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What's next for personal productivity

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Re: What's next for personal productivity

#31

Post by slightwinder »

cratermoon wrote: post #18
_rupertius wrote: post #7

I think this article misunderstands what productivity is and is trying to achieve. Productivity is about achieving your goals with as little waste as possible, and getting things done. It's not about deciding what those goals are. That's not a slight on productivity, it's just what the word means. This article isn't talking about productivity, it's talking about meaning & fulfilment. But the idea that deciding what y…

What's the point of being productive without meaning and fulfillment?

"Productivity is the efficiency of production of goods or services expressed by some measure."

The meaning and fulfillment is given by the metric by which you measure, nothing more. Productivity is basically just a tool, it has no greater meaning by itself.

Re: What's next for personal productivity

#32

Post by ocimbote »

My take on this article's tl;dr;:

COVID shone some light on how pointless productivity is without fulfillment. Let's achieve fulfillment with better productivity tools!

Now the critique:

Being after productivity at the expense of fulfillment is unbelievable and unbelievably stupid. I don't mean to generalize and I really hope it's not a sign of our times, but I can't ignore this hypothesis for now.

Anyway, sol ing fulfillment issues with productivity tools certainly sounds like techno-solutionism to me and avoids a much simpler solution that is regularly overlooked: removing some productivity objectives instead of working to solve your issues with more productivity.

Re: What's next for personal productivity

#33

Post by xcambar »

ocimbote wrote: post #32

My take on this article's tl;dr;: COVID shone some light on how pointless productivity is without fulfillment. Let's achieve fulfillment with better productivity tools! Now the critique: Being after productivity at the expense of fulfillment is unbelievable and unbelievably stupid. I don't mean to generalize and I really hope it's not a sign of our times, but I can't ignore this hypothesis for now. Anyway, sol ing fu…

As some will inevitably point out: the power of less.

That's what I meant, yes.

Re: What's next for personal productivity

#34

Post by slightwinder »

catchmeifyoucan wrote: post #16

I liked this article. Productivity, is the next biggest thing to solve. All these “productivity” (tools for thought) are the toys of the future. We have too much information, and crappy ways to manage it. At the end of the day, that’s all a computer is, an information processing machine. So we’re merely modeling how humans of the future will interact with personal computers. Ultimately it’s about changing that underl…

Productivity is the efficiency, you can't "solve" that, you can only become more and more efficient. What people need to solve is to understand that productivity is just a tool, not the goal. And in the first place, when people talk about productivity, they often mean managing and organization, not even productivity.

Most of this bubble seems to be about people finding ways on how they can organize themselves to reach their goals in the first place. Optimizing these ways for higher efficiency is usually the endgame that most people seem to barely reach, considering how swallow it all is at the end.

Re: What's next for personal productivity

#35

Post by slightwinder »

jaqalopes wrote: post #4
sg47 wrote: post #2

https://elenasalaks.medium.com/i-just-dont-want-to-be-busy-a...

Exactly what I thought of reading this. The idea of "productivity" doesn't even make sense. People don't want to be productive, people want to be happy.

Happiness is a metric for which you can optimize, which then would be productivity. But in the first place people don't want to be happy, they want to survive, need to move and grow, happiness comes just after the important foundation is secured.

And optimizing the necessary and boring parts, to have more time for happiness makes totally sense. For example, the less time I waste on necessary household chores which are eating my free time, the more time I will have with actual free time which I then can use for things which will make me happy.

Re: What's next for personal productivity

#36

Post by afarrell »

itisit wrote: post #19
cratermoon wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point of being productive without meaning and fulfillment?

The boss would prefer you don’t ask such pesky questions.

The boss would prefer you ask such questions of your coach, therapist, or friends — they are not in a good place to give you the answer.

Re: What's next for personal productivity

#37

Post by slightwinder »

chii wrote: post #23
cratermoon wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point of being productive without meaning and fulfillment?

meaningfulness is for yourself. Productivity is for other people asking you to achieve a goal (and you measure this productivity with money earned). You could be doing meaningful stuff for yourself, like a starving artist. It is not productive, if other people do not pay you for your art work. You could be doing very productive work, but not meaningful (for yourself).

> Productivity is for other people asking you to achieve a goal

Productivity is a measurement for any work, independent of the season why one executes this work. You can be productive for your own tasks, or the tasks for someone else, it still could be measured and evaluated.

> and you measure this productivity with money earned

No, you do not. Money can be a viable metric, but most often wage and productivity have not direct correlation in most jobs today. This is a typical misconception.

Re: What's next for personal productivity

#38

Post by kkoncevicius »

The content seemed a bit empty to me. It can be said that "fulfilment" is the next step of anything.

"Fitness 3 - fulfilment. Traditionally fitness focused on building muscle and nothing else, then came cross-fit and calisthenics that sacrificed pure muscle mass in favor of extending bodily functioning. Fitness 3 will be fulfilment where everyone can be as fit as they want or need to be without the pressures of ..."

"Reading 3 - fulfilment. Reading community has gone through two different stages in the past: first people were reading as many books as they could, summarising them and storing them in their bookshelves; then came the niche-reading which divided people into groups - we had sci-fi readers, popular psychology groups, detective story enthusiasts and so on. But the tide is shifting towards the next step for reading - fulfilment. Readers are now seeking meaning in their life and they try to balance reading with other activities for a more holistic life experience ..."

I didn't manage to gain something useful from reading the article, maybe that's why my take here is a bit cynical.

Re: What's next for personal productivity

#39

Post by lbriner »

My worry about these types of articles is that can make conclusions that sound like they should be universal but are not.

Company size and nature of work; turnover of staff; existing teams vs new teams all have an effect on whether you can give people the freedom to work asynchronously, work offline, have creative freedom.

I know plenty of devs who simply would not be productive if left to themselves, they need direction, they lack the skills to creatively solve problems and that's fine. Build them a backlog and let them tick things off. If they need help, let them message somebody and disturb them to get them unstuck.

A lot of the cult of independent and async working sounds like people who are introvert and just want to do what they want to do. This often doesn't work in business where we want people to be proactively working together to achieve a goal and some of this does require our time being "wasted" actually discussing things.

Re: What's next for personal productivity

#40

Post by davidbanham »

lbriner wrote: post #39

My worry about these types of articles is that can make conclusions that sound like they should be universal but are not. Company size and nature of work; turnover of staff; existing teams vs new teams all have an effect on whether you can give people the freedom to work asynchronously, work offline, have creative freedom. I know plenty of devs who simply would not be productive if left to themselves, they need direc…

> we want people to be proactively working together to achieve a goal

Do you? Or do you just want that goal achieved with a great solution?

Sure, there are times that necessitates a team to solve it. That’s far from always, though.

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