[Barrin92]

The problem with the entire productivity culture is just how industrialized, bureaucratic and formulaic it is. You read the piece by Newport and there is Henry Ford, the assembly line, 'knowledge work', growth, and so on.

Words that don't show up once: freedom, exploration, curiosity, creativity (that does show up once in quotes technically).

Everything that makes life interesting is discontinuous and surprising and unique. Productivity culture is an attempt to bureaucratize human action, a sort of individual Whig history.

Newton was a genius, yet the man spent most of his life doing alchemy, trying to forecast the future with the help of the bible, and chasing dragons in the Swiss Alps, put simply, he was batshit insane and probably a failure by the standards of modern productivity gurus. Yet he also made contributions larger than anyone will ever do by filling up note-taking apps and tracking how much time they spent on their breakfast with a stopwatch.

[weq]

The kings and queeens have turned into the captailists and relgious zealots who espouse ideals of productivity and growth in order to secure your obedience and trap you in debt and gives you no choice but to continue on or give up everything.

By chasing the money you commit yourself playing within the confines of this system.

I instead chase my passion and ive found an employeer who is happy to make those same tradeoffs. I remotely work on a global SaaS product that is scaling quickly, and my backyard is a river next to the ocean where i can immediately connect with physical world. As the tides ebb-and-flow i can see the day changing and feel apart of it. My water cooler is like going on a hike into the mountains. This is what pleases me so i keep it close.

My day is a combination of creativity and nature mixed with technical challenges and stress. No matter your situations, if you are working a growing company you will have competing priorities and therefor stress.

Ive been developing professionally now for 26yrs. 10 years ago i released that i was not going to be happy climbing the ladder in search of more money. More money at the expense of my personal time. More money to manage people. More money to 100x shareholder value... Ive switched markets/verticals from gov to private to startups in search of this balance.

[limaoscarjuliet]

> The kings and queeens have turned into the captailists and relgious zealots who espouse ideals of productivity and growth [...]

Advocatus Diaboli here. One has to be careful not to forget benefits of the hard work over millenia which we all enjoy: shelter, electricity, food in the fridge, medicine in the cabinet, transportation right outside of the house we live in. Countless people worked hard to get to this point. So the question is: is our society evolved enough to stop working hard and still enjoy these benefits?

[fogihujy]

Also, have our society evolved into one that we actually want? I would expect the answer to vary greatly, depending on whom you ask.

[limaoscarjuliet]

And, if not, should we stop now? Perhaps break-through is around the corner?

[fogihujy]

It's almost as if this wasn't a one-sided issue that could be solved by a few anonymous comments on a discussion forum aimed at a crowd that are relatively privileged compared to most of the World's population.

Jests aside, these are all valid points, and it's sad that the current political climate has become so polarized that it's difficult to have a reasonable discussion about this. Going from one extreme to the other won't necessarily result in a net improvement.

[Gollapalli]

There have always been elites. There will always be elites. The question is, can we afford the rent overhead of our current elites in return for the stability they provide? If not, then a new elite will seize the opportunity and replace them. I'd wager the dissatisfaction with "productivity and growth" is an expression of frustration with a high rent-overhead from a rent-seeking elite, which has ceased to do what made them the elite in the first place.

[PragmaticPulp]

> Ive switched markets/verticals from gov to private to startups in search of this balance.

Am I understanding correctly that you switched to startups to find better work/life balance?

I have to say I'm surprised by that. Usually startups have the highest demands and the fewest people to get things done. Can you expand on your experience?

[dasil003]

There are a lot more variety of startups than there are big companies. If you're thinking of late-stage VC-driven companies who work hard to maintain the label of "startup" to perpetrate the mythology of rocket-ship riches that their ivy league hiring funnel relies on, then yeah, it's gonna be stressful. On the other hand, if you're willing to take less money for the ability to work with tighter constraints, less resources and more creativity then it's not too hard to find a company willing to accommodate you, especially if your talent level is validated by a big tech name brand on your resume (not saying it's the best signal, but hiring manager psychology is what it is).

[d3nj4l]

> especially if your talent level is validated by a big tech name brand on your resume

This is unironically the best way to find a good WLB while working on interesting problems. I switched from a startup with great WLB to a big tech with worse WLB because I recognised that the brand name on my resume will open me up for more interesting work with better WLB later on. It sucks for me now, but I'm hoping it'll pay off soon enough.

[iamstupidsimple]

There are plenty of big tech companies with good WLB. Not everywhere is Amazon.

[d3nj4l]

That's a sort of outdated view on startups IME. Unless you're talking about the FAANG types (which, IMO, shouldn't be called startups anymore) I've found that many small startups are embracing a healthy work-life balance. I switched from a small startup working on an early-stage SaaS to a mature big tech company and my wlb got worse.

I think the reason is that small startups can't always compete on salaries, so they have to make up for it by giving you something else in return. The market is full of extremely talented people leaving big tech because they're unhappy with the wlb, or want full-time remote or so on, so it turns out to be a win-win for startups and engineers. Big Tech will continue to get meat for the grinder by their sheer reputation, so they can expect you to dedicate your life to them if you want to stay.

[thow-58d4e8b]

It's a different kind of stress, and some people prefer one over another.

I experienced both a megacorp and one-man-army setups, and I find fighting bureaucratic inertia, office politics, endless stream of status updates, ever-changing organization chart and product rebrands - all way more tiring than shipping out features at frantic pace.

[mikro2nd]

There are more ways of doing startups than dreamed of in Silicon Valley, my friend.

[spaetzleesser]

“Newton was a genius, yet the man spent most of his life doing alchemy, trying to forecast the future with the help of the bible, and chasing dragons in the Swiss Alps, put simply, he was batshit insane”

I generally agree with your comment but this sentence doesn’t do justice to Newton. During his time alchemy, predicting things from the Bible were generally accepted. If Newton had published papers about his successes in alchemy you could call him crazy but he just probed the accepted wisdom of his time. I bet in few hundred years a lot of our current conceptions of reality will also sound crazy. That doesn’t mean that current scientists are insane. They are just trying to expand our current knowledge. Which is the same Newton did. He did all kinds of crazy looking stuff because he was curious.

[robertlagrant]

Exactly! In 200 years it'll be "why did they try all that cold fusion creation when you can just go to the dollar store and buy a self-contained gateway to an exploding sun to charge your Tesla for the next 1000 years?"

[mrpopo]

I think the first paradigm change will be "why did they let humans drive cars??"

[Gollapalli]

"safety uber alles" is a sure way for your society to stagnate, at the civilizational level, and a sure way to hate your life at the personal level.

[robertlagrant]

That's quite the non sequitur.

[levinb]

>tracking how much time they spent on their breakfast with a stopwatch

Masterfully stated.

One of the primary problems with this culture, and the general culture of quantified self/everything, is that the data doesn’t inform or change actual actions.

Most quantification is proffered as a solution by the Anxiety Alleviation Industrial Complex.

I’d argue a significant portion of consumer SaaS is just that.

[Viliam1234]

> One of the primary problems with this culture, and the general culture of quantified self/everything, is that the data doesn’t inform or change actual actions.

It depends on how you use the collected data. I think it is psychologically similar to investing in stock market or cryptocurrencies: Some people keep refreshing the screen every minute and get crazy about microscopic increases or decreases of the stuff they own, read all the clickbait with related keywords, and after a few weeks they burn out. Other people invest some money, then forget about the whole thing for a few months, then spend one afternoon looking at the numbers and making small adjustments, then again forget about the whole thing for a few months.

Just because you collect a lot of data about yourself (as the quantified-self people like to do), doesn't mean you need to review it every day. You could simply spend the minimum effort to collect the data, and then summarize it and draw conclusions once a year. I know people who collect various body statistics every day, and they just upload the logs to their computer, and later write a script that generates graphs over longer periods of time. And their conclusions are like: "hey, I made this lifestyle change a few months ago, and here my health data have improved significantly, so it was the right move"; where the health data is something like a weekly average of blood pressure.

Collecting million trivial details does not necessarily prevent you from seeing the big picture. Though I guess for some personality types, the temptation to obsess over the details is irresistible. It is not enough that the big picture is okay, they need to maximize the pressure at every single detail... until the thing somehow explodes. Congratulate yourself on successfully shortening the bathroom breaks, and then get surprised when in a few months half of your workforce quits.

[pjc50]

That line reminded me of the Pajama Game (1954): https://www.allmusicals.com/lyrics/pajamagamethe/thinkofthet...

    At breakfast time, I grab a bowl.
    And in the bowl I drop an egg, and add some juice.
    A poor excuse for what I crave.
    And then I add some oatmeal too
    and it comes out tasting just like glue,
    But think of the time I save.

[imgabe]

If we're going to have a civilization, we can't just have Newtons. We still need to grow food, build houses, take out the trash, and do all the mundane stuff that's necessary to sustain life. That requires some "bureaucratizition" of human action. The only reason Newton was able to do what he did was because he had a position where other people took care of fixing the leak in the roof and preparing the meals.

Newton can come up with the laws of motion, but he can't build a space shuttle by himself. Nobody could. It requires some organization and coordination and, yes, some menial, boring tasks.

Maybe one day we'll get robots to do all of that, but we aren't there yet.

[danjac]

Of extended family and friends, the ones with the most personal wealth by retirement got there not by being more creative, or inventive, or productive, or by studying and acquiring skills and knowledge, or starting and growing a business, but by inheriting, buying, renting and flipping properties at the right time.

I don't know much about macroeconomics or economics in general, but it seems that's how you climb in the Western world these days. "Working hard" and increasing your productivity - that's for chumps.

[killtimeatwork]

> seems that's how you climb in the Western world these days.

Or perhaps - used to climb. Property prices can't rise sharply forever. Not if you want real people to buy them too, not just the speculators. Real people have real limits on what they can afford, and, if priced out, you're just left with speculators and a speculative bubble, which won't go on forever.

[Gollapalli]

Well if they can't buy, rent to them! Rent-seeking in a nutshell. The value of a property becomes determined by "can you rent it for more than your mortgage?" and "how much credit can you get?".

Obviously, that's going to break down eventually, and it will be a mess when it does.

[axelroze]

It's the problem of diminishing returns.

If one is at rock bottom then working hard and being productive can get them to middle class lifestyle. It works. Helped billions of people in the past few decades.

But starting from middle class and working hard won't make riches. Think of it physically. A hardworking person can build a house compared to a drunkard who will be homeless. Yet the same hard working person can't build million houses and get insanely wealthy.

To get truly materially rich (millions+ usd, servants, yachts, etc) one usually needs to be evil and screw over other people. Productivity, in the sense of a machine making houses in the millions, would make the inventor fairly rich. But this is the exception rather than the rule. Most riches are arrived at immorally as parent comment mentions.

[arvinsim]

"Behind Every Great Fortune There Is a Crime"

[lazybreather]

> tracking how much time they spent on their breakfast with a stopwatch.

I know this is a serious forum. But the last line had me in splits.

And yeah. He made contributions larger than anyone will ever do. End of the sentence.

[amatic]

>Yet he also made contributions larger than anyone will ever do by filling up note-taking apps and tracking how much time they spent on their breakfast with a stopwatch.

Maybe not the best example. Apparently, Newton took loads of notes, and also created handwritten indexes and contents lists, alphabetical, by topic.

https://www.inc.com/ilan-mochari/how-isaac-newton-remembered...

[abnry]

> Yet he also made contributions larger than anyone will ever do by filling up note-taking apps and tracking how much time they spent on their breakfast with a stopwatch.

Part of the problem is that both the low hanging fruit has already been picked and the competition is steeper due to a wealthier society.

If you can't make a societal impact the magnitude of calculus, why not time your breakfast so that the marginal benefit you provide improves society a little while also increasing your status?

I wouldn't say I agree with the above, but I'd push back against the portrayal of the productivity guru being irrational.

[dasil003]

The idea that only "big" impact is worthwhile is a huge part of the problem. Software and the global internet has made it possible to scale everything at ridiculous speed with tiny overhead. This has set the standard for success very high, but has some perverse effects. For instance, smart people flocking to finance and ad-tech because it's easier to make money there simply by proximity and complexity to mask what you're doing.

I'd argue we need a fundamental shift in our economy and regulation to incentivize diversity.

[adamisom]

Another point overlooked in the implicit “why be 10% more efficient instead of 10x” is that we can’t all be Newtons. There is no advice to turn you into Newton, but that doesn’t make advice useless.

It’s reason to get what you can out of life, not to throw your hands up! And maybe one way to get more from life is to cut down on drudgery or do work faster so as to contribute more.

[Retric]

Math is thousands of years old yet many people have made significant strides in multiple fields in the last 200 years. In 1,000 years even more low hanging fruit will be plucked. Yet, I suspect a few people will be notable for their great strides between now and then.

Everyone can’t be Newton, but perhaps everyone can aim higher than yet another note taking app.

[dexwiz]

You are so far in the trap you cannot imagine a life without it.

[BeetleB]

I understand your frustration, but your comment is a bit off the mark.

> Yet he also made contributions larger than anyone will ever do by filling up note-taking apps and tracking how much time they spent on their breakfast with a stopwatch.

I really doubt Cal Newport would recommend this.

> Words that don't show up once: freedom, exploration, curiosity, creativity

Pretty sure Cal discusses these often - some in a positive manner and some in a disparaging manner.

[robertlagrant]

> Yet he also made contributions larger than anyone will ever do by filling up note-taking apps and tracking how much time they spent on their breakfast with a stopwatch.

This worked because he was independently wealthy, and lots of people at the time couldn't do that and made all the goods and services he paid for so he could spend his time doing what he did. That still is the case today.

[MathYouF]

Newton was poor enough that he worked through college and could only attend on scholarship. At the time of writing the Principia he was a fellow, still just a working scholar same as any professor.

He only became wealthy after joining the Royal Mint.

[RandomLensman]

New efficiency is easy, new effectiveness is not. So everyone focuses on the former with a lot of cookie cutter type recipes (management, their consultants, ...).

And Efficiency progress is so nicely measurable while it happens. Effectiveness you only see once you have it and not in a new organisation design.

[robertlagrant]

Good point.

[perl4ever]

>he was batshit insane and probably a failure by the standards of modern productivity gurus

Newton was notoriously involved with the Royal Mint (for decades, I think) and efforts to maintain sound coinage, and it's conspicuously left out of your list of odd things he did.

It isn't exactly about "productivity", but your overall tone seems like you're presenting him as unsullied by capitalism, finance, "bean counters", and other mundane things.

https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/isaac-newton-and-the-royal...

Actually, reading some of this sounds like Newton may have had some good insights into management for productivity:

"he encouraged the Mint’s engravers who were responsible for engraving coin designs on to the master punches (the tools used to make the coins) to take on private work outside of their contracted working hours. Newton recognised that this would enable them to improve their skills, making their engraved designs of a much higher quality and thus more difficult to replicate by the counterfeiters."

I think you could spin him as an icon of productivity, an early forerunner, if you so desired.

[kqr]

This depends entirely on what you let pass for productivity culture. The Ford "scientific management" stuff falls under your description, but it also doesn't work. It doesn't promote productivity, it promotes waste.

Look into how the lean ideas promote productivity. Hint: it involves freedom, exploration, curiosity, and creativity -- quite explicitly. Those are the things from which true, lasting productivity stem.

[hammyhavoc]

I think a lot of people confuse 'productivity' and 'organization'. A considerably large number of people lack organizational skills, especially so when working remotely, or running their own business—it's a lot of hats to wear.

[UncleOxidant]

The guy actually poked needles in his eyes because he was curious about how eyes worked.

[mattharney]

This is such a thoughtful encapsulation here. Thank you Barrin92

[adrhead]

There's more than to it than the productivity culture. The different underlying factors that a lot of people are hiding away because they can't seem to express it impact how they perform.

[slightwinder]

> Words that don't show up once: freedom, exploration, curiosity, creativity (that does show up once in quotes technically).

Obviously, those are the opposite of productivity, the things you want to get rid of to get more things done. Productivity is about optimizing your workflow to the point where no action is wasted, and every second is used in the most beneficial way.

> Newton was a genius

Was he? Or was he just lucky to be rich enough to be sent to university, while living in an age of low-hanging fruits to discover?

> yet the man spent most of his life doing alchemy, trying to forecast the future with the help of the bible, and chasing dragons in the Swiss Alps,

Now think about what else he could have discovered if had work seriously and not wasted time on pointless stuff.

> Yet he also made contributions larger than anyone will ever do by filling up note-taking apps and tracking how much time they spent on their breakfast with a stopwatch.

Maybe, maybe not. The thing is, nobody knows that. Creativity is random and unpredictable. Sometimes is bringing forth something good, but more often it's more harm than benefit. There is a huge mountain of survivorship bias with those cases.

It's true that we need the creative nut heads who think outside the box and contribute in mysterious ways to society. But not everyone should be a nut head and not everywhere we can afford them. We've seen in the last 18 months the other side that this creative minds will bring to society, in the form of conspiracy idiots and anti-vaxxers.