The Problem of Productivity

We don’t have good notions of productivity. Traditional economic productivity largely requires people working toward a singular measurable output with a transparent process. You have this input-to-output ratio and a process generating it, and you can tweak that and see what it does to the ratio. None of that works in knowledge work. So we fell bac

What’s needed is more intentional thinking about what we mean by “productivity” in the knowledge sector—seeking ideas that start from the premise that these efforts must be sustainable and engaging for the actual humans doing the work. Slow productivity is one example of this thinking, but it shouldn’t be the only one. My long-term wish is that thi

The central goal of Slow Productivity is to keep an individual worker’s volume at a sustainable level.

In most every other area of our economy, not only is productivity a well-defined concept, but it’s often central to how work unfolds. Indeed, much of the astonishing economic growth fueling modernity can be attributed to a more systematic treatment of this fundamental idea. Early uses of the term can be traced back to agriculture, where its meaning

what we really need—more so than righteous disdain or brash new policy—is a slower conception of what it even means to be productive in the first place.

I think productivity is really a race to the bottom um it's I think that the that a lot has been said about how humans uh or machines are trying to be more human but I think less has been said about how humans have for decades uh been trained to be machines

and we have a lot of unlearning to do because if we focus on efficiency and optimization and