When the Knowledge Sector emerged in the mid 20th century, human best understanding of the word ‘productivity’ came from manufacturing and that understanding led to us measuring productivity based on quantity produced per hour. 100 items made per hour is much better that 10 items in the same period of time, and 1000 items per hour can still be a dream but some people are still trying to do that no matter their domain of activity. But in knowledge work people are not producing just one thing: some of us are working on 7-8 different things at one time, that differ per worker. A good solution to this was to introduce a rough heuristic that author and professor Cal Newport has dubbed “pseudo productivity,” which uses visible activity as a crude proxy for useful effort.
More and more of our time is focused on performing this busyness rather than focusing on high-quality outputs, leading to burnout. Newport has a solution: An idea called ‘slow productivity,’ which is focused on the quality of items produced over time and based on three main principles.
The chapters of the video:
- 00:00 - Burnout
- 00:50 - Slow productivity
- 01:35 - Pseudo-productivity
- 02:25 - Principle 1
- 03:32 - Principle 2
- 04:23 - Principle 3
