What's Your Response to Allen Jacob's Challenge to Your Productivity Metrics?

00:00:00.000 | [music]

00:00:04.760 | All right. Well, speaking about easy, let's see how easy our

00:00:09.320 | questions are this week. Jesse, what is our first call we have

00:00:13.160 | on the docket?

00:00:13.800 | All right, the first call is from Simon, and he references an

00:00:17.440 | article that you were a focus of, and it basically challenges

00:00:21.280 | some of your metrics of productivity.

00:00:23.400 | Hi, Cal. Simon here. I'm calling from New Zealand. Recently, Alan

00:00:35.520 | Jacobs, philosopher Alan Jacobs, published a small bit of writing

00:00:39.880 | in the Hedgehog Review. The writing is called The Problem

00:00:42.040 | with Productivity and the Good Work of Love. And in it, he takes

00:00:47.520 | you to task a little bit in one of your New Yorker articles.

00:00:53.200 | And just has some questions about the way you describe

00:00:56.880 | productivity and the metrics of productivity. And his questions

00:01:01.680 | are kind of about the way in which those people involved in

00:01:07.520 | things that are less able to be quantified, how they fit in

00:01:12.280 | your, let's say, picture of the world. Would love to hear your

00:01:15.560 | response. Cheers.

00:01:17.720 | Well, Simon, I went back and I read that article. I like the

00:01:22.360 | Hedgehog Review. This was an interesting piece, as you

00:01:25.040 | mentioned, by Alan Jacobs. He was talking about a piece I wrote

00:01:30.200 | for the New Yorker on productivity culture, people's

00:01:35.440 | frustration with the notion of productivity, and what we should

00:01:40.000 | do about it. So there's a couple points in his piece, if I'm

00:01:43.760 | remembering properly. Yeah, so part of this was just saying

00:01:49.480 | productivity is hard in a lot of contexts to even measure, like,

00:01:53.760 | what do we even mean by productivity? And he felt that

00:01:57.800 | it's sort of the typical anti-neoliberal critique of this

00:02:01.560 | seems to, your language seems to quantify too systemic, too

00:02:07.000 | economically blinkered, I would say. Now, this is a, I think

00:02:12.680 | this is a common fault line right now in the discussion of

00:02:15.360 | productivity and anti-productivity. So I would

00:02:17.440 | say the popular lane right now in elite discourses when talking

00:02:21.960 | about productivity, roughly speaking, falls into the club of

00:02:25.640 | the post-capitalist, post-liberal types, where the

00:02:30.800 | big things to talk about is how just work itself, we need to

00:02:35.120 | rethink work itself, and this drive to produce and to define

00:02:39.960 | your life too much by work is a problem, and it's a sort of a

00:02:43.280 | necessary outcome of our capitalist systems, and can't we,

00:02:47.560 | we need to rethink what work means and the role it plays in a

00:02:51.480 | life and productivity discourses, typically it's

00:02:54.680 | influenced by like, Bayes superstructure theory,

00:02:56.840 | productivity discourses are really just an opiate of a Zoom

00:03:00.560 | equipped bourgeois that is trying to coerce you into giving

00:03:04.440 | up more of your labor towards extracting value for the

00:03:08.280 | capitalist, etc, etc. So there's a sort of post-capitalist thread

00:03:11.320 | that's really popular right now, in, I would say, left-leaning

00:03:15.480 | elite discourses, they don't like me. So they think I'm a

00:03:20.080 | neoliberal shill, because I think while those are

00:03:22.200 | interesting philosophical ideas, I'm much more boots on the

00:03:25.000 | ground pragmatic, these people at this company right now in

00:03:27.840 | this job are stressed out and why and how can we change this

00:03:30.680 | company, so they're not so stressed out, like I like to get

00:03:32.720 | into the nuts and bolts about how knowledge work actually

00:03:35.480 | unfolds, and work in a much more narrow way of what can we do in

00:03:40.440 | here pragmatically what's going on. So again, I'm often

00:03:43.600 | disparaged by that crowd as some sort of neoliberal shill,

00:03:47.720 | because I'm not, you know, appropriately having these naval

00:03:52.520 | gazing more philosophical grandiose theories about work

00:03:57.600 | and life and capitalism, etc, I'm much more narrow. So what

00:04:02.760 | I'm arguing about what I argued about in that article is

00:04:04.920 | actually something very specific, I'm saying here is

00:04:08.160 | let's get boots on the ground ethnographically, in the

00:04:11.280 | cubicles, seeing what is frustrating people. And this is

00:04:13.880 | again, one of the things I think distinguishes my work, I have

00:04:17.440 | such a deeply embedded surveillance network into the

00:04:20.320 | world of work, because I have this decade plus career writing

00:04:24.680 | about this stuff, or I hear from people constantly. So I

00:04:27.160 | really have my finger on the pulse, like what's happening in

00:04:29.600 | these type of knowledge work jobs. And what I was pointing

00:04:32.200 | out is here is a specific pragmatic issue. We said

00:04:36.520 | productivity should be personal, it's up to the

00:04:38.960 | individual to figure out how to manage their work and their

00:04:42.360 | workload. A necessary consequence of this is that in

00:04:46.760 | this informal, you have to figure it on your own type

00:04:49.320 | context, people became way overloaded, they have more work

00:04:54.360 | than they know how to handle. And it is a almost

00:04:57.240 | dehumanizing, cruel act to say, we're going to give you more

00:05:01.600 | work than you can handle and like figure it out, forcing you

00:05:05.040 | into a position. So there's no sort of professional personal

00:05:08.080 | Fifth Amendment here forcing you into a position of having

00:05:11.120 | to make these judgment calls between your personal life and

00:05:13.640 | your work life. Because the more of your personal life you

00:05:15.640 | give up, the more work you can get done. They're just like,

00:05:17.760 | hey, be productive, and it's up to you to figure out how to do

00:05:20.040 | it. And like, this is an untenable situation. We're

00:05:22.320 | overloaded, we were in this untenable situation where we

00:05:24.640 | have to figure out how to balance our professional lives

00:05:28.360 | and our personal lives. And the whole thing is a recipe for

00:05:31.120 | frustration and exhaustion, and people are getting fed up with

00:05:33.560 | it. And so my argument is, we got to get this off of the

00:05:38.560 | individuals. The structure and systems by which we actually

00:05:43.280 | figure out things like how much work should you have on your

00:05:45.320 | plate? How many projects should someone be working on? How do

00:05:50.720 | we communicate and talk about this work? These type of things

00:05:53.760 | need to be surfaced and made explicit. So A, it can prevent

00:05:59.880 | us from being in these terrible situations where we're

00:06:02.240 | overloaded and are being implicitly pushed to just

00:06:04.960 | sacrifice more and more of other things that are important to us.

00:06:07.520 | And it makes it something that we can argue and fight back

00:06:09.960 | against. When you say this is how we assign work, and this is

00:06:12.600 | how we communicate about work. And if that system is onerous,

00:06:16.160 | we can all point to that and say, this is an onerous system.

00:06:19.000 | We don't like this, do something better. It gives you something

00:06:21.840 | to push back on. You don't have any targets to push back on,

00:06:25.560 | which is up to everyone, and work is informal, and we're all

00:06:27.720 | sitting back and forth, calendar invites and emailing. Surface

00:06:30.560 | and make explicit the systems by which work is assigned, how you

00:06:36.000 | collaborate on that work, how much should be on your plate.

00:06:38.040 | And now we have something to push back on, now we have

00:06:40.120 | something to optimize. And now we can actually move past, I

00:06:43.320 | think, the excesses in terms of workload, the excesses in terms

00:06:48.440 | of sacrifice that our current knowledge work context creates.

00:06:51.040 | Now, this is like an intensely pragmatic thing. I'm talking

00:06:53.440 | about processes for communication and task boards

00:06:57.320 | and push versus pull work allocation systems and what we

00:07:00.480 | can learn from just-in-time manufacturing and Kanban. None

00:07:03.440 | of this is sexy. It's much better to have a substack in a

00:07:05.960 | Twitter account and talk about the excesses of capitalism and

00:07:09.640 | how we have to, in the sort of the post-capitalist order, we'll

00:07:12.840 | all just have, I guess, universal basic incomes and write

00:07:15.840 | poetry or whatever. And I'm not being fair to Jacobs, I'm

00:07:18.760 | obviously exaggerating here, and that's all fine. And I think

00:07:21.720 | it's good to have avant-garde philosophical critique because

00:07:24.240 | the avant-garde pulls forward the mainstream, and that's all

00:07:26.640 | good. But I'm not on the avant-garde. I like to think of

00:07:29.760 | myself more in the cubicle trenches. And so I think this

00:07:33.520 | is what I was talking about in that article. This is a core

00:07:35.480 | issue right now. It's very pragmatic. Implicit informal

00:07:39.720 | systems for work assignment, organization, and collaboration

00:07:42.200 | cause issues, and it frustrates and burns people out. So let's

00:07:44.840 | make them explicit. I think that's what Jacobs was taking

00:07:48.200 | me to task. He was like, "Well, but let's not talk about

00:07:51.360 | systems. That seems weird and corporate and capitalist. Let's

00:07:54.800 | not talk about systems. Let's not talk about trying to figure

00:07:57.080 | out what's more productive. Let's be very careful about the

00:08:00.760 | language we use." And I'm like, "That's fine." I think when I

00:08:04.640 | write for the Hedgehog Review, I'll be more careful about the

00:08:07.720 | appropriate language. But I think this is a concrete issue

00:08:10.360 | that I think real people have, and this is a concrete approach

00:08:14.960 | to actually solving those issues. I mean, let's get in the

00:08:19.240 | trenches and figure out why do you have 200 emails and are

00:08:22.920 | working on the weekend? And yes, we could stand back and say,

00:08:27.200 | "Because of capitalism," but that's not going to fix this

00:08:30.760 | person's problem next week. And so again, I think both of these

00:08:37.160 | levels of analysis are important. I talk at my level. I

00:08:44.400 | think a lot of the elite discourses talk at another level.

00:08:48.200 | Both are important. The avant-garde pulls forward. The

00:08:51.320 | mainstream. And I also think debate is good. I think this is

00:08:55.640 | a useful article, and it's a well-written article. And I

00:09:00.000 | think Jacobs is very thoughtful. But there's a lot of other

00:09:02.040 | commentators out there where I think the anti-productivity

00:09:07.120 | discourse so easily just falls more into, "I want applause. I

00:09:13.040 | want applause for how radically critical I am and aren't I

00:09:17.840 | smart, and I hate capitalism. Subscribe to my sub stack

00:09:20.400 | because I want more money." Yeah, it's like this whole,

00:09:22.120 | "It's fine, and I'm boring. And I think we get too many emails.

00:09:26.320 | I want to fix it." So I don't know if that's convincing,

00:09:29.880 | Simon, but I guess that's my off-the-cuff review. I mean,

00:09:35.880 | Jesse, if you look at me, see, no one's ever going to

00:09:37.400 | associate with me. You just look at me and say, "You can't be a

00:09:41.480 | radical. You can't be avant-garde. You have a part in

00:09:44.840 | your hair." You know what I mean? So why even try? Why even

00:09:49.120 | try? So I was like, "Let's talk about how we need more

00:09:52.720 | systematic work assignment policies." No one ever

00:09:55.480 | associates me with the word, "intellectually cool." If I did

00:10:00.880 | like a beret and had a cigarette in a cigarette holder,

00:10:04.520 | see, then we might be playing with fire. And if I was like,

00:10:07.800 | "Here's the thing. Here's the thing." I need an accent, too.

00:10:13.240 | "Here's the thing. You got to have another column on your

00:10:17.800 | Trello board for waiting to hear back." "Waiting to hear

00:10:23.240 | back" should be its own column. And then I just throw in some

00:10:30.960 | of the post-liberal stuff, too. And do better. Zoom is the

00:10:39.280 | shackles of the bourgeois. French intellectuals are very

00:10:44.400 | cool. And we need to get rid of the capitalism. You do better.

00:10:50.680 | But also, you should use Calendly when setting up your

00:10:57.800 | meetings because it's less email. See, what I'm going to

00:11:00.080 | do, I could mix them together. Like the really avant-garde

00:11:02.920 | philosophical stuff. Like, "As Edward Said taught us well, you

00:11:11.960 | should only use email for short questions and also do not

00:11:17.280 | other." So I'll mix in post-colonial theory plus my

00:11:23.520 | advice for scheduling deep work sessions. But see, no one would

00:11:28.360 | buy it from me. I'm not French. I don't have the right accent.

00:11:31.080 | I'm not suitably angry. I have read all this stuff, by the

00:11:35.200 | way. I mean, I get it. I'm on a university campus. It's good

00:11:37.400 | stuff. I like the avant-garde.

00:11:38.760 | The accent was solid.

00:11:40.240 | It's solid? All right. Do the rest of the episode that way.

00:11:42.720 | Do the ad reads that way?

00:11:46.560 | Yeah. They're not mad at us enough. Yeah. Why does this

00:11:51.000 | company even exist? It's just a stooge of the capitalist. The

00:11:56.360 | only company that I think should exist is, I don't know what

00:12:03.400 | company, the Hedgehog Review. The only sponsor we have for

00:12:08.760 | the show. And we paid them money. They're paying us. This

00:12:14.480 | is a capitalist exchange. It is dirty. No. So we paid them

00:12:19.320 | money to be on the show as Foucault taught us. The power

00:12:27.480 | hierarchy that defines the modern podcast ad agency is

00:12:32.000 | itself a vestige of capitalist supremacy. So we could do it.

00:12:39.800 | We could do it. Again, I've got a part of my haircut. I can't

00:12:44.160 | pull it off. I need a Shea t-shirt and shave my head,

00:12:48.520 | maybe. I don't know. Or I'll just continue to be kind of a

00:12:52.760 | dork. It's worked okay so far.

00:12:54.880 | Having hair is a good thing.

00:12:56.760 | Having hair is a good thing. That's right. All right. So

00:12:59.880 | Simon, there you go. Let's do another call here.

00:13:02.680 | [MUSIC]

What's Your Response to Allen Jacob's Challenge to Your Productivity Metrics?

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