All right. Well, speaking about easy, let's see how easy our questions are this week. Jesse, what is our first call we have on the docket? All right, the first call is from Simon, and he references an article that you were a focus of, and it basically challenges some of your metrics of productivity.

Hi, Cal. Simon here. I'm calling from New Zealand. Recently, Alan Jacobs, philosopher Alan Jacobs, published a small bit of writing in the Hedgehog Review. The writing is called The Problem with Productivity and the Good Work of Love. And in it, he takes you to task a little bit in one of your New Yorker articles.

And just has some questions about the way you describe productivity and the metrics of productivity. And his questions are kind of about the way in which those people involved in things that are less able to be quantified, how they fit in your, let's say, picture of the world. Would love to hear your response.

Cheers. Well, Simon, I went back and I read that article. I like the Hedgehog Review. This was an interesting piece, as you mentioned, by Alan Jacobs. He was talking about a piece I wrote for the New Yorker on productivity culture, people's frustration with the notion of productivity, and what we should do about it.

So there's a couple points in his piece, if I'm remembering properly. Yeah, so part of this was just saying productivity is hard in a lot of contexts to even measure, like, what do we even mean by productivity? And he felt that it's sort of the typical anti-neoliberal critique of this seems to, your language seems to quantify too systemic, too economically blinkered, I would say.

Now, this is a, I think this is a common fault line right now in the discussion of productivity and anti-productivity. So I would say the popular lane right now in elite discourses when talking about productivity, roughly speaking, falls into the club of the post-capitalist, post-liberal types, where the big things to talk about is how just work itself, we need to rethink work itself, and this drive to produce and to define your life too much by work is a problem, and it's a sort of a necessary outcome of our capitalist systems, and can't we, we need to rethink what work means and the role it plays in a life and productivity discourses, typically it's influenced by like, Bayes superstructure theory, productivity discourses are really just an opiate of a Zoom equipped bourgeois that is trying to coerce you into giving up more of your labor towards extracting value for the capitalist, etc, etc.

So there's a sort of post-capitalist thread that's really popular right now, in, I would say, left-leaning elite discourses, they don't like me. So they think I'm a neoliberal shill, because I think while those are interesting philosophical ideas, I'm much more boots on the ground pragmatic, these people at this company right now in this job are stressed out and why and how can we change this company, so they're not so stressed out, like I like to get into the nuts and bolts about how knowledge work actually unfolds, and work in a much more narrow way of what can we do in here pragmatically what's going on.

So again, I'm often disparaged by that crowd as some sort of neoliberal shill, because I'm not, you know, appropriately having these naval gazing more philosophical grandiose theories about work and life and capitalism, etc, I'm much more narrow. So what I'm arguing about what I argued about in that article is actually something very specific, I'm saying here is let's get boots on the ground ethnographically, in the cubicles, seeing what is frustrating people.

And this is again, one of the things I think distinguishes my work, I have such a deeply embedded surveillance network into the world of work, because I have this decade plus career writing about this stuff, or I hear from people constantly. So I really have my finger on the pulse, like what's happening in these type of knowledge work jobs.

And what I was pointing out is here is a specific pragmatic issue. We said productivity should be personal, it's up to the individual to figure out how to manage their work and their workload. A necessary consequence of this is that in this informal, you have to figure it on your own type context, people became way overloaded, they have more work than they know how to handle.

And it is a almost dehumanizing, cruel act to say, we're going to give you more work than you can handle and like figure it out, forcing you into a position. So there's no sort of professional personal Fifth Amendment here forcing you into a position of having to make these judgment calls between your personal life and your work life.

Because the more of your personal life you give up, the more work you can get done. They're just like, hey, be productive, and it's up to you to figure out how to do it. And like, this is an untenable situation. We're overloaded, we were in this untenable situation where we have to figure out how to balance our professional lives and our personal lives.

And the whole thing is a recipe for frustration and exhaustion, and people are getting fed up with it. And so my argument is, we got to get this off of the individuals. The structure and systems by which we actually figure out things like how much work should you have on your plate?

How many projects should someone be working on? How do we communicate and talk about this work? These type of things need to be surfaced and made explicit. So A, it can prevent us from being in these terrible situations where we're overloaded and are being implicitly pushed to just sacrifice more and more of other things that are important to us.

And it makes it something that we can argue and fight back against. When you say this is how we assign work, and this is how we communicate about work. And if that system is onerous, we can all point to that and say, this is an onerous system. We don't like this, do something better.

It gives you something to push back on. You don't have any targets to push back on, which is up to everyone, and work is informal, and we're all sitting back and forth, calendar invites and emailing. Surface and make explicit the systems by which work is assigned, how you collaborate on that work, how much should be on your plate.

And now we have something to push back on, now we have something to optimize. And now we can actually move past, I think, the excesses in terms of workload, the excesses in terms of sacrifice that our current knowledge work context creates. Now, this is like an intensely pragmatic thing.

I'm talking about processes for communication and task boards and push versus pull work allocation systems and what we can learn from just-in-time manufacturing and Kanban. None of this is sexy. It's much better to have a substack in a Twitter account and talk about the excesses of capitalism and how we have to, in the sort of the post-capitalist order, we'll all just have, I guess, universal basic incomes and write poetry or whatever.

And I'm not being fair to Jacobs, I'm obviously exaggerating here, and that's all fine. And I think it's good to have avant-garde philosophical critique because the avant-garde pulls forward the mainstream, and that's all good. But I'm not on the avant-garde. I like to think of myself more in the cubicle trenches.

And so I think this is what I was talking about in that article. This is a core issue right now. It's very pragmatic. Implicit informal systems for work assignment, organization, and collaboration cause issues, and it frustrates and burns people out. So let's make them explicit. I think that's what Jacobs was taking me to task.

He was like, "Well, but let's not talk about systems. That seems weird and corporate and capitalist. Let's not talk about systems. Let's not talk about trying to figure out what's more productive. Let's be very careful about the language we use." And I'm like, "That's fine." I think when I write for the Hedgehog Review, I'll be more careful about the appropriate language.

But I think this is a concrete issue that I think real people have, and this is a concrete approach to actually solving those issues. I mean, let's get in the trenches and figure out why do you have 200 emails and are working on the weekend? And yes, we could stand back and say, "Because of capitalism," but that's not going to fix this person's problem next week.

And so again, I think both of these levels of analysis are important. I talk at my level. I think a lot of the elite discourses talk at another level. Both are important. The avant-garde pulls forward. The mainstream. And I also think debate is good. I think this is a useful article, and it's a well-written article.

And I think Jacobs is very thoughtful. But there's a lot of other commentators out there where I think the anti-productivity discourse so easily just falls more into, "I want applause. I want applause for how radically critical I am and aren't I smart, and I hate capitalism. Subscribe to my sub stack because I want more money." Yeah, it's like this whole, "It's fine, and I'm boring.

And I think we get too many emails. I want to fix it." So I don't know if that's convincing, Simon, but I guess that's my off-the-cuff review. I mean, Jesse, if you look at me, see, no one's ever going to associate with me. You just look at me and say, "You can't be a radical.

You can't be avant-garde. You have a part in your hair." You know what I mean? So why even try? Why even try? So I was like, "Let's talk about how we need more systematic work assignment policies." No one ever associates me with the word, "intellectually cool." If I did like a beret and had a cigarette in a cigarette holder, see, then we might be playing with fire.

And if I was like, "Here's the thing. Here's the thing." I need an accent, too. "Here's the thing. You got to have another column on your Trello board for waiting to hear back." "Waiting to hear back" should be its own column. And then I just throw in some of the post-liberal stuff, too.

And do better. Zoom is the shackles of the bourgeois. French intellectuals are very cool. And we need to get rid of the capitalism. You do better. But also, you should use Calendly when setting up your meetings because it's less email. See, what I'm going to do, I could mix them together.

Like the really avant-garde philosophical stuff. Like, "As Edward Said taught us well, you should only use email for short questions and also do not other." So I'll mix in post-colonial theory plus my advice for scheduling deep work sessions. But see, no one would buy it from me. I'm not French.

I don't have the right accent. I'm not suitably angry. I have read all this stuff, by the way. I mean, I get it. I'm on a university campus. It's good stuff. I like the avant-garde. The accent was solid. It's solid? All right. Do the rest of the episode that way.

Do the ad reads that way? Yeah. They're not mad at us enough. Yeah. Why does this company even exist? It's just a stooge of the capitalist. The only company that I think should exist is, I don't know what company, the Hedgehog Review. The only sponsor we have for the show.

And we paid them money. They're paying us. This is a capitalist exchange. It is dirty. No. So we paid them money to be on the show as Foucault taught us. The power hierarchy that defines the modern podcast ad agency is itself a vestige of capitalist supremacy. So we could do it.

We could do it. Again, I've got a part of my haircut. I can't pull it off. I need a Shea t-shirt and shave my head, maybe. I don't know. Or I'll just continue to be kind of a dork. It's worked okay so far. Having hair is a good thing.

Having hair is a good thing. That's right. All right. So Simon, there you go. Let's do another call here.