Sapere Aude
Tag: productivity
we could probably work far less, and still have just as much stuff, of just as high a quality, if only we’d sacrifice product variety.
that would get you huge economies of scale. if the few well-made things were tastefully designed it would be a win from that perspective too.
As information workers, we are asked to absorb even more information than ever before. More blogs, more documentation, more patterns, more layers of abstraction. Now Twitter and Facebook compete with Email and Texts for our attention, keeping us up-to-date on our friends dietary details and movie attendance second-by-second. Does all this information take a toll on your psyche or sharpen the saw? Is it a matter of finding the right tools and filters to capture what you need, or do you just need to unplug.
most companies manage inputs, like clock punching or attendance at meetings, instead of outputs (who actually does things). this leads to politics and the sort of theatrics described in this article. the fundamental problem is that most companies can’t tell who actually does something useful. cf also the recent yahoo debacle where marissa was trying to manage inputs because the outputs are so unclear.
in a world with multiple free, high quality video conferencing solutions, why do the dilberts continue with conference calls? i suspect it is collective work avoidance. “being on a call” while “working from home” is the most transparent ploy to walk your dogs and getting paid for it ever.
there are < 50m calendar users in the world. what would happen if 1b people used calendars every day?
as a species, we have mastered space as a shared resource, but not yet time. what happens when we do?
in the future, people will still spend their time looking at chart junk, doing useless business travel, and use UIs at toddler speed. and don’t worry, everyone will still have ginormous kitchens to make a bowl of cereal.
treat it as infrastructure, like electricity. automate everything, fire 98% of financial services employees. the remaining employees are like sysops / on call, and certainly don’t get to play with other people’s money for a living. reward companies that can lower transaction costs and overhead, so no more physical presence, no marble halls.
The paradox is this. A job seeker is looking for a well-defined job. But the trend seems to be that if a job can be defined, it can be automated or outsourced. The marginal product of people who need well-defined jobs is declining. The marginal product of people who can thrive in less structured environments is increasing.
See also zero marginal product workers what fraction of the economy is pretend work, appearing to be busy?
2013-08-20: On the predicament of ZMP (0 marginal product) workers:
Huge swathes of people spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul.
2014-11-21: When the revolution comes, this will be very useful to smoke out people.
2018-06-07: A New Yorker take
Bullshit, like paper waste, accumulates in offices with the inevitability of February snow. Justification reports: What are these? Nobody knows. And yet they pile up around you, Xerox-warmed, to be not-read. Best-practices documents? Anybody’s guess, really, including their authors’. Some people thought that digitization would banish this nonsense. Those people were wrong. Now, all day, you get e-mails about “consumer intimacy” (oh, boy); “all hands” (whose hands?); and the new expense-reporting software, which requires that all receipts be mounted on paper, scanned, and uploaded to a server that rejects them, since you failed to pre-file the crucial post-travel form. If you’re lucky, bullshit of this genre consumes only a few hours of your normal workweek. If you’re among the millions of less fortunate Americans, it is the basis of your entire career.
2018-09-20: Scott Alexander looks into the topic
I write a note saying: To whom it may concern: I am a psychiatrist treating Mr. Smith. He tells me that he has chronic back pain (“lumbago”), and asks to be allowed to bring in his own chair to work. Yours, Dr. Alexander It’s too soon to have a good sample size. But it seems to usually work. I think it works because there is nobody at Mr. Smith’s workplace – maybe nobody in the entire world – who’s really invested in preventing Mr. Smith from bringing a chair into work. Someone wrote up a procedure for employees using special chairs, so that they’re not the sort of cowboys who make decisions without procedures. Someone else feels like they have to enforce it, so that they’re not the sort of rebel who flouts procedures. But nobody cares.
2021-03-06: It’s surprising that it took so long to automate extremely low value work like copying & pasting, and somehow requiring a college degree:
they do the dull-but-critical tasks that someone named Phil in Accounting used to do: reconciling bank statements, approving expense reports, reviewing tax forms. […] She’d known that her job was straightforward and repetitive, making it low-hanging fruit for automation. The experience was a wake-up call. She had a college degree and was early in her career.
2023-01-17: The race between bullshit jobs and automation
We escaped the original Malthusian trap with the Industrial Revolution, expanding capacity faster than the population could grow. A sufficient lead altered underlying conditions to the point where we should worry more about declining population than rising population in most places.
Consider the same scenario for a potential AI Revolution via GPT-4.
Presume GPT-4 allows partial or complete automation of a large percentage of existing bullshit jobs. What happens?
My model says this depends on the speed of adaptation.
it is hard to exaggerate how awesome this is. where is the US version? of course the proposed solution is only slightly better. much better: really think hard if you need to present anything at all.
The Anti-PowerPoint Party (abbreviated APPP) is a political party whose aim is to influence the public with regard to limiting the phenomenon of unproductive use of time in the Swiss economy industry, in research, and educational institutions. Particular attention is being paid to the economic damage resulting from presentations using PowerPoint. The party aims to launching a national referendum to obtain a law forbidding PowerPoint during presentations.
Research with the population at large to date suggests that our ability to multitask is not as great as we think it is. Starner replied that he multiplexes rather than multitasks. Multiplexing means doing tasks that reinforce each other. For him, taking notes and having conversations are tasks that parallel and enrich each other. They are multiplexed. On the other hand, he doesn’t try to manage email during a conversation or while walking down the street. That would be multitasking. “If the wearable task is directly related to the conversation, the user’s attention is not ‘split’ and multiplexing can be pretty effective.”
Some combinations of tasks can be multiplexed effectively. The question is which ones.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 