Everything Wrong With Modern Productivity (+ A Hopeful Way Forward) | Cal Newport

Cal Newport talks about everything wrong with modern productivity.

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About Cal Newport:
Cal Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown University. In addition to his academic research, he writes about the intersection of digital technology and culture. Cal's particularly interested in our struggle to deploy these tools in ways that support instead of subvert the things we care about in both our personal and professional lives.

Cal is a New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including, most recently, A World Without Email, Digital Minimalism, and Deep Work. He's also the creator of The Time-Block Planner.

The videos are considered to be used under the "Fair Use Doctrine" of United States Copyright Law, Title 17 U.S. Code Sections 107-118. Videos are used for editorial and educational purposes only and I do not claim ownership of any original video content. I don't use said video clips in advertisements, marketing or for direct financial gain. All video content in each clip is considered owned by the individual broadcast companies.

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[sarthakgupta]

The way Ben Meer defines a productive day is by defining a 3-3-3 plan. 3 hrs on your most important project, 3 shorter tasks and 3 maintenance activities. It is important to define what productive really means to you

[Keepitcurious]

Thankful for the shorter yet still very meaningful and useful video.
I like the long form, but this is great too. ❤

[tod]

I do something similar. Sharing my personal kanban with supervisors and co-workers. Full transparency is fantastic if you are a productive and well organized person.

[piotrn]

Perhaps one of the reasons why email stood the test of time is because of the micromanagement problem of many managers and c-suit folks. Wdyt?

[vinaymahadevan]

Great video, as a software developer, I'm already using this thought process using JIRA and kanban like workflow.

[AmanGupta-gmpw]

7:58 i use to think less of me because i was not able to be at full intensity more then few hours

[matthewcaldwell]

What you're referring to is a management philosophy that streamlines surveillance and uses it to discipline workers with increasingly little recourse. These aren't fundamentally technical problems. There was nothing, for instance, inherently preventing managers from calling workers at their home after work hours, or expecting them to work later. It was understood to be culturally unacceptable, the kind of thing a real asshole would do to compensate for his own organizational failures. Technology abetted an increasingly manic productivity maximalism in which workers need to be seen to be working at all times, not because it actually produces efficiencies, but because it allows for the exertion of power over them. Make the metrics fine enough and you can produce a system in which people are defined by their divergence from a farcically granular optimum. Managers are now afforded all the pretext they could ask for to wince and rationalize the staff cuts they were going to make anyway. That this is a terrible way for an organization to operate is obvious to anyone who has been in one at any but the highest levels.

Once again, Cal, you've taken a cultural problem that has its roots in labor and shorn it of context so that it appears to be a matter of technological usage and personal regimen.