Do bears defecate in woodland settings?

More startling revelations from academia

Scream And Shout

I listen to quite a few podcasts. Comedy ones, politics ones, business ones. You can tell when I am listening to the latter because I appear to be standing in an empty room arguing with myself. Unless I am out having a walk, in which case I seem to be shouting at the trees.

What, only me? Don’t you hear such errant nonsense masquerading as insight that you feel moved to protest? Don’t you hear prognostications so conflicted with your lived experience, you shout out in indignation?

Oh well, maybe I need some more therapy. Or medication. Or a restraining order. I don’t know.

Anyway. A recent edition of the FT’s ‘Working It’ podcast had an interview with Cal Newport about his latest book “Slow Productivity” and it made me a bit shouty.

(I should, perhaps, issue a ‘Rant Alert’ at this point. Those of a nervous disposition should look away - no, wait, what the hell are you doing subscribing to this anyway? Cancel it now!)

I don’t actually disagree with Newport’s diagnosis of the problem, which is, in summary:

We’re not very good at estimating how long cognitive tasks take. We take on too many projects/responsibilities. Each comes with an administrative overload (emails, slacks, reading, reporting, meetings). We end up spending all our time on this overhead and having to fit the actual work into quiet periods we carve out of our own time, like early morning or late at night.

The result is we get burnt out. We also suffer from what he calls ‘cognitive logjam’, or what most of us would call ‘spinning too many plates’ or ‘keeping too many balls in the air’.

“Well, knock me bandy”, as that great master of human psychology, Del Boy Trotter, would put it.

And this brings me to one of the things that irritates me about a lot of these types of books. They create a new word for something that is an everyday experience for us normal people and claim they have uncovered some amazing insight.

Back to the interview. Newport explains that what then happens is people do ‘performative work’. He calls this ‘pseudo-productivity’, using visible activity as a proxy for doing useful stuff. Although us mere mortals would probably call it ‘busywork’ or perhaps ‘productivity theatre’. Or skiving. Maybe ‘LARPing your job’. A quick scoot around Social Media would turn up many phrases that are in common parlance but Newport thinks we need a new one. I’ll leave the fact that it starts with ‘pseud’ is perhaps an indication of why but ain’t no-one making TikToks about ‘pseudo-productivity’.

On And On

There’s more. I wish there wasn’t but there is.

(Although I am talking about Newport here, these crimes are widespread. There’s no shortage of books I could have picked. And yes, I shout at books as well. And write rude words in the margins.)

Newport says we’ve been making this mistake since the middle of the 20th Century, when knowledge work began to replace factory work. The arrival of computers and things like Slack have caused it to spin out of control. (I’ll come back to this later).

Whilst he’d like management to sort it out, his ‘Slow Productivity’ movement is about the individual pushing back at the problem.

He says that if you work for yourself, you have the freedom to make the necessary changes.

However, if you work for a boss, then it could be risky to start saying no to things. So, instead he suggests you have two different statuses - ‘Things I am actively working on’ and ‘Things I have accepted but are not yet active’ (i.e. in the queue).

This is the point at which I shout the same questions that I often find springing to my lips, “ Have you ever actually worked in a big organisation? Have you ever been in an office?”

Or, in the partilcular case, heard of Kanban boards?

The idea that people have never thought of having ‘active’ projects and ‘in the queue’ projects is laughable. This is what most people would call ‘coping with the workload’.

This is not the problem. The problem is that your boss tells you all your projects must be actively worked on. And they can tell if you are not working on them all because the tech enables them to micro-manage you.

They are telling you this because their boss tells them all their projects have to be active.

It’s cascading objectives. You are in a waterfall of unreachable targets, impossible deadlines and unsurmountable workload. A never-ending deluge of delegated demands. A cascade, in fact, of crap.

People don’t take on too many projects because they are too much of a people pleaser or they are just super-enthusiastic (well, obviously some do, but they are a minority). People take on too many projects because too many projects are dumped on them. They work on too many things concurrently because they are told to, one might even say forced too (I once had to report monthly on over 50 different initiatives/product features and wasn’t allowed to say ‘no progress’ on any of them).

This is not a problem of individual work organisation. It is a systemic problem of how organisations function today.

Obviously

Then the interviewer, Isabel Berwick, says

“So the thing that really blew my mind in your book is this thing that I had just never thought of before, is that we’ve got no way of measuring productivity in knowledge and creative work, you know, and we’re still working like we did in factories”

This is where I really lost my shit.

I mean, what? Really? WTF?!!!

I don’t blame Isabel Berwick for not thinking about this before, or realising it. She’s a journalist, she has a pretty good measure of productivity in terms of articles or podcast she produces. And a newspaper environment is atypical, quite unlike your average corporate environment (something it shares with academic environments…)

But is she saying that someone who writes about business and, er, productivity has only just articulated this?

Maybe I’m being unfair. I haven’t read all Newport’s books (well, I haven’t read any of them, to be honest). Perhaps he’s said it before.

But no. Newport says he asked his email followers what productivity is and they couldn’t say.

And so he went and did some research into the history of productivity. (Actual research. I know!)

You’ll never guess what he found out.

That “when knowledge work emerged as a major sector, the way we were measuring productivity in the factories and on the farm just didn’t apply. We did not have clear output we could count.”

Well, knock me bandy. Again.

He went on to say that after 3 centuries of economic growth measuring productivity with numbers, this new sector emerged where none of that worked and we haven’t recognised this as the major disruption that it is.

Well, I agree with that. But it’s not exactly an earth-shattering observation, is it?

It’s what I would call SOBO.

A Statement Of the Bleedin’ Obvious.

He also goes on to talk about how Slack and other newer communication tools came along because they were better for the synchronous chats that were taking place on email, but they are just better ways of doing the wrong thing. He concludes that the way we have been working, with unscheduled messaging back and forth all day long, has been disastrous.

As anyone who has spent the evening writing the report they never got around to during a day spent being interrupted by Slack messages already knew.

More SOBO.

He seems to be an expert at it.

(Which may be why I haven’t felt the need to read any of his books.)

Ice Ice Baby

I could go on. At length. You may think I have already.

(Actually, I have written about productivity several times before, e.g. ‘Riffing on Productivity’ from last year, ‘Working Hard’ from 2022, ‘In the darkness’ in 2021…)

Maybe I’m being unfair.

So, for balance, I do agree with Newport’s conclusions. That the right measure of useful effort is actually finishing things that are valuable (although how we decide what is valuable is another minefield). That’s what we should consider as productivity.

And that we need to start doing fewer things better by rejecting ‘busyness’. Even though it’s a scary step.

He also says that AI might help reduce the admin burden but that we can solve the problem right now by changing the way we think about work, by having more structured ways to talk about work (this is probably the most profound statement in the entire interview).

But it’s still all a bit underwhelming.

However, I have the advantage of having worked before PCs and email came in. Before Slack and Teams and all that other technology that was supposed to improve our personal productivity (oh, the irony). So I experienced a different way to think about work. On paper. With face-to-face communications.

I saw the impact of this new tech stuff and what worked and didn’t. I could tell that things like Slack were a complete attention-suck and should be avoided in certain situations. I could see how the tech could make things worse (or ‘spin out of control’ as Newport dramatically puts it).

I’ve also had to learn to switch between creative work and execution (or ‘deep work’ and ‘process work’, to put it in Newportisms). And I’ve worked in an actual organisation. In fact, more than one. And with actual people in actual teams doing actual work.

Reality is a great teacher.

This is what really frustrates me about this stuff. Here is a book written by someone who’s experience of the work place is quite different to the lived experience of most people in organisations. Here’s a conversation about it with someone else who’s workplace is also quite different to that of most organisations. It’s not informed by the everyday reality that most people encounter.

It’s part of a whole parallel universe of conversation and debate that creates much heat but little illumination. That floats above the lives of most of the people who are supposedly the subject of this conversation, whilst the real issues are ignored.

It focuses on changes the individual can make (or ‘victim blaming’ as I prefer to call it) without advocating for the systemic changes that would really make a difference.

It highlights ‘point solutions’ and various silver bullets (Radical Candour, anyone? Or maybe Grit. No? How about Psychological Safety? If you don’t like these, there are plenty more) but ignores the fundamental issues.

It takes personal experience, or the results of limited research (often culturally specific, primarily to the US), and presents the findings and conclusions as generally applicable.

It’s superficial, faddish, ephemeral. It’s re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. Worse, it’s arguing about where the deckchairs should be put. When we really need to be talking about the looming encounter of the iceberg kind. The moment when our pleasant little existence (well, for those in first class, which is where most of the commentators are) is going to collide with reality. Literally.

I’m not saying people shouldn’t take individual action to improve their experience at work. Quite the opposite, I think it’s essential for self-preservation, so you come out the other end of the shitshow we call a corporate career with some semblance of sanity. That’s a big part of what Decrapify Work is about.

But let’s not pretend that’s going to fix ‘work’. Let’s not pretend that’s going to effect the level of change needed. Let’s not pretend that’s enough.

Instead, we must talk about what the problems really are, and what changes will have real impact at the macro level.

Otherwise, we’re all going to go under, whilst the band plays on…

---

What do you reckon? Am I being unfair or do these academic authors deserve both barrels?

Get in touch and let me know what you think.

Or just for a chat. I’d love to hear about your experiences and see if I can help you.

If you feel like I’m totally on the money here and you’d like to show some extra appreciation, you could subscribe for a month. Think of it like buying me a pint.

But whatever you do, keep reading and engaging, because that’s what I appreciate the most.