Missing -- or Hidden -- Productivity?
Thursday, November 14, 2024
Over at The Endeavour is a thought-provoking post concerning a common question: Why aren't we more productive than we are, given the vast array of productivity-enhancing technology at our disposal?
Cook himself is reacting to a then-Twitter thread, in which Balaji Srinivasan came up with five generalized reasons.
Of the five from the list, Cook opines, "If I had to choose one of the five, I'd lean toward The Great Dissipation, inventing new tasks to absorb new capacity," and I agree.
He continues:
Building on this: If, to borrow David Allen's cranking widgets metaphor for productivity, we focus on the wrong "widgets," it can look like we're doing less and less, when we're doing more things that count. William Faulkner, after all, wasn't producing wads of paper: He was writing novels.... This is what happened with the introduction of household appliances. Instead of spending less time doing laundry, for example, we do laundry more often.
Image by Our World in Data, via X, license.
Maybe we're seeing that technological bottlenecks were not as important as we thought.
For example, it's easier to write a novel using Microsoft Word than using a manual typewriter, but not that much easier. MS Word makes the physical work easier, but most of the effort is mental. (And while moving from Smith Corona 1950 to Word 95 is a big improvement, moving from Word 95 to Word 365 isn't.)
Technology calls our bluff. Improvements in technology show us that technology wasn't the obstacle that we thought it was. [bold added]
We are indeed absorbing the capacity, but the new tasks are not necessarily of the same kind we are freed up to do.
But this isn't all, as we can see from Srinivasan's description of the Great Dissipation: The productivity has been dissipated on things like forms, compliance, process, etc.
Cook's example is a positive one, if we remember that we are productive in order to live. Yes, we can now do useful things more often, and we can facilitate creative endeavors up to a point.
But there is also the negative side of the ledger in this category, drags on productivity. Mismanagement or improper government policies can become less apparent in a more productive milieu. We may well be much more productive, but with less to show for it and wondering, as a result, why we aren't as productive as we could be. (If an inflated money supply enables the government to pickpocket everyone, there is much more to pickpocket, but it will cause the victims to see less of their own production.)
Other items I take issue with, again on the basis that humans are productive for a reason. New leisure activities represent an improvement in our standard of living and can increase our productivity in unanticipated ways (e.g., an acquaintance met through social media can lead to landing a better job or starting a business).
To be clear, merely "improving productivity isn't the justification for such activities. Humans aren't machines, and need recreation, so I don't think it's right to dismiss the new activities -- themselves being produced -- so easily as mere "distractions" when they are employed at time of great productivity, as paradoxically evidenced by the fact that we have more leisure and produce in much greater abundance than at any other time in human history.
Don't be fooled by the fact that much of the new evidence doesn't look like the old evidence!
-- CAV
2 comments:
It's a bit disheartening to see video games yet again made a scapegoat. The reality is that games have always been part of our lives, and video games aren't replacing work for most gamers, they're replacing TV and watching (not, critically, playing) sports. I have never seen an office set aside time for a Halo game; every office I've seen has set aside time for basketball brackets and fantasy football rosters.
For my money, I'd say #2 is the answer, with a caveat: "technology" has come to mean only computers, and computer people quite naturally try to make things easier for computer people to use. Getting a computer person to understand the realities of, say, warehouse management or field geology, is nearly impossible. So a lot of the "improvements" are done without reference to the final users, leading to the final users being required to spend their time learning new systems that don't do what we want anyway.
To give an example of how this negatively impacts productivity: In the past when you submitted a report the technology was limited so the editor went through it carefully and thoroughly, once, maybe twice. Now? There's no friction in the editing process--you can bounce reports back and forth fifty times a day--so editors do sloppy work and do it over and over and over. Now, sometimes this is helpful, sure. There are times when you need to collaborate with people to draft a report, and being able to read the same document over Teams is fantastic! But the lack of thoughtfulness encouraged by instant communication more than consumes any benefits we derive from not needing to print out and mail hard copies of reports to editors.
The reality is that the modern world has replaced thinking with communicating. The idea of the person sitting alone, thinking things through, has vanished from our society--the expectation is that every minute be filled. It creates chaotic action without direction that does no one any real good.
Dinwar,
That is a great point regarding a real loss of potential productivity. We have to hope that people like Cal Newport are successful in pushing back, and getting computers back into their proper, less central place.
Your point on video games reminds me of Steven Johnson's Wonderland, a book-length argument to the effect that play has driven human progress throughout history. The scapegoating of games isn't just wrong, it is tragically so.
Gus
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