The plight of the modern knowledge worker is we don't have a good definition of productivity. So we think we do right? I mean, it's something like, yeah, I know what it means to be productive or not productive. But we don't actually have a great definition and knowledge work of what that means, because knowledge work is not well set up for the classical definitions of what it means to be productive, right?

So in a factory, I can measure Model T's produced per labor hour input, and it's a number, right? And then if you change something about how you build the Model T's, and that number goes up, you say this way is better, this is more productive, that came out of agriculture, bushels yielded per acre of land if you planted your crops a different way, and that number went up, like, oh, this is a better way of doing it.

Knowledge work emerges as a major sector in mid 20th century, right? The term is coined 1959. How do we define productivity here? Well, those did not exactly apply anymore, because individual knowledge workers weren't producing one thing, they were doing many things. And maybe what I'm doing is different than what you are doing.

These are the projects I happen to have taken on, you've taken on these projects, the systems by which we were doing our work also are no longer transparent. So in knowledge work, how you organize yourself or manage your work is personal, which is a big change, actually, in the history of economic activity, but it's personal productivity.

So there's nothing to even improve in an obvious way. So we couldn't use standard definitions of productivity. So what do we do instead? We said, let's use visible activity as a proxy for doing useful effort, which is just a veneer of productivity, the appearance of productivity, the pseudo productivity.

Exactly, right. So like, at least we'll do this. So if I see you doing stuff, that's better than you not doing stuff. And if we need to be more productive, let's work longer hours, you know, come in early, stay late. That's what we had as our definition of productivity.

Now, I'm a technocritic, right? I'm a computer scientist. So I'm always interested in how technology interacts with these social economic systems. My contention is this really went off the rails when we had the front office IT revolution. So now we have computers, and we have networks, and we have laptops, and then we get wireless internet.

Now, suddenly, you can demonstrate visible activity at any point, wherever you are. The fine grainness of these demonstrations is much smaller, right? It's now not just I see you in your office, it's I have to actually be answering specific messages, and work can follow you wherever you go. Also, the low friction nature of digital communications made potential work really skyrocket.

So workload per worker really went up, because it was just much easier now for things to be put on your plate. If I can just send you an email, like, hey, can you handle this? That's much lower friction, much less social capital costs and having to actually come to your office and ask you to do something.

So workloads also spiraled. Pseudo productivity did not play well in that environment. So if I could demonstrate busyness at any point in my life, and there was a never ending queue of work, this was going to create a crisis. Because now, every moment at the office or not at home, home office, now in the home office on the soccer field, wherever you are, you're constantly now in the psychological battle internally speaking between do I demonstrate more productivity or not, this is what I think started to burn people out.

It's what began to create a burnout crisis and knowledge work that you really don't see pick up until the early 2000s. Right? If you look at time management books from the 1990s, look at you know, first things first by Stephen Covey, all optimism, all figure out your values, and you can carefully plan your day to actualize all of your best interests, like rah, rah, very positive.

You get to 2004. David Allen's getting things done. And now it's how do we even find like some moments of Zen like peace among the onslaught? There's no everything is gone, except for how do we survive the onslaught? So by the 2000s, digital technology was cracking pseudo productivity. And so I think this is what began to rapidly burn out knowledge workers, that combination, and didn't necessarily translate into actual productivity or moving the ball forward on whatever the mission of the job or the corporation is, well, I think it made it more apparent because you began to get once you have these tools, these absurd situations like early in the pandemic, for example, a lot of people found themselves in a situation that eight hours of zoom, right zoom after zoom after zoom after the entire day was spent talking about work with no time actually spent not actually doing any work, which is so absurd that it's like a like a Kafka play or something like this is some metaphor for the the nihilistic reality of life, but it was what people were actually doing.

So it became hard to ignore. And that's why I think the pandemic was the tipping point. Finally, for a lot of people, a lot of knowledge workers, they got it got so absurd and overloaded so much time spent talking about work so little time actually doing work that people began looking in the mirror and saying, what am I even doing here?

Yeah, the idea that this membrane that separates work from home was initially permeable seemed like a good thing until it became so permeable as to be non existent whatsoever, where there's no boundary or distinction or differentiation between when you're working and when you're not. And then you layer on top of that, this expectation of always being available, with the expectation that you are going to immediately respond to everything that's incoming.

And it's not just email, it's got its email, it's slack, it's DMs, it's LinkedIn, it's, you know, the number of inputs that people have and ways in which people can get in touch with you is overwhelming. So even yesterday, I came into the studio, I was like, I'm gonna get ready to talk to Cal.

You know, I've been away for a while, I should probably check in on the, you know, inbox, checked email, checked, you know, checked my WhatsApp, responded to a whole bunch of texts. And by the time I was done with that, it starts over again, because there's a whole new tranche of replies to then get into.

And then I looked up and it was, I got to the studio at, I don't know, 830 or something like that, it was three o'clock. It was like, I hadn't even begun to wrap my head around, like, what I wanted to talk to you about yet. Yeah, what did you create?

Insanity. And then you spend your whole day in defense mode, you're not intentional about, you know, being on the offense, tackling the things that are most important. And then you leave feeling dispirited, and feeling like you didn't actually accomplish anything and questioning and maybe, you know, you and you're, are you?

You're not really. Yeah, well, this was this is the idea of the book, right? Is why do we do that? Well, we don't have another workable definition of productivity. So for a lot of people, it's like, this is all I had. This is all my, my organization recognizes is activity, right?

And this is the way you're active. In 2024, as you're on email, you're doing this, I don't know what else to if I'm not doing this, then how does anyone know I'm doing productive work. So the solution to all this is let's have better definitions of productivity. Let's have alternative ways of thinking about what it what it could mean to be productive, because I had written about, you know, I wrote a book about email, and how damaging it was, and how this culture was making everyone stupid, or it is a terrible idea.

It's like turning the lights off in a car factory to save money on your electric bill. It's like you are, but people are putting the steering wheels, you know, on the roof, because they can't see anything. And that's what email was, to me, it's convenient, but it's destroying these companies.

But why didn't people make changes, even if they recognize this is very damaging to people's psychological sustainability, we're not actually producing anything valuable. It's because they said, Well, what else do we do? Like, how else do I? How else do I know if my, you know, employees are working?

Like, what would productivity mean? If it's not accessibility? And I thought, well, we can answer that. So let's answer it. How do you let's begin the process of answering that. So slow productivity is much more based on producing stuff that's good. And it's much less based on activity. So it's results oriented more than it is activity focused.

It has three big ideas. The first is to do fewer things, which terrifies a lot of people, but it shouldn't. The second is to work at a natural pace. So this idea which is possible in a world of pseudoproductivity, that you're going to just be full intensity, nine to five, week after week, month after month, year after year with no variation.

Like you can you can pull that off if what you're doing is just lots of email. You can't pull that off if you're doing serious cognitive work. So we need more of a natural varied pace. And then finally obsess over quality. So counterbalance that or support that with an obsession over the quality of what you produce.

I think that combination is engineered to be much more sustainable, it matches the human condition much better. So you can you can pursue that definition of productivity without by default burning out. And I think it's actually effective, it's going to produce a lot of valuable things and your, your company, your career, these things are going to do well.

I want to get into each of the three. But I think before we do that, it should be pointed out that to engage with those three tenants requires at least some agency in your job, or a person at the top who understands this and is trying to create that culture beneath him or her.

So I tried to design the ideas in this book that if you're a knowledge worker, even with no buy in, you can still act to some degree in all three principles. This was the lesson I learned with my last book, which was much more organized on what can organizations do, in this case, like the cure the email problem, turns out organizations just aren't willing to do it, or if they're willing to do it, it's too complicated, it's too hard.

And so what I'm really focusing on here is how can we put these ideas into play, even if you have to do it without the direct consent or blessing of someone above you. So how does that work if your boss has a different expectation? So that's what we get into, like, okay, quick, get concrete.

So alright, so early on principle number one, do fewer things, right? What that actually means is do fewer things at once. So my argument is, if you have fewer things on your plate at any one time, from a mental health perspective, it's way more sustainable, you get rid of that deranging effect of just I'm all I'm doing is talking about work.

It also actually increases the rate at which things are finished. Because the issue with having too many things on your plate at the same time is that each of your commitments brings with it its own administrative overhead. So everything you've agreed to has its own little overhead tax, like emails, you have to send about it or meetings you have to go to.

So if you have too many things on your plate at once, you say yes, too many times, you now have a huge pile of this overhead tax coming to every day. So more and more of your day is spent servicing the things in your list without actually working on it.

This not only takes up direct time, it also fragments your day more and more. So your ability to actually make uninterrupted progress that also begins to degrade. So now the pace at which you're able to finish anything slows down. So yes, you said yes to more things. But the rate at which anything is getting done is actually slower.

So if you can somehow bootstrap your way and have ideas about how to do this, but bootstrap your way, and then taking on fewer things at once, pretty soon you're gonna be rewarded for this. Because not only does it make your life better, but your boss or whoever, your clients will be like, "Hey, look at this.

We're getting things done. This is great. Now you're a rainmaker over here." And so you can, if you can bootstrap that, it's actually gonna be pretty easy to keep going because you're gonna be better at what you do. What would be an example of how you would bootstrap that?

You said you had some ideas about how would like in a very concrete context. Yeah. So like, okay, here's the, this started as a thought experiment, actually, but people are trying it. So I'm now proposing this as an actual thing to do. Imagine you have a shared document at the top.

All right, here's the projects I'm currently working on, like actively making progress and dividing line. Here's the queue of projects that I'm going to work on next in the order I'm going to work on them. So now someone comes to you and says, "Hey, like, I need you to work on, you know, the Johnson memo." And you say, "Great, just go to here's my shared work document, just, you know, throw it on there, make sure I point or anything I need to know, or if you want me to follow up with you, just let me know to do that." Now they have to confront the reality of your workload.

And they say, "Oh, like Rich is working on these three things. There's seven other things in this queue. And a couple things are going to happen there. Either A, they're going to say, 'Actually, you know what, never mind, because, you know, actually, you have a lot going on. It's not some vague sense of you saying I'm busy, I can see what you're doing, or their expectations will be reset.

Okay, if I give this to you, it might be a month till I hear back because I can see what this whole queue is." And it allows people to understand you're only actively working on a few things at a time. And you can even tell them, "Feel free to keep checking in on here, you can watch your project move its way up the queue.

And you'll see when it jumps into my active projects list, at which point like it would make sense to actually bother me about things." This was supposed to be a thought experiment, because it's a little bit contrived, right? People are trying it. They're doing it. They're doing it. But isn't the exception or reality check here, because the person who's calling you or emailing you and saying, "I want you to do this thing," is going to be higher up in the hierarchy of the organization.

And they're going to say, they may look at that and they say, "Okay, but like, I need you to stop what you're doing and do my thing first. It takes priority." Yeah. Because they're answering to somebody else. And all they care about is making sure that the thing gets done so that they can report to the person above them.

Yeah. So, in this thought experiment, you say, "Okay." You add it to the top, you bump something out, and you tell that person. You got to talk to the other person that I'm supposed to be doing this thing for? Yeah, yours got bumped out, but it's at the top of the list.

It'll go back in. So, you know who actually does this very successfully? Software developers. So, they figured out a long time ago, "Okay, it doesn't work well to have all these different features and stuff we need to add to a product just existing on various people's plates." Like, just like, "Hey, also add this feature, also add this feature, also add this feature." The idea of the stack.

Yeah, that does not work. And so, what do software developers tend to do instead? These agile methodologies that all seem to share a similar workload distribution strategy, which is we will collect the stuff that needs to be done as a team centrally, not assigned to anyone yet, but not lost either.

Here it is. Like, we have it as index cards on a bulletin board. These are all things that need to be done. And if someone comes up with something else that needs to be done, let's get it right up there so we won't forget it. Over here, we can have a column for each of our developers.

We put what they're working on in their column. And as soon as they're done with it, we'll move that thing to done, and we can pull something new onto their plate. And then they'll work on that thing until it's done. So, it gives the people who are coming up with the idea.

So, someone calls the development team from the marketing, whatever, department. "Hey, our clients really want this. Like, get this in our program." They can know their work they're requesting did not disappear. There it is. It's on the board. It's on the queue. They're going to make a decision every time someone frees up a slot.

But it's pull not push. I pull something new onto my plate when I'm ready, not you push everything onto my plate, and then I have to somehow deal with it. It works fantastically well for software development. I think we should explicitly be doing this in more knowledge work jobs.

I'm talking literally index cards on a thing. Here's the one thing I'm working on. We're probably not going to get there anytime soon. But you can internally more or less simulate this by saying, "Here's what I'm working on." So, if you don't want to create that document, which is you got the right type of boss to get away from that, you can also do this more internally.

So, you can say, "Okay, when someone asks me to do something, I find a time on my calendar to do it. I have to go and find and protect the time, right?" It's not only a time management tactic. You know you'll have time for it when the time comes.

It's a reality check on your schedule. And you can earn a reputation pretty quickly as, "I'm very careful about my time." Like, "Okay, we know that about Callie. He's very careful about his time. We ask him to do something." Instead of giving the immediate yes or no, instead of saying yes or no in the room, you say, "Yeah, great.

Let me go do... I keep very careful track of my time. Let me go find where the time would be for this. And I'll get back to you as soon as I do that and let you know when this might be able to fit." Then you go and you do that.

You get back to them later. And you might be able to realistically say, "If I don't move something else, the next time I can find 15 hours, it's going to be six weeks from now." You earn the right to do this if people trust that, "Yeah, he's organized by his time.

He's not lying." And you have more leeway. The trust piece is important because there's probably people who are trying to dodge work or just trying to do the least amount that they're going to be required to. But I think that central portal of shared information through a document or whatever else gives people the ability to see everything as it actually is and also obviates a lot of asynchronous communication around it because you can just look at that and there's no need for emailing back and forth about schedules, etc.

Yeah, I mean, the asynchronous communication is the killer. Not the idea of asynchronous communication, but volume of it. Hey, if you like this video, I think you'll really like this one as well. Check it out.