Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samherris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We don't run ads on the podcast,
and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Well, there's a lot going on in the world. Iran recently attacked Israel to a minimal effect, happily. I think there's one casualty at this point. Anyway, there'll be more to say about that. Soon enough, I will wait until I can do a proper podcast on the topic of Iran and what to do about it.
Today I'm speaking with Cal Newport. Cal is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University, where he's also a founding member of the Center for Digital Ethics. Cal is also a New York Times bestselling author and a frequent contributor to the New Yorker. He also hosts the Deep Questions podcast. And Cal's most recent book is Slow Productivity, the law start of accomplishment without burnout. And we talk about the book today. We generally discuss information technology and the
cult of productivity. We talk about the state of social media, the academic and exile effect, free speech and moderation, the effect of the pandemic on knowledge work. And then we get into his book. We talk about Jane Austin as an example of traditional productivity, managing up in an organization, defragmenting one's work life, doing fewer things, reasonable deadlines, trading money for time, how we will find meaning in a post-scarcity world, the anti-work movement,
the effects of artificial intelligence on knowledge work, and other topics. And I bring you Cal Newport. I am here with Cal Newport. Cal, thanks for joining me again. Sam, it's always a pleasure to talk with you. So we're going to talk about your new book Slow Productivity, the law start of accomplishment without burnout. But before we do, I first have to thank you. I think I must have thanked you by email in the intervening year and a half since we last spoke. But you, as you know,
you were the final domino to fall that led me to get off Twitter. And as I've said, really, every time I've touched this topic on this podcast and elsewhere, I'm just embarrassed to have discovered what a great life hack that was. I mean, it was just diagnostic of how much a problem Twitter had become for me. But I just must thank you for your influence and your wisdom on that front and your actual intervention. I mean, you just straight up told me you thought I
should get off Twitter in our podcast. And your voice was definitely in my head when I finally pulled the plug. So thank you. I mean, I, you're welcome. I enjoyed and found fascinating the reaction to you leaving Twitter. I don't know if this is how you experienced it. But to me, it's what I imagine it's like when your buddy at the bar stops drinking because people got mad that you left to I can't imagine being mad about someone stopping doing something. But people is as if they took
it personally as far as I could tell, like, what do you mean you're leaving Twitter? What's wrong? I thought that was as instructive as hearing about what your experience has been like after you left. Yeah, people did get mad. And you know, from the top down, Elon Musk was one of the people who got quite mad. It was interesting. I mean, obviously much of the reaction I didn't see because I was no longer on Twitter. But I got a lot of it in my inbox. You know, many people immediately reached out
worried that I was suffering some kind of mental health crisis. I mean, how do you delete your Twitter account apart from being in extremists? But it's been wholly good and has allowed me to not just pay attention more to things I actually care about. But just it's allowed me to reflect on what my engagement with Twitter had become. And it was, I mean, I think people's negative reaction to it is to some degree understandable because my decision really wasn't just for me and my perception of,
you know, what Twitter was, you know, had done to my own mind. It is an implicit and even explicit every time I talk about it, condemnation of what what I think social media has done to most people on it. I mean, I think, you know, there's some people who have, you know, fairly benign experiences on these platforms. But for most of the so-called elites, you know, journalists and scientists and public figures who are who think they are condemned to use this so-called digital
town square to maintain their reputations and build their brands and all of that. I mean, it's just stay in touch with what's going on in the world. It has become so dysfunctional. And I don't think this, I can't recall if this came up in our conversation. But one of the reasons why I left was not so much my awareness of what it had done to me. But the obvious evidence of what it was doing to Elon, not as the owner of the platform, but just as his most, you know, most prominent
user. And I just saw it was just kind of staring into the funhouse mirror of his life to arrangement, which was just quite obviously happening as a result of his addiction to the platform. I then began to reflect on the way in which I was sharing in that symptomology, you know, albeit somewhat differently. But still, I mean, once I pulled the plug, I just, it was like I had a, almost like a digital phantom limb syndrome. In fact, it was like, it was analogous to
amputating a phantom limb. Because I felt that what I was, the pain I was experiencing was happening in the space that wasn't quite real ever, you know, the digital reputation you imagine you're maintaining isn't quite, I mean, you can't quite say it's not your reputation, obviously, it is your reputation, but it is, it is a almost a second presence in your in your mind and life, which doesn't totally map onto your life in real social space with real people in the real world.
Even with the same people who you might be fighting with online, when you actually meet them face to face, those conversations are different. And so it just, it was like amputating in a phantom limb. And I mean, I just can't say enough about what a positive change has been. It's been quite incredible. Well, you know, I did some writing about this more recently. And I had you in mind a little bit when I was thinking about this. I wrote this New Yorker essay late last summer, early fall.
And one of the big questions I had in there is, why did we come to believe that the right way to use the internet to have discussions, this sort of surface ideas, the spread news, why did we think the right way to do this was to try to get everyone to use the same global platform. And this is, we take this for granted is like a course, this is what you should do. We should have everyone use the same global conversation platform because if we're all on the platform, we all can see
each other. But of course, the reality, and I sort of laid this out of the article, is when you have 500 million tweets being generated per day. And the average person is going to see 100 in their feed. What you have to do is just incredibly aggressive curation, right? Because there's just, you can't have 500 million people using the same platform and yet have a sort of globalized centralized zeitgeist
feed where you're trying to surface a small number of trends for everyone to see. This requires incredible curation, this sort of amazing cybernetic, part algorithm, part human, part network theory powered curation that Twitter uses. And it's of course that incredibly aggressive curation that makes this a platform that just fuels outrage, that fuels the darker side of people. And one of the arguments I made in that article is here's what works better. Small communities that have weak
tight connections between them. You have lots of small communities online and they have overlapping membership. We know from network theory, really interesting ideas can spread to these network of networks. Really important news will spread to these network of networks. But most of your interaction in this sort of digital vision is going to be with a small number of other people that have a sort
of emergent shared sort of community standard. It's much richer, much more personal. That's really what the internet envisioned. Everyone is going to have the possibility to be connected to everyone else. Not everyone actually needs to be directly connected to everyone else on the same platform. So I've really been thinking about the folly of global conversation platform as one of the key folly's
of the sort of 2010s internet. Yeah, I think when we last spoke, you were pretty bearish on the the major social media networks because I think it was because you thought Tiktok had successfully disrupted everything because they weren't relying on the social graph that you have Facebook and Twitter. They had a kind of first mover advantage where they got all of us to build out our social networks in this common space. That was really that end some algorithmic gaming of the system
was really the basis of surfacing content. As we all know, it privileged outrage and a negatively biased engagement. But what Tiktok did is it just never even went in the direction of establishing a social graph. It just used a pure algorithmic surfacing of entertainment. And in so far as the social media platforms have had to emulate Tiktok, I may be Twitter still
an exception here, but certainly Facebook or Instagram. Do you still think that the writing is still on the wall for the major platforms or do you think they're going to figure out how to still claim the better part of humanity for the rest of our lives? I still feel strong about that hypothesis. I mean, I think we see for various reasons, but we see the dethroning of Twitter as having that same central cultural status it had before. Tiktok, we see for example, like my argument was
about Tiktok is without this entrenched advantage of my social graph is in there. I've already spent years trying to set up follower networks that I said the connection to Tiktok would be very superficial. And we can we are seeing that. I think last year, for example, there was double digit drops in Tiktok users among the sort of 20, especially the upper 20s and in the 30s,
that sort of demographic, it's sort of young adult demographics and enough. And they really had no problem leaving because what's actually connected in there, it's a very zeitgeisty platform that people can take or leave. I mean, Instagram is holding it there, but I don't think it has that same against centrality that it might have had two or three years ago. And the alternatives independent media, so podcasting email newsletters, these really are ascended in the last year,
year and a half since we've talked. And that is the opposite of the centralized platform model, because this is a independently produced information. People discover these things almost entirely through point to point curated trust. Someone I know forward me an email newsletter I signed up. Someone I know told me about this podcast. I started listening to this podcast. They mentioned another podcast. Now I listen to that one. That distributed trust model of curation, as opposed to
a centralized algorithmic model, I think really works well. And we're seeing that. Right. So I remain to be, I remain bearish on the idea of a small number of social platforms that dominate internet culture. Yeah, one of the biggest changes for me, which I didn't anticipate, was that shutting down my Twitter account changed my relationship as a producer of content, as a somebody with a fairly large platform. It changed my relationship to my own engagement with
current events and the world of ideas and just my audience. It's just changed the time course of everything. So when you're on Twitter, you feel an obligation to react to something that everyone is reacting to, or at least you have to consider whether or not you should. So you're just, you know, something happens in the news and everyone is forwarding a specific article or you know, dunking on some response to current events. And you, because you just implicit, you have
the platform, you have the massive audience, you're part of this conversation. What are you going to say about it? And no longer having that outlet, the time course of my response to everything has slowed way down. And so, you know, now I have this podcast and I podcast, you're more or less once a week. And so I really have a better part of a week to decide whether I should say anything about what just happened in Ukraine or anywhere else. And you know, most things, I would say 99%
of things don't survive that interval. Right. There's no reason for me to react to the thing that happened four days ago. And you know, it has been memory hold for almost everyone at this point. And so it's just changed my relationship to information to the news to my own sense of just how I needed to think and talk about things. And I really wasn't anticipating that. It just, it was, you know, there's probably something lost there. I mean, there are moments in public
conversation where it's probably an advantage to be able to say something immediately. And you know, you're part of that first, the first things that are getting said are something you're contributing to. But I don't know, there's so much more noise than signal there. And just the feeling of moving through the day is so different when it's not being punctuated by dozens of interruptions. But you know, we're just to see what was said or or or to decide whether you're
going to say something about this next thing that happened. It's just, I mean, honestly, it feels like I've just come out of some kind of decade-long flirtation with mental illness. I mean, I just, it's not actually too strong a way to put it. It's, it's just, it is a profound relief. I mean, it's a humbling, humbling one really. Yeah. Do you find it surprising the number, I'm thinking journalists in particular who very much dislike Elon Musk, right? So they have a sort of moral
personal ethical commitment to stop using his platform. And they'll still talk about I don't like what's happening on X. I don't like Elon Musk. And yet almost none of them have left. I find that intro, I think again, I think there's something interesting in that where it would, for a lot of people who are writing like in tech journalists, business journalists, really dislike,
clearly dislike Elon Musk, still can't bring themselves to leaving the platform. Which, which again, I think speaks to something interesting about the way the platform plays, especially people with some sort of public profile, the way it plays and how they, they understand their, their influence on the world or their impact. But that's, to me, that's been the more interesting observation of the post-Musk period is actually how rare you still are, which is, you know, I thought
it'd be a lot more Sam Harris's, a lot more people saying, yeah, I'm just leaving. People are having a hard time. Yeah, well, I mean, I do have to recognize that I'm immensely lucky to have already already built my platform in the ways that I've built it so that I didn't feel that really I was putting anything in jeopardy by just pulling the plug on my social media presence. I still have a minor presence in the sense that my team puts out stuff on the various platforms. It's just a
sheer marketing, right? So there's, but those were always much smaller accounts and because everyone knows it's not me, you know, people are much less interested in it. So, you know, I mean,
those are just maintained in a perfunctory way. But I think most people who are still building their, their, their reputations as writers or journalists or I mean, certainly people in politics feel that they just can't forsake the opportunity to build an audience there or they certainly can't pull the plug on a large audience or already built if they're busy, you know, whittling away
on their various projects. I just see no other way to it to effectively market them. I mean, I just think it's, everyone's been captured by it and what's more, there is just this sense that if you're not there, you don't know what's actually happening as soon as you need to know it. I mean, especially if you're a journalist and I mean, the thing is that it's so distorting of priorities and of,
of real information. I mean, I see so many people in the podcast space and in the alternative media space pushed around by misinformation and conspiracy thinking and even when they're, you know, occasionally right about something, you know, I mean, occasionally there's a conspiracy theory that really turns out to be true. It's just so, everyone's priorities are so upside down and there's just this, what it has engineered for, this is now kind of outside of
mainstream channels. I mean, this wouldn't be true of the New Yorker where you write, but it's just, you know, out in what I call podcast to stand and substack a stand, it has created this, this new religion of anti-establishment thinking where it's just the alternative explanation of everything
is the thing that we're now going to spend 90% of our time talking about. And it's just so often wrong in misleading and deranging that I mean, it really, it has made me increasingly worried that we have, you know, politically, you know, you know, in the, certainly in the aftermath of COVID, rendered ourselves almost ungovernable in how we talk about, you know, what you, what you, what you are a, or a, you know, attempt to have a conversation about what used to be the world of facts.
Yeah. Well, I mean, I think this is one of the more engaging human psychological experiences is this idea of most people were thinking this, but then me and my group figured out that that is true, right? That inversion, the inversion of the, whatever, the empiricism structure is incredibly engaging and it occurs every once in a while in reality. Like, everyone was thinking this and then we realized whatever DNA is a double helix and it's like amazing. Online culture, especially algorithmic
driven online culture has given a way to basically commodify that and spread that. Like that, we can create, you can, you can build an entire like epistemology around. Everyone thinks this is true, but it's really that, you know, everyone thinks this is bad for you. It's good. Everyone thinks like this about this disease, but it's that everyone, you know, thinks that and you can build an entire epistemology around that. Like your entire world can be that and there can be a whole
audience that's just going to reward that. The algorithm is going to reward that. So I have definitely seen that as well. There's a well known effect among professors called the sort of academic and exile or academic in the wilds effect, which is if you take an academic and then they leave, they leave academia, you know, they go, they go independent eight times out of 10, they go to some really conspiratorial places. And partially what's going on here is, well, first of all, they're smart.
So like it completely makes sense to them that I could figure something out that other people didn't understand because I'm very smart. But one of the purposes and like services academia plays as there's this checking mechanism. Everyone else is smart too. And so when you're like, hey, I think, look, here's this, this whole new way of seeing it, the earth is hollow. You have all these other smart people being like, here's why you're dumb and they take you down, right? But when you leave,
you have this academic and exile. And this is sort of like Linus Pauline with vitamin mechidosis, you know, it's much, much higher rate now in the age of social media because now when you leave, you can immediately, algorithmically have constructed an audience that cheers you on. And so now, I think the severity of academic and exile effect is much more pronounced and much more ubiquitous than it used to be that when you sort of leave academia to start your podcast, it's not too long
until, you know, there's world changing conspiracies that you're uncovering. And it could be medical, and it could be governmental. And it doesn't matter. And so I think that effect is like one of the more interesting effects has been happening is that you can get a cheering section. And the algorithmically constructed cheering section of people that's you're being rewarded for saying, I think this is the way it really happens. And you see this all the time, I think I like podcast
to stand as a term. This idea of there can be a hundred studies saying something. But if there's one study saying something different, the way you perceive that is, well, everyone knows now that things not true. It's this interesting sort of sampling of evidence, this sort of destabilization, abasian priors, that is amplified and supported in sort of the world of algorithmically discriminated or algorithmically disseminated information. Yeah, that's really interesting.
Yeah, this is a, you just described an effect that I've referred to, I believe previously, as watching people get radicalized by their own audience, right? I mean, that cheering section has the effect of people notice the signal in their own audience and they begin to cater to that signal. And then there's just this, this ratchet effect where it just gets, you know,
crazier and crazier. And there's more and more sunk cost reputationally for having been the guy who was sure that there's so many examples of this in the midst of COVID that focus on vaccines and medical conspiracies, et cetera. You just, you go all in and then you, you know, you would have to completely repudiate how you spent the last 12 months if you were going to have a, have a second
thought and anyone's going to talk any sense into you. Yep. So there's one thing that reliably confuses people here around the norms of our online conversation and it's the analogy of Twitter being the so-called digital town square. And this notion that a commitment to free speech should more or less bar the door to any kind of, you know, real moderation policy, right? Like, what, what you want is a total free-for-all where the best idea wins. And sunlight is the best
disinfectant, right? So we should be able to entertain any notion at whatever scale for however long in proximity to any other world events. And any effort to put your thumb on the scale to de-platform Alex Jones or to try to clean up a digital sewer that's introducing bias by definition and it's, and worse, it's actually just a repudiation of, you know, free speech in the constitutional sense. And it's some, it's forsaking the best error correcting mechanisms we have,
which are just let everything suffer collision with everything else and see what wins, right? And so the, you know, people never, when they're champion, this commitment to something like free speech, absolutism, they never take a moment to recognize that there are places on online that are much closer to the absolute than Twitter ever was and no one wants to be there. I mean, places like
4chan and 8chan. I mean, that's where you really get your absolutes, right? What do you can just, you know, I mean, everything up to child pornography is my popular, your, your feed. But there's also just this point that is also overlooked, which you just referenced, which is the algorithmically boosted aspect of the speech, which changes the nature of what speech is online.
So, and perhaps you could just give me your thoughts on how you view this tension between our commitment to free speech or commitment to leveraging the wisdom of the crowd in so far as it exists and to correcting errors at scale. But this need to not suffer the 4chanification of everything in our digital lives. Yeah, well, I think the town square, it's a town square analogy
that's causing the problem here, right? I mean, the concept of a town square, the sort of central gathering place where people can democratically discuss, depends on scale being reasonable. Right? I mean, we call it the town square, we don't call it the city or the state square, right? Because it's a place where the demos and Athens, we sort of a relatively constrained group of people who all know each other and have other ties to each other. You have other social trust
ties to each other. We live in the same town. I run the hardware store that you come to to buy your nails, them to come together. There's this free speech notion of, well, we don't want to buy fiat in advance, say, here are topics that are off limits because how are we going to work together to advance what we understand? Twitter is not a town square, right? When you have 500
million users, that's not a town square. It's an entertainment product. We have 500 million users who are inputting lots of different possible bits of content that could be interesting. We're going to run them through this cybernetic curation algorithms. This is what I mean by that is there's algorithms involved, but it's also the expansion properties of the underlying follower graph means that individual decisions to retweet or not retweet. So these are human decisions
interacting with these digital networks can create these cascades of information spreading. That's a lot about how trends arise. It's a really powerful actual curation mechanism. It's unlike TikTok, which is purely algorithmic on Twitter. It's cybernetic. So you have these digital networks with good expansion properties and 100 million people making individual decisions whether or not to click retweet or not, whether to quote tweet or not. Which is a whole interesting computer science
question. All of this aim towards how can we take this giant pool of potential content and choose this sort of small number of streams of content that are going to be relatively globalized or interesting and engaging. That's not a town square. It's an entertainment product. It's why in a New Yorker piece I wrote right after Musk took over Twitter is I said it's not the town square. It's much more the Coliseum. That's much more the better idea. It's tons of people watching
carefully curated entertainment. In that context, of course, you have all sorts of thumbs on the scale. The whole point is we're trying to put on this show. And I think of like the trending topics of the day as the show on the Coliseum floor with all the huge crowds just watching and chiming in to see the blood sport between, hey, Sam today is having a war with, you know, whoever, right? This is the entertainment for today. It's an entertainment product.
Of course, the thumb is on the scale because you're trying to find something that just pushes the buttons right. Maybe there's some outrage, but not too much. Maybe it's absurd, but not in a sort of 8-chan, like completely over the top, Lowell's type absurd. You're trying to program a television station. You're trying to program entertainment in a Coliseum. It's not a town square.
If you have actual digital town squares, like here's a place for like a small number of people who ask other ties to each other are gathering to think things through and talk things through. I mean, we've seen examples of those can have a wide variety of different community standards, including standards where like almost anything's going to go on this discussion group. But it works because we're all whatever lumberjacks from this part of the country and we sort of
have other ties to each other. And so I think it's that town square metaphor that threw us off. Is we took this entertainment product and somehow tried to make it seem like this was the Roman Senate. Like this is where just like this reasonable, reasonable scaled group of people were getting together to hash things out. And that's never what they were actually trying to do there.
It seems reasonable to have made this mistake, though. I mean, the structure you're positing, like a network of networks online, at least as implied on Twitter because you have the people you're following and you have the people who are following you. And that's not all of Twitter, right? It's just you're just tending to see what you're following and everyone sees, everyone who's following you sees what you react to. And that's just that's its own little space.
What why is that so easily corrupted by being in contact with the rest of the ocean of information? Well, what ends up happening on Twitter is that that more local interactions just get swamped out by the ultra amplified content, right? And increasingly their feed is driven by this. So there's some stuff in there from people you straight follow. But the feed is algorithmically sorted. And one of the major criteria on which things are sorted for your feed is their engagement
across the network. So really what's happened is it's the it's the content that has really gained this big boosting effect, this sort of cascade of retweets leading to retweets. That's what's being programmed for. And there's some conceptual regionalization. So if you're if you follow a lot of a certain type of people, you might be seeing what's really being amplified in that that subgroup. That's true. There's some there's some of that going on as well. But it's a really large scale at
which a lot of this is happening. And especially when it comes to the most town squarely piece of this, which is discussions of politics, discussions of policy, discussions of world events, the sort of the stuff we think of as the grist of civic discussion. Those are incredibly large subnetworks in which information is spreading. And that's where you really have the coliseum effect. You know, it's people competing to get their turn on the coliseum floor. They have their trident ready.
And that's like that most civic-minded aspect that we associate with Twitter. I think it's the most entertainment centric. Yeah. And the most corrupting of our conversation about important topics because it really because one of the thumbs on the scale here is outrage. And
I mean, outrage is a word we keep using in this context. And it's it seems to have been, I mean, at least in my hearing, it doesn't quite convey the attitude that one sees so often online, which is it really is kind of in group sanctimony and out group contempt. Right. You're expressing contempt for the out group to your in group. It's a simulacrum of conversation. I mean, sometimes you're actually someone's responding to somebody else, but
it's almost always a bad faith response. It's a response that is meant to be enjoyed by the in group that despises the target of the remark in the out group. And it's so it's just, it's so obviously driving us apart at the level of society. Again, not when you're talking about how beautiful full solar eclipse is, but you know, when you're talking about politics or anything that is polarizing. Yeah. No. And I'm with you on this, right? It does that. It does that. And
you're auditioning. You're auditioning when you comment on someone's tweet. You're auditioning for the algorithm. Does this sort of cybernet-ac amplification effect so everyone tries to one up each other? I mean, I hear a lot from people, you know, what they're really, they're worried about mainly is not the contempt from the other side, but that the in group policing. I think it's had a massive impact. We see it. You see it in journalism. You see it in academia. You see it in
sort of theoretical frameworks. You certainly see it. The some degree in politics. So it's interesting. Politicians, they're so used to that. It's almost as if they they're the one group that at least sort of understands the social dynamics of of something like Twitter. Like this is sort of their lives is, you know, in group policing, out group contempt, being okay with like these people are upset. Who am I going to hitch my wagon to putting their finger to the wind? But for most
other people aren't used to that. And so it's a it's definitely an effect. It makes you either coward or makes you conform. Look, I only get some taste of this like when I'm doing book tours, right? Because I'm not on social media. So I'm not subject to people talking about me in these sort of contexts. When you have a book out, you people do talk, you get reviews and people come out to talk about your book or whatever. And I hate it. And I couldn't imagine if that was
just all the time. That if like all the time that was the world I was in is like every week, I have to get like the two or three people that are like taking their swing at me or whatever. I mean, that would drastically affect. I'm sure what I write about how I went through my life, just like the subjective well-being. Yes, I really I was really hoping for Elon to destabilize Twitter so much that it that essentially collapse. Like that it would actually be like a great civic
duty that he would have done. But it seems to be holding on to some degree, at least as far as I can tell, which is I think unfortunate. Yeah, well, he's destabilized something and it's been his own brain. But yeah, it's just he really is a cautionary tale at this point. And that has always been my concern about his engagement with Twitter, not so much what he was going to do to the platform. I you know, for the longest time, I remain diagnostic as to whether or not he could actually
significantly improve it. I don't, it doesn't seem likely to me now, but I'm not really in touch with what has become. But it's just as for its effect on him, you know, one of the most productive people in any generation, it's it hasn't been good. Let's turn to your book because it's some really, I mean, you've written a series of books that have targeted the same kind of object here, which is a life well lived, right? I mean, the question is like, how do we answer the question,
what is life good for? Right? I mean, the people, especially when you get to a certain level of privilege and abundance and just sheer good luck. And this is almost by definition much of our audience, you know, for a podcast like this or for a book like yours. And we're talking about people who have the time to think about how to improve their lives and how to live more wisely and
get to a place where they, they more and more are not regretting how they use their time. I mean, that there that does suggest you know, at least a few degrees of freedom there and in the kinds of choices they make, you know, presumably if you're listening to this podcast, you're not digging a ditch in the sun under the lash of some tyrant, right? So you seem to be at least implicitly and rather often explicitly asking these types of questions and just like, what does the point
of all of this? What what does winning the game actually look like? And in this most recent book, you're talking about a new approach to productivity, which you know, you say is a lost art. So you are suggesting that we're once much better at this. But let's just start with your, your basic
concept. What do you mean by slow productivity and how have we lost touch with it? Well, I agree with your characterization of the questions I think about I would add something else to it, which is, you know, as a computer scientist, as a digital theorist, I care in particular how technology intersects with that story as well, right? So in most of my writing of the last decade, there's usually an unintended consequence of a technological development that gets us out of touch
or becomes an obstacle to living some life that's going to be deeper, more meaningful. And we have to grapple with that and understand that technology, the opportunities, the perils and sort of navigate around it. So even this book, like slow productivity, the problem that I'm solving, there's actually a
techno story behind it. I mean, so there's there's a, an easier way of summarizing it, which is, look, there's a key question that a lot of people are in mainly as you say, this sort of knowledge work world. These are people who are doing pretty well, right? You have a job in which you look at a computer screen and you're an air conditioner, right? So a lucky place to be. But that group of people, and these are the people, these are a big group of my readers. A big question a lot of them
have is, okay, how do I do my work well? How do I produce things I'm proud of? Have impact, you know, support my family? And yet not let work just take over all of my life. How do I avoid sort of falling into burnout? I don't want to be like pre Twitter Elon Musk and just don't sleep and have seven businesses and just get after it. Like how do I still do stuff I'm proud of, but also spend
time with my kids? Right? There's this big question. And in the book, looks at that question, from both the perspective of someone like creatives that have a huge amount of autonomy and also from the perspective of sort of a standard office worker who has less autonomy. How can they still sort of navigate that that knife's edge? But there's a techno story behind how we got to a place where
that question became more and more relevant. And the story that I'm trying to tell in the first part of the book is a knowledge work itself when that emerged as a major sector, which is really like mid 20th century. Had this issue of not really knowing how to define productivity, because we had industrial productivity was a quantitative concept. It's a ratio, it's model T's per paid labor hour. Agricultural productivity is a quantitative idea. It's bushels
a corn per acre of land. You could measure this. Industrial manufacturing agriculture, you had well-defined production systems. So you could tweak something very specific and see how it impacted that number. Knowledge work comes along under that works. Knowledge work is more haphazard and autonomous and ambiguous. I might be working on seven things that are different than the eight things you're working on. There's not one thing we're producing. There's no well-defined production
systems we use for our work as well. Organizing labor is very independent and individualized in knowledge work. And so in response to that, the knowledge sector came up with this idea of we will use visible activity as a proxy for you doing something useful. So we'll all gather in the same building like we would a factory. We'll work factory shift hours. And like if I see you here doing stuff, I'm assuming that's useful stuff. And if we need to be more productive come early stay late.
Right. I call that pseudo productivity. The techno story is that worked okay, not great, but worked okay until the front office IT revolution of the late 90s and early 2000s. And then once we threw network computers and then later mobile computing into the sort of office works fear, pseudo productivity spun off the rails. Right. Because the personal computer came in and now suddenly the amount of different things you could work on, you know quadrupled. No longer do we have
specialists the type and specialist handle communication. Like the amount of work you could do quadrupled. Low friction communication networks made it really easy to ask people to do things so workload skyrocketed. Email chat really changed the game when it came to demonstrating visible effort. Now you could be doing this an incredible fine granularity at a frenetic pace. How quickly I respond to a message might be really important signal and trying to show how pseudo productive I
actually am. So my argument was the front office IT revolution plus this older idea of pseudo productivity they didn't mix and it led to this increasing exhaustion of knowledge workers as the amount of stuff they're working on increased the amount of their day dedicated to talking about work instead of actually doing work increased the freneticism and speed of their work increased at the same time they were getting more nihilistic like what am I actually doing here I'm just
doing all these visible signs of productivity. I'm sending emails I'm in meetings but I'm not actually writing the marketing report I'm not actually programming the computer and it led to the burnout epidemic and so there's that underlying techno story of technology plus that crude metric
didn't work well so we have to reassess what does it mean to produce really good stuff can we do that in a way that doesn't make work really exhausting so I have that sort of personal angle and then there's also this sort of deeper techno social economic story and they're both circling
I think the same issues. What did COVID do to this picture? There's this profound change I mean again we're talking about knowledge workers almost by definition here and perhaps you should bound that concept for us a little more but the rise of remote work in the aftermath of COVID and
the the seeming durability of our commitment to that I mean there's just I guess many organizations are still struggling with just how to get the balance right but there does seem to be this hybrid a level of commitment to remote and in office work for many organizations and there's there
upsides and downsides to that but it does change this at least the optics of pseudo productivity I mean you're just if you're not seeing people if you're not condemning people to have to be at their desk for 40 hours a week whether that that's the best use of their time or not because so much of
their time is now remote and you're not actually you know they don't get the credit for being at their desk because there you know there is no desk to be at much of the time and then there's this phenomenon of you know the quiet quitting that has been much discussed how do you view the
what recent years you know during and post COVID have done to this conversation I think the beginning of COVID pushed this increasing issue people were having with the unsustainability of pseudo productivity it pushed it over the edge because a couple things happen when knowledge workers
had to go remote right away when we were shifting remote we were already for the most part at our max capacity for the amount of work that we could have on our plate at the same time and have any chance of not drowning and the reason why we're at max capacity is because in knowledge work we leave
workload management up to the individual like for the most part that's up to you the figure out how to manage what you're doing and what you say yes to it's it there's a lot of autonomy and ambiguity in knowledge work so how a lot of people began to manage their workloads is they would wait until
the stress of their workload got high enough that it out outweighed their concern about the negative social costs of saying no to new work like this became the primary governor mechanism by which so many knowledge workers manage to workloads so of course this keeps you at a state of having a
stressful stressfully large amount of work if you have to be stressed before you begin to say no everyone has a stressful amount of work then the pandemic hit which automatically gave us like 25% more tasks overnight because we had to adjust unexpectedly to oh we got to run our company
the way up down your groceries yeah and just work itself like how do we deliver our our services you know if I remember this going on at the New Yorker like how do we move our whole production process to like a digital pipeline it was just new work came out of nowhere the collaboration then
also became less efficient because we lost all of the oh I see your office door is open so I'll book my head in and like hey what are we going to do about this client that it takes two minutes instead we had to start scheduling zoom meetings but the the smallest granularity of these meetings
was a half hour because it's hard to drag anything smaller on your calendar and so now we were making the collaboration the overhead related to work that became a lot less efficient and then finally the compensate for the fact that I can't see you doing visible activity we just move this
over to being even more phonetic with digital communication like I really now is important for me not to reply quickly like I have to reply very quickly to slack because like this is maybe the only way I have right now to demonstrate that I'm being suited or productive right so all these things
happened overnight and people just said enough is enough and I actually argue this is a you know a piece I wrote a couple months ago I argued that many of these sort of spasmatic emergent grassroots revolution reform movements and worked that we saw throughout the pandemic period were in part
people responding in a primal way to this I've been pushed over the edge with what's going on in knowledge work so I think the knowledge work component of the great resignation was a response the people saying enough is enough I think quiet quitting was a response for the younger generation who
couldn't resign or or switch down the half hours and move to a cabin so quiet quitting was a response I think much of the fury around the remote work wars that really picked up steam in 2021 and 2022 was also a sort of misguided response to this deeper primal rejection of work has just become
sort of intolerably frenetic and overloaded and I'm getting actually almost no real work done objectively the remote work wars didn't make a ton of sense right you you have this thing that did not exist 16 months earlier and now you had worker groups talking about it like it was a Geneva
convention it was just like fundamental right that a course work is supposed to happen at home how could we ever take this away this and even exist you know 16 months earlier I think part of that was just a generalized zeal for reform because when we we took this already sort of exhausting
tempo and this nihilism of all we do is talk about work and rarely get work done when we push that over the edge in the pandemic it broke a lot of people and and a lot of the unrest we saw in the knowledge work sector throughout the pandemic I think was people just responding to enough is enough
but they didn't really know exactly what they were responding to and I think a lot of those efforts were sort of misguided energy and we missed a lot of the opportunities we had to really make better reform here that's the context in which I was thinking about slow productivity well let's talk
about the principles of achieving slow productivity what is signified by the phrase and you frame your discussion around many interesting case studies the main being John McFee but you talk about Benjamin Franklin and Jane Austin and a bunch of scientists and it's all it does suggest I mean
that this is really your thesis you talk about the ways in which our engagement with new information technology has you know to range our our sense of what it is to be productive and how we measure success and so if you go far enough back in time it's not a surprise these examples of people who
didn't have this technology who were who were succeeding by the lights of history and spectacular ways with at a very different cadence with respect to how they they worked you know feel free to bring up any of the principal case studies you want but we should talk about your your three
the stages here do fewer things work at a natural pace and a obsessive equality yeah I mean and the reason I mean because it was a big decision but the reason I chose to use as the primary case studies these sort of historical figures there's really two to aspect to that that I think is
important to sort of set the stage one I was wary of the uncanny valley effect I'm I've seen this a lot when talking about sort of contemporary work there's an uncanny valley effect if you say look I'm going to tell you about a company that exists right now that's doing things differently
or a specific employee at a marketing company and here's how they do things differently their job is so similar to yours that the differences really begin to matter right and people have a hard time getting past like oh but that's a that's a client service firm in our client we have a
time sheet firm and it's actually I found it's difficult for people to get past that uncanny valley it's too close if it's too close to what they do but not exactly what they do it becomes an unbridgeable or just orienting gap so I said why don't I look at what I call traditional knowledge
workers who are actually defined by like this could be the critique but I'm twisting the critique to be a benefit they're defined by all the freedom and autonomy they had to experiment with what's the best way to create value using my brain I said this is why these people are important
because they had all the freedom in the world to figure out what works so if we look at what they settled on they're probably uncovering some useful universal principles about the best way of creating valuable things using the human brain now what we could then do is once we isolate
those principles I can do the hard work of okay so how can we make that relevant to someone who works in the cubicle how can we make that relevant to an entrepreneur in 2024 yeah there's a lot of work then to translate those principles to to tactical things that makes sense to people today
but I thought that was the right way the right way to do it so those three principles you mentioned were the three big things that came up if you study historically people who were good with creating valuable things with their brain they didn't work on too many things at the same time they really
avoided overload their pace was varied hard periods less hard periods also they would measure productivity on very large time scales so many of the most productive people in history if you go back and look at a random month in their life they seem incredibly non productive right because they
didn't think about productivity in terms of like today needs to be productive they thought about it like the next 10 years I want to produce something that matters and then finally they cared a lot about craft right that that was a sort of antidote to the appeal of busyness was to instead
reorient their interests towards I want to do something really well and I want to keep better what I'm doing all three of those principles I argue can be first adapted to modern knowledge workers with a lot of freedom and then can be further adapted even to knowledge workers who are
in a situation where they have less freedom we can get ideas from there that transmute into interesting tangible advice for for people in various situations in our current in our current moment the purist case is the person who really is his or her own boss and can just decide to
create whatever they want and then usually and then the analogy to if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation you'll need to subscribe at samherris.org once you do you'll get access to all full length episodes of the making sense podcast the podcast
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