>>In office jobs, by contrast, productivity remains rooted in notions of busyness and multi-faceted activity. The most productive knowledge workers are those wh

>>In office jobs, by contrast, productivity remains rooted in notions of busyness and multi-faceted activity. The most productive knowledge workers are those who stay on top of their inboxes and somehow juggle the dozens of obligations, from the small tasks to major projects, hurled in their direction every week. The deal here is focus. You can focus on anything, anything. Even on emails. The real problem is most people aren't even doing that properly. People while away their time on Insta reels, Twitter, Facebook fighting etc etc. The best productivity example I saw was when I was working with a Chinese colleague. He would have 2 monitors. One split, exclusively for Slack, Jira and Email. He would watch every issue, every communication, every PR, every darnest little thing going on in the project. He would review, it, or learn about it. He knew what code was going in, what was getting deleted, the pipeline of features, bugs and what not. The other monitor was for the terminal, coding and other work tools. He would also find spare time in a day for TIL, and other long term learning. There was zero FB, Twitter, Insta, TikToK, whatever. There was lots of 'productive context switching'. Or in other words, the context switch was in the boundaries of work. The biggest lesson is not to avoid context switching. But to not waste time. Wasting time is the biggest time drain here. I define wasting time as doing something that is not relevant to the thing you are trying to achieve. If you are trying to have fun, working in periods would be equally unproductive to having fun. Same with work.