All right, let's do some questions. What do we got? - All right, first question from Sam. There's a time management popular app that insists that people should automate their time, time blocking using AI driven apps. They think that it's too hard for people to manually replan and prioritize work.

What's your response? - Negative. I do not believe we need AI driven time blocking because we have to shave off the moments required to figure out what should be on our plan or to fix our plan when it actually drifts away. Now, Silicon Valley is desperate for knowledge worker productivity, which is this sort of trillion dollar a year business opportunity to be something that can only be fixed by proprietary high-tech tools that only they know how to make.

There's huge money on the table there. The unfortunate reality for Silicon Valley, however, is that this is not an issue that needs complicated, high technology to solve. Now, there's a backstory here. This is a theory I have. I'll share it with you. It's my theory about how Silicon Valley accidentally polluted our understanding of productivity in a way that I think was very detrimental that we're only sort of pulling our way out of now in the last few years.

Here's what I think happened. In the early 90s, so the 1990s, let's say. In the 1990s, that whole decade, when Silicon Valley was exploding into prominence and into its sort of economic relevance, this was the same time when the computer processor wars were unfolding. So you remember this, this March from the 286 to the 386 to the 486 to the Pentium, you actually knew how many megahertz your processor was, and this processor has more megahertz than that processor.

So there's this age of the processor war. During that age, as Silicon Valley was coming to cultural relevance and economic relevance, I believe they adopted implicitly this computer processor metaphor for understanding human productivity. So when you're trying to make your computer processor better, what does it mean for a computer processor to be more productive?

It goes through instructions faster, as fast as possible. Let's reduce the time and friction in between each next instruction that we execute. The other key component to making a computer processor very productive was to make sure that it always has something to do. And so there's a technology called predictive pipelining, where essentially what would happen is you're looking ahead to try to queue up instructions you think are gonna come next, because you don't want there to be too much downtime after the processor completes an instruction to go figure out what it should do next.

That's all cycles that could have been doing something productive. So there's this mindset of you want a queue always full of things to do, so it always has something to pull in, so that it's always executing something. And every single cycle is executing something, and we want the speed between those cycles to be as fast as possible.

That's productivity for a computer processor. Silicon Valley adopted a similar model for their human employees. A notion of human productivity that was built around how do we reduce the friction and time in between actual tasks or things being completed. So the focus went into how do we make networks faster?

How do we make email more seamless? So you can get to the thing quicker, fewer keystrokes to send that email and have another one come in. How can we build information management systems to make sure that every bit of information you need is right there at your fingertips? The notion of computer inboxes, email inboxes overflowing was not an issue because like a predictive pipeline, you would want more than enough stuff always ready to go so that that human always has something they can do, an email they can respond to, or something they can attach, something they can drag over into this program and then send that through email to that program that gets loaded here and it gets put on the screen and people can see it.

It's all about reducing friction, increasing the velocity of information, increasing the velocity of task execution. It's a very computer processor type metaphor. And because Silicon Valley became so powerful and economically relevant in the 1990s, what they were doing spread. And we know that happens. I think that the clearest example of Silicon Valley nonsense spreading nationwide, the one that we all know is open offices.

Silicon Valley started doing these open office plans because in their highly rarefied world, it really mattered to them that they could signal the potential employees and potential investors that they were disruptive and they were doing business in a new way. It didn't really matter how they signaled this. They just had the signal that they were disruptive because they would get better talent and they would get more investment.

And that was critical to their survival. I mean, they could have done almost anything here. They could have all worn weird, silly hats, whatever, but they just had the signal, we're being disruptive. And then you fast forward 10 years later, and I gave a talk at a major drug manufacturing a few years ago, and they were all shaking their heads about their giant open office.

It made no sense why they had open office, right? So stuff comes out of Silicon Valley. So I think this notion of productivity as computer processor style, picking up the speed and reducing the friction required to execute small things, that just spread. And work and productivity in the knowledge sector became, are we on it?

Are we quick? Are you here? Email's not fast enough, let's do Slack. Let's do meetings and video because we can get onto those faster. How about you just directly have access to my calendar and can just start throwing things on there. So it's a speed. Now, of course, this didn't work at all because human beings are not computer processors.

We can only focus on one thing at a time. It takes us a while to actually get going on something. And once we're done with something, we need time to wind that back down, to rest and recharge, and then move our mind into a new context to work on something else.

I think there's probably like four different things we could productively give time to in a typical eight hour day with sufficient rest. Our brain can't jump back and forth like a computer processor. It's not agnostic to op codes. The thing we just operated makes a big difference on the thing that comes next.

We're not just circuits being driven by a crystal oscillator at a constant speed. So this computer processor notion of productivity, I think was devastating. It's a lot of the exhaustion that people, like we talked about earlier in the show, Ginny O'Dell, Berkman, McEwen, me, we're picking up on the exhaustion of this overload.

This overload is in part a direct effect of this broken model of productivity. But again, it's not mustache twirling exploitation. It's, hey, the cool kids are doing this. Jim Clark just built this giant Hyperion yacht. If you don't know what I'm talking about, read Michael Lewis's book, The New New Thing about the excesses of Silicon Valley in the 1990s.

They say, so whatever they're doing must make sense. Let's be more like them. And they built the tools that we used. We used their tools. We tried to emulate how they worked. That's what I think is broken. And so no, we're not gonna fix our way out of this by making those tools faster.

Using AI to manage our time block schedule is perpetuating the computer processor metaphor of increasing speed and reducing friction of task executions to key to productivity. That's an entirely broken metaphor. Our issue is not that it takes us too much time to build our plan, or that it takes us too much time to change our plan.

The issue is that we have 5X too many things in that plan. It takes me five minutes to really think through how to build my plan. It takes me three minutes to fix it. That's not the problem. The problem is checking the inbox once every one minute. The problem is having seven meetings per day where you're trying to scramble in between these meetings to try to answer Slack messages.

That's where the real problem is. And the problem for Silicon Valley is that the solutions to that problem have more to do with getting away from their ideas and getting away from their tools than they do about embracing even more. So, nope, I'm not a big believer in an AI-driven time-blocking app.

I think my paper planner probably works just fine. Not that I have a rant or anything, Jesse. - That was a good rant. - Not that I've thought about that. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)