Cal Newport is a professor of computer science and the author of books like Deep Work and Digital Minimalism. His latest book is Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. In this episode, he explains what s led to the rise of what he calls "pseudo-productivity," and the fallout when we apply the structures of the industrial revolution to modern work.
00:03:59.700And this really clear anti-productivity movement gained a lot of steam in those first months and first years of the pandemic as a result of this pent-up exhaustion finally going too far.
00:04:12.440Yeah, you're seeing books coming out about how not to do things, how to just take back your life.
00:05:24.260They just don't want to be so exhausted.
00:05:26.240And so I thought there was this opportunity here to start from the premise that gave birth to the anti-productivity movement, that we're exhausted.
00:05:34.300We don't know why, but then go in a different direction with that towards, okay, so how do we fix work so that we're not exhausted, but also so that we don't hate our work, so that we still can have pride and motivation for what we're doing.
00:05:48.760That seemed to me to be self-evidently what we needed to figure out.
00:05:51.780And that's the question out of which slow productivity eventually emerged as an answer.
00:05:57.060And so you argue that a big driver behind this backlash was people had an incorrect view of what productivity is.
00:06:04.820Because I think oftentimes when you ask people, like, what does it mean to be productive?
00:06:07.380You're going to get 20 different answers.
00:06:09.360People really don't know what it is, particularly in knowledge work.
00:06:12.020If you ask a factory worker or a farmer what productivity is, they can tell you.
00:06:16.300It's like, well, if I do X amount of work, I'm going to get X amount of results.
00:06:20.060It's a little harder when you're doing spreadsheets or doing writing or things like that.
00:06:25.040And you argue that what ends up happening is that knowledge workers engage in a lot of what you call pseudo-productivity.
00:07:36.340This emerges as a major sector roughly in the mid-20th century.
00:07:39.780The term knowledge work is coined in 1959 for the first time.
00:07:43.620That definition of productivity doesn't work anymore because there is no one thing we're producing.
00:07:48.140Instead, knowledge workers do a variety of different things.
00:07:52.000What they're doing shifts over time and differs from person to person.
00:07:55.260Like what I'm doing right now as a professor, the literal list of projects and commitments that I'm working on is different than the professor sitting right next to me at Georgetown.
00:08:28.980So quantitative productivity did not translate to the birth of the knowledge sector.
00:08:35.220So we fell back onto a very crude heuristic, which was what you mentioned, pseudoproductivity.
00:08:41.280Well, at the very least, we'll use activity as a visible proxy for useful effort.
00:08:46.760So what this led to was the obvious idea of, well, why don't we gather all these knowledge workers in an office building for roughly the same length of a shift in a factory?
00:08:54.920And then we can just make sure they're there.
00:08:57.160Hey, if you're there, we know at least you're doing something.
00:08:59.180And then we can kind of watch and make sure that you're not spending too much time at the water cooler.
00:09:02.900We'll just use activity as a proxy for productivity.
00:09:05.780If we need our productivity to go up, we'll tell you to work longer hours.
00:09:25.120It's not like put up on a mission statement, but it's what we've been doing.
00:09:29.320Activity will be a proxy for useful effort.
00:09:31.940When you combine that with the advent of computers and networks and portable computing, all this falls apart.
00:09:38.380And this way of measuring productivity, pseudoproductivity spins out of control.
00:09:43.020That then becomes the source of the discontent that reaches ahead in 2020.
00:09:46.560Okay, so because there's no specific way to measure productivity in knowledge work, we end up just showing how we're productive by answering lots of emails, going to lots of meetings, doing Zoom.
00:09:58.440I mean, what other kind of things do you see people do in knowledge work to show that they're doing something?
00:10:01.800Well, specifically what went wrong is before we got those technologies, demonstrating busyness was a physical thing.
00:10:10.920And if you walk by my door, I need to start typing or look like I'm looking through papers.
00:10:15.740Once you add communication that's digital and once you add portable computing, so I can bring work home with me on a laptop and I can communicate with people about work from wherever I am through, let's say, a smartphone, Slack, email, et cetera.
00:10:28.860The problem was the opportunities to do work became endless.
00:10:34.060The opportunities to demonstrate busyness also became ubiquitous because I could do this digitally.
00:10:39.840If you see a footprint of me replying to a message or jumping on a Slack channel or being on a quote-unquote optional Zoom meeting, these all became ways of demonstrating productivity.
00:10:50.360And the amount of work I could do also became limitless because with low friction communication, it's very easy to push more and more work at people.
00:10:57.260There's always more work you could take.
00:10:58.800So now this drive to be visibly productive morphed from let me show up to the office on time and look reasonably busy while I'm there and then I'll go home to this constant tug of war at all points of your life of, hey, this is a moment where I could be demonstrating more productivity.
00:11:15.940Every time I choose to do something else, every time I choose to be with my family or to exercise or to go to church, whatever I'm doing is always now a constant psychological tug of war between I could be demonstrating more productivity.
00:11:28.000It became this psychologically fraught internal battle of I always could be working, there's always more to be done, and that's when we got into trouble.
00:11:37.500That's what pushed us towards this sense of exhaustion.
00:11:40.240And not only that, it led to that nihilism because people would look at all the stuff they did during the day, the emails and the Zoom meetings, and they're thinking, boy, what did this actually do?
00:11:51.160There's no point to this, so I might as well just give up on this idea of productivity.
00:11:54.780Yeah, well, one thing that happened in particular, which I think is tragic and overlooked, is that once activity becomes how I demonstrate that I'm useful, I start saying yes to more things, right?
00:12:05.560Because what clearer way to indicate that you're active than saying yes when someone asks you to do something?
00:12:11.720And what way would be more dangerous, more of a signal that you're not productive than to say no when someone asks you to do something?
00:12:19.220So we began taking on way more commitments than we would have in time past.
00:12:23.660So just the concurrent number of things we work on as an average knowledge worker, that's really gone up.
00:12:29.140But the problem is each one of these things that we commit to doing, it's not just the time required to execute the task, the write the report or the do the committee meeting.
00:12:37.900It's the administrative overhead that comes with it that begins to really take a toll on us.
00:12:44.360Everything we say yes to brings with it a persistent administrative overhead that I call overhead tax.
00:12:51.200And the more things you say yes to, the more of this tax you have to pay, which means the more of your day now has to be spent tending to all of the things that you've put onto your plate.
00:13:02.400And the more time you now have to spend tending to these things, meaning emails and meetings and just the cognitive real estate that these things take up, the more time you have to tend to the administrative overhead of all these commitments, the less time you have to actually get work done.
00:13:16.440And then we get to a point where there's very little time left to actually make progress on our work.
00:13:22.080And this is what I think happened in the early pandemic is that the shift to remote work added about 20% more tasks to everyone's plate basically overnight because there's work to be done to adjust to the pandemic.
00:13:37.900So much of our day was already in administrative overhead that for a lot of people, that extra 20% spiraled the whole thing out of control.
00:13:45.500And we began to hear from people that would have eight hours in a row of Zoom meetings.
00:13:49.700I mean, I have emails I could show you of people saying, here's my problem, Cal.
00:13:54.340When do I go to the bathroom during the day?
00:13:56.360It's eight hours back to back to back to back to Zoom.
00:13:58.540So the whole thing just fell apart because we were flying so close to the edge of absurdity.
00:14:57.580Even if you know, I'm going to work on this proposal next week, other people don't know that.
00:15:03.540So they're going to be emailing you and they're going to be setting up the dreaded weekly check-in status meetings.
00:15:08.400And so regardless of how you want to tackle this work, once you've committed to it, once it's been activated, other people are going to start demanding that you interact with them about it.
00:15:17.040So the overhead tax is persistent and ongoing until that commitment is discharged.
00:15:23.320And then the problem is you might think, well, I'm just taking on one task and that task is I'm going to write this proposal.
00:15:28.300But then you think, well, I just got this one thing I'm doing so I can take on something else.
00:15:31.440But then that other thing you add to your list comes with its own additional overhead tax.
00:15:39.520So now if I keep adding things, eventually the amount of time I'm spending on overhead tax is so large that I fall behind on actually finishing the tasks.
00:15:49.960And then more and more projects begin to pile up because you're not finishing the ones you said yes to because more and more of your day is overhead tax and things begin to spiral out of control.
00:15:59.300The only way to escape that spiral is to start finding hours free from the cost of overhead tax to actually do the work.
00:16:08.700And now we find people having to work early in the morning, to work on the weekends, to work in the evenings.
00:16:13.960And this is particularly crazy making because they know that they have these long workday, which is just being wasted on meetings and email.
00:16:22.840And the fact that they now have to also sacrifice a weekend or the evening.
00:16:26.800I mean, that's why this stuff becomes derangy.
00:16:29.040I mean, this is why we got an anti-productivity literature.
00:16:32.580The way we were working was just crazy.
00:16:34.980But I think the big difference between, let's say, the way I think about this and an anti-productivity person is they would say, if we're feeling really bad about work, if it's really making us crazy, it must be really benefiting someone else.
00:16:47.760It's all going to be these dialectics.
00:16:49.660So if we feel terrible about work, it must be because we have a mustache twirling manager that's getting a lot of extra labor out of us.
00:16:58.440This must be an exploitative relationship.
00:17:02.060The reality is also, I think, is more crazy than that.
00:17:04.960No one was benefiting from this way of work.
00:17:06.900It's not good for a company that you're spending eight hours in Zoom.
00:17:10.680They don't make money for you being in Zoom.
00:17:12.760You answering emails does not produce the reports or the software that they're selling.
00:17:42.420You look to the past to kind of guide and shape your philosophy.
00:17:47.180I mean, one of the things you look to when you're developing your idea of slow productivity was the slow food movement.
00:17:53.340How did the slow food movement inspire some of the tenets of slow productivity?
00:17:58.140Well, I first looked at it just because the term slow.
00:18:01.380So I kind of had this intuitive appeal to the word slow because things felt really fast and distracting.
00:18:09.580As I read more about slow food, though, I said, oh, there's actually a framework here around which we could build a solution to the issues we're having in work.
00:18:16.780So if you look at slow food, there's two things that's really key about that movement and the additional slow movements that followed it.
00:18:23.980One, they look back to traditional sources of wisdom.
00:18:27.080So instead of trying to build from scratch a new utopian way of thinking about something, they like to look back and say, where is the aggregated cultural wisdom on this topic?
00:18:37.920So slow food didn't try to build alternative food cultures to fast food from scratch.
00:18:43.780They look back at their great grandparents, you know, how did they eat in this part of Italy 100 years ago?
00:18:49.740So they look back to traditional aggregated sources of cultural knowledge as opposed to trying to build new things from scratch.
00:18:55.800And two, they really believed in a positive alternative.
00:18:59.920Present a positive alternative to what it is that is upsetting you.
00:19:04.740Don't just attack what's upsetting you.
00:19:06.300So instead of just attacking McDonald's coming to the Spanish steppes in Rome, they said, let's give you an alternative way to think about food that's better.
00:19:29.620We need a positive alternative to the way that we're working that's not working.
00:19:34.000And two, instead of trying to invent new approaches to work entirely from scratch, let's look back at traditional ways we thought about work.
00:19:41.180And for me, it made sense that what I'm going to do is look for knowledge workers from time past, people who use their brain to produce new value, who did not work in an office, but instead had a lot of freedom about how and when they did their work.
00:19:55.300Let's see what they gravitated towards.
00:19:57.280What did they discover through trial and error was the right way to use your brain to produce useful knowledge in the world.
00:20:03.940Let's isolate those principles and then adjust them to the modern 21st century office setting.
00:20:09.420So we'll look back just like slow food, look back to traditional cuisine.
00:20:12.880I look back to traditional knowledge workers and just like slow food said, what's our positive alternatives to McDonald's?
00:20:18.960I said, what is our positive alternative to being on Slack 10 hours a day?
00:20:23.720And so, yeah, you look to Jane Austen, I think Charles Darwin, a lot of famous knowledge workers who the work they did, groundbreaking, it changed, sometimes changed the course of history.
00:20:35.900But if you look at their day-to-day work life, it doesn't seem like they were doing much, but little by little, they got a lot done.
00:20:43.340So let's dig into these tenets of slow productivity.
00:20:46.640And the first one is just do fewer things.
00:20:50.040And so by doing fewer things, this can reduce a lot of that overhead tax we were talking about, right?
00:20:55.080So if you take on fewer projects, fewer commitments at work, you'll have to deal with less of the back and forth emails, the Zoom meetings, etc.
00:21:02.660But how do you convince your boss or the people you work with that, hey, I can't take on another project when there's this expectation you should?
00:21:11.800There's a lot of social pressure that you need to take on more projects.
00:21:16.620Well, one of the key things to remember is that really what this principle is saying is not do fewer things this year.
00:21:24.240It's not saying accomplish less useful results over the next few months.
00:21:28.520It is instead asking that you do fewer things at once.
00:21:32.500So cut down on the simultaneous number of commitments.
00:21:35.840When you cut down on how much you're doing at once, as we talked about, the overhead tax goes down, you have more time per day to actually work on hard things, and you finish these things faster.
00:21:45.520There's this irony to it that if you take on fewer commitments at any one time, the total number of things you accomplish over months and years is actually much higher.
00:21:55.080So there's some sense of, if I can just get away with this long enough, the value of how I work is going to be self-evident.
00:22:02.820Fewer things it wants means more things over time.
00:22:06.300And so the book, I mean, a lot of the book is trying to understand how do we engineer these timeless principles into this very specific time we have right now of bosses and email and Slack.
00:22:14.960And so there's a lot of ideas, a lot of real practical ideas about how to do this.
00:22:18.400But if you work in an office and for a boss, a lot of these heuristics or tips that I talk about, they center on making workload transparent.
00:22:26.480The key thing that drives overload right now is the fact that it's a secret how much I'm working on.
00:22:48.960I have no idea if you're overloaded or not.
00:22:51.820Transparency about workload can make a really big difference.
00:22:55.060So in its very simplest form, you could literally have a shared document.
00:22:59.320Here's what I'm working on right now, like actively dividing line.
00:23:03.620Here are other things that people want me to work on.
00:23:06.240And, you know, I have them roughly ordered.
00:23:08.240And so you could say to someone when they ask you to do something like, well, yeah, go to my work queue and go ahead and add it on there.
00:23:14.460And suddenly they have to confront, oh, my God, you have like 15 things waiting to be done once you're done working on the three things you're doing now, which will either A, lead them to say, you know what, never mind.
00:23:23.260Or B, have completely reset expectations about how long it's going to take and whether they're going to bother you about something else until it's done.
00:23:30.320Another way you can do this is do pre-scheduling of time.
00:24:58.160You know, the key is not that they're trying to exploit you.
00:25:00.860It's just that they haven't thought much about you or what you're doing or how much work you have on your plate.
00:25:04.300They're just trying to get rid of something.
00:25:05.360So transparency about the reality of workloads goes a long way to moderating the actual flow of assignments and works in these environments.
00:25:13.740Yeah, it sounds like what you're doing is you're making your abstract work concrete.
00:25:50.220So you're going to have to might have to wait before I can get to it.
00:25:53.100Yeah, it's almost like you wish we could have a jar of marbles on your desk and they each represent, you know, a half hour of your time for the next.
00:26:03.840And then when someone wanted to ask you to do something, they have to come into your office and grab out the appropriate number of marbles from your jar and know what they're taking from you.
00:26:12.240And if there's no marbles left, there's no marbles left.
00:26:14.380We somehow want to capture that metaphor digitally.
00:26:17.780Somehow we want to capture that metaphor in the way we work today.
00:26:21.880We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
00:26:30.500So just reducing the number of projects you take on at a time can go a long way to allowing you to keep your sanity and reduce a lot of that overhead tax.
00:26:41.440But are there things we can do to reduce the overhead tax on the projects we do take on?
00:26:46.540Because I feel like maybe a lot of people have experienced this.
00:26:49.120You're working on a project and you think, I'm doing a lot of movement on this thing, but I'm actually not moving anywhere.
00:26:57.000Because you're kind of spinning your wheels doing dumb stuff.
00:26:59.640Anything we can do to reduce the little piddly things that take up our time during the day?
00:27:04.100Yeah, it's a really important element to add to this.
00:27:07.580And I essentially consolidated in the book years of writing and thinking about these small time-consuming overhead activities and sort of consolidated all my best thinking on it.
00:27:18.140And the verb I used was how do you constrain the small?
00:27:24.820So we want to limit how many things we commit to.
00:27:27.040But then how do we, after we've committed to things, constrain the impact of the small administrative work that comes along and we can't avoid?
00:29:41.000So whenever someone wants to begin a back and forth interaction, I get that fateful email that's like, hey, what are we doing about the client visiting tomorrow?
00:29:49.520And I can just imagine the seven or eight back and forth emails they're going to follow.
00:30:15.800In fact, one project might even look harder.
00:30:17.720Like, oh, that's going to be hard work.
00:30:19.000But what you really should be measuring these projects on is how many tasks are they going to generate?
00:30:25.780How much unscheduled obligations I'm going to have to respond to in the moment?
00:30:30.200Is it going to be a task engine or not?
00:30:33.600And bias towards the commitments that have less of the ongoing small tasks that happen unexpectedly.
00:30:40.140So like I give the example of organizing a conference versus writing a really big report.
00:30:44.420The report is hard, but you control your time.
00:30:48.000The conference is not intellectually demanding, but there's going to be a ton of unscheduled back and forth urgent emails with vendors and other people.
00:30:54.860And so you should bias towards the report because what you're trying to minimize is not effort.
00:30:59.320What you're trying to minimize is not hardness.
00:31:01.400You're trying to minimize small tasks that can sit there and take up time in your schedule.
00:31:06.440So, yeah, there's a lot you can do to constrain the small.
00:31:17.440It's just types and things hit send and bam, at the speed of light, you can contact somebody.
00:31:23.160You talk about this in the world without email, that facility of email digital communication just results in more and more and more communication.
00:31:32.580So if you make people have to work a bit more to talk to you, so that might mean going to the office hours at a specific time and have that face-to-face conversation, they're going to think a bit more before they actually make a request.
00:31:43.540And like I do this in my own business.
00:31:45.660Like I don't have a contact form on our website.
00:31:47.840I used to years ago, but what I found is that I was spending all my time answering people's emails who had these one-off questions and I'd have to spend, you know, 30 minutes answering their single question.
00:31:59.400And I wouldn't have any time to actually work on writing articles, working on the podcast.
00:32:04.900And if you want to reach us, you got to write a letter.
00:32:07.520And I think, you know, if people have to write or have to spend 10 minutes to write a letter as opposed to just, you know, dashing off an email as soon as they have a thought, they reevaluate whether something that felt urgent is actually important.
00:32:22.180And we get fewer messages and only messages from people who have actually thought about it.
00:32:28.040And that allows us to spend more time on the stuff that, you know, actually provides value for our readers, which is podcasts and articles.
00:32:35.900Well, I mean, here's a simple example of that.
00:32:38.040I mean, imagine, and this is both a thought experiment and a concrete suggestion, but imagine when someone wants you to take on some sort of project or task, you, you know, you say effectively, that's great.
00:32:49.360Go to this Google Drive folder, create a document for what you're asking me to do.
00:32:55.140And then you need to put in there all the information I need to execute it.
00:32:58.520Like, okay, so here's what I want you to do.
00:34:25.000You need to go to each of those 10 people one by one and talk to them about the issue.
00:34:28.580Like the meeting should be much harder for the person organizing it than the people who have to go because you going to each of those 10 people has a much smaller impact on the overall organizational footprint.
00:34:57.540So, yeah, principle one, do fewer things, do fewer big things, and then do less of the piddly things or find ways to reduce that or constrain it.
00:35:05.760The second principle of slow productivity is work at a natural pace.
00:35:11.220We don't realize how artificial it is, those of us who do cognitive work, that we use a model of eight hours.
00:35:19.840Like I'm supposed to, between roughly nine to five, just be super intense, available, working that whole time.
00:35:28.400The dictate of pseudo productivity is like during work hours, you should be available and working and filling those hours as much as you can.
00:35:34.580But this is actually, in the broader scope, a really artificial way of approaching work.
00:35:39.980If we go back, like I do, to the Paleolithic, like 300,000 years of Homo sapiens, our workday, quote unquote, hunting and gathering, was incredibly variable in terms of intensity and all sorts of scales.
00:35:51.660Like on three hours, we know this from studies of extant communities that still forage, hours of just doing nothing while we wait for the midday sun to go down, followed by two very intense hours when we're on a stock.
00:36:04.580The winter is very different than the season in which the herds we hunt are active.
00:36:11.020You know, there's all sorts of variability.
00:36:32.900The idea of just I'm going to work intensely all day long for set hours without variation throughout the year was invented for mills and factories because in mills and factories, the equipment is most productive when it runs all the time and we need people to run the equipment.
00:36:45.520But this was incredibly unnatural and it really was a massive source of human misery.
00:36:53.060It's why we had to invent labor unions.
00:36:55.620It's why we had to invent entire regulatory infrastructures to constrain this work.
00:37:01.280The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 in the U.S.
00:37:04.540And you can't make people work more than eight hours.
00:37:06.640And if you do, you have to pay them a lot of money because this is really unnatural.
00:37:10.500Then in the 50s, knowledge work comes along like, oh, so how are we going to do this?
00:37:15.640So we adopted this very recent, very unnatural, misery-inducing approach of work that we have no real history with through most of our history.
00:37:26.720And we're like, yeah, we'll just do that for knowledge work as well.
00:37:29.440Because pseudo-productivity, if I can see you, I know you're working.
00:37:32.320And we created what I call the invisible factory.
00:37:34.560Yeah, you come to the office, you check in.
00:37:36.400And now in an age of remote work and email, we just do this digitally.
00:37:39.580You better be answering those messages and available for Zoom meetings.
00:37:55.960Just like we pay extra money to soldiers when they're in hazardous duty, we were like, okay, we have to sort of accommodate that this type of labor is very hard to do.
00:38:04.340So it was an unforced error in some sense that we stick to that today.
00:38:07.860Knowledge work is not well served by maintaining constant intensity every day, day after day, week after week, month after month.
00:38:15.940It's much better served with huge variations in intensity on different timescales.
00:38:20.420Sometimes the day you're working harder than others.
00:38:22.600Some days you're not working that much.
00:38:43.420When you looked at knowledge workers from the past, so composers, writers, even scientists, if you look at their schedule, there was a seasonality to their schedule.
00:38:53.000There'd be periods where they weren't doing really much of anything.
00:38:55.820They'd just be at the beach and taking walks, but then they'd have these bouts of frenzied work that would last weeks, months, and then they'd take a break again.
00:39:05.820And so what you're saying is that knowledge workers today who work for companies, they could emulate some of that.
00:39:12.060It is a better way to produce knowledge from our brains.
00:39:15.440If it was productive in some sort of literal sense to just work eight hours a day as hard as you could, we would see in these examples of world-famous traditional knowledge workers that that's what they would do.
00:39:26.380But they don't do that because they quickly discovered, oh, I produce less.
00:39:30.380I produce less good ideas if I'm constantly trying to do that.
00:39:34.240In fact, I don't think it would have even occurred to them, especially if we go back far in history.
00:41:04.520You know, like that's a fair trade and it's like entirely more sustainable.
00:41:09.240Freelancers will also do things I talk about where they'll do like six weeks on.
00:41:13.920They'll do an engagement and then take six weeks off and do four months on and then maybe take a month off to do something else.
00:41:19.400So if you have control, do not simulate the factory.
00:41:24.520I know you think that it's maximizing income or whatever, but in the long run, not only going to be happier, you're going to be way better at what you do if you approach your work otherwise.
00:41:33.400Now, if you're in a big company, there's things that the big companies could do and some do.
00:41:38.280Like I talk about the company base camp that has a whole methodology of cycles.
00:41:43.180Our employees work in cycles and they're like four to six weeks long and you're working intensely on a small number of objectives.
00:41:49.600And then you take like two weeks cycle down.
00:42:02.900You're figuring out what to work on next.
00:42:04.440And base camp figured out cycles makes us much more effective than trying to stay at high intensity all the time.
00:42:11.460Now, finally, if you have no control and your boss is just the king of pseudo productivity, now you can start to do some more subtle things.
00:42:18.880So you can take the idea of quiet quitting, for example, which taught us like, oh, you do have a lot of control over your workload.
00:42:25.800Quiet quitters discovered if I do the bare minimum perpetually, hey, it eventually gets noticed.
00:42:31.620And that's a problem because my employer will not like if I'm systematically doing the bare minimum.
00:42:37.220But if you quiet quit for a month, once a year, no one's going to notice.
00:42:41.920But you know, yeah, July is pretty quiet and I'm not making a big deal about this.
00:42:49.140And just before people might really start to notice like, hey, hasn't it been a few weeks till, till, you know, Brett's been able to come to a meeting?
00:42:55.820I'm back to kind of a normal pace again in August and they move on with their lives.
00:42:59.360So when it comes to the situation where you have no control and your boss loves pseudo productivity, even then I have a whole list of surreptitious tactics you can do to get some more of that variation over time and your intensity.
00:43:51.660You're using the relaxed project to deflect things into the future.
00:43:56.300So like really, you're not drawing much attention.
00:43:58.420And, you know, some people get nervous about this surreptitiousness, but I think it's all hands on deck, all options on the table right now because of the absurdity that we documented earlier in this interview.
00:44:09.020Because of the absurdity of what's going on in knowledge work, it's a sort of break glass in case of emergency situation.
00:44:16.460I think all options should be on the table.
00:44:18.440And even Peter Drucker, you know, the kind of the father of knowledge work management productivity thinking, he said that the biggest challenge is personal management.
00:44:28.160And it's up to each knowledge worker to manage themselves.
00:44:31.280Like, you can't rely on a manager to manage your own workload because it's up to you.
00:44:35.580You have to take it into your own hands.
00:44:38.140Well, and that's the irony of the situation is that part of what allowed pseudo productivity to flourish was Peter Drucker, who really helped instill this idea that knowledge work is autonomous.
00:44:50.160People figure out on their own how to work.
00:44:53.140We don't have a set system for how we organize our work at a given company.
00:44:57.500It should be everyone does it on their own.
00:44:59.080Now, this allowed pseudo productivity to thrive in part because there was no system to measure or improve or push back against.
00:45:06.020Without a clear system for workload assignment, for example, this allowed these informal workloads to spiral out of control.
00:45:12.600But the reason why I say it's ironic is exactly what you just emphasized there is at the same time, we can lean into that to save ourselves from productivity, from pseudo productivity rather.
00:45:22.760So, yeah, if it's up to me how I organize my work, then I'm going to do that.
00:45:27.600And so when I tell you now, hey, this is how I keep track of my hours.
00:45:44.360And actually, people worry about being specific about these things.
00:45:48.280Being specific about these things gives you more cover because if you're clear and confident in explaining what you're doing, people say, okay, this guy has his act together.
00:45:58.000He's thinking about how do I organize?
00:46:02.580So now I'm actually going to trust him much more and let him much more get away with saying what he will and won't do than someone who's much more frenzied and haphazard.
00:46:28.080I've I'm I'm known for productivity because some of these books I've written, I get a lot more leeway when I tell someone no, or here's how I'm going to do it because they sort of assume Cal knows what he's talking about.
00:46:39.260Like if he can't do this, that's probably because he really can't.
00:46:42.240Whereas if I'm just haphazard and all over the place and lost, they're like, I don't like how disorganized you are.
00:47:16.340It's another thing we saw when I studied these traditional knowledge workers is they really cared where they worked.
00:47:20.980Like it really made a difference where work happened.
00:47:24.380We see this most clearly with writers.
00:47:26.560And I think writers are a good case study, especially in an age of remote work, because they were the original remote workers.
00:47:33.240Like writers did not have, if you're a novelist or a nonfiction writer, you didn't have an office to go to, right?
00:47:38.780So they were the original remote workers.
00:47:40.560And so if you study famous writers, book writers from times past and said, where did they work?
00:47:45.960It's interesting that you discover it's almost never their homes.
00:47:48.920They would find these eccentric locations often really near their home, but these eccentric locations that they would go to do their writing.
00:47:55.680One of the cool examples of this was Peter Benchley, who wrote the hit novel Jaws that the movie was based off of.
00:48:01.340The house he lived in when he wrote Jaws was right down the street from the house I grew up in.