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>If you must work hard and be efficient, consciously pick that work With this one sentence, the whole dichotomy proposed by the article falls apart. It all dep
by fasterik 4y ago
>If you must work hard and be efficient, consciously pick that work
With this one sentence, the whole dichotomy proposed by the article falls apart. It all depends on what gives your life meaning and what your goals are. If you primarily derive meaning from having experiences with friends and family, then it absolutely makes sense to devalue productivity. If you primarily derive meaning from creating artifacts that will survive for a long time and provide benefit to humanity, then it's hard to see why you shouldn't optimize for productivity.
A lot of the anti-work, anti-productivity discourse seems to revolve around this assumption that some things are more meaningful than others independent of individual preferences. If people really value competence in a certain domain and "getting ahead" is important to them, what ground is there to stand on to say that they're wrong?
- potatoman22 4y agoI interpreted the book to be about living intentionally. I don't think the author would say advancing in a field you're passionate about is a bad thing.
- fasterik 4y agoI haven't read the book, but the article gave me that impression. Maybe I define productivity differently than they do.
- 8note 4y ago> If you primarily derive meaning from creating artifacts that will survive for a long time and provide benefit to humanity, then it's hard to see why you shouldn't optimize for productivity. You are still devaluing productivity because this is actually an agility problem. Optimizing for productivity doesn't necessarily make you any progress towards creating long lasting artifacts, and instead will draw you into doing infinite work before making any progress on those artifacts The key is to be agile and ensure that your productivity furthers the things you care about. Your speed towards irrelevant items is irrelevant, but there's an infinite number of irrelevant tasks to complete.
- fasterik 4y agoI don't think that contradicts what I said. The key here is how we define productivity. I agree that focusing on maximizing productivity in the short term can be a bad strategy. What you're suggesting is still what I would call productivity; it's just maximizing it over longer time scales.