursive quality of his work. Refining his productivity system so that he could blog more efficiently about productivity made him feel as if he were being “tossed around by a menacing Rube Goldberg device” of his own design; at times, he said, “I thought I might be losing my mind.”
This is reminiscent of a note Andy Mastuchak made regarding productivity influencers: If someone's productivity only produces content about productivity there is something wrong. #todo find ref for this
Systems reform is unpopular with knowledge workers
Author Tom Davenport wrote a book in 2005 called Thinking for a living about how to best increase knowledge worker productivity. Newport asserts that Davenport's suggestions were largely ignored because contemporary knowledge workers do not want to forgo autonomy in decision making.
Newport gives the example of Davenport's chapter on transaction workers which suggests a flowchart for deciding when to collaborate with another worker. Expert workers tend to ignore these kinds of suggestions and instead trust their own intuition.
- In taking smart notes the author suggests that this development of intuition is vital to being an effective writer
Systems level reform must start with visibility on current work
If the problem with modern work is a constant deluge of information, and tasks, the solution is provide easier ways for each autonomous actor to see who is working on what and how it is going. This reduces the need for meetings/check ins and emails about project status.
It seems likely that any successful effort to reform professional life must start by making it easier to figure out who is working on what, and how it’s going. Because so much of our effort in the office now unfolds in rapid exchanges of digital messages, it’s convenient to allow our in-boxes to become an informal repository for everything we need to get done.
For example, the Sprint and trello board work flow of software development. Each task is assigned a card with a developer attached and placed in a column which signifies its status. This allows a quick view of who should do what task and who is available for more.