Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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there’s no upper limit to the amount of output you seek to produce: more is always better. When you ask individuals to optimize productivity, this more-is-more reality pits the professional part of their life against the personal. More output is possible if you’re willing to steal hours from other parts of your day—from family dinners, or relaxing bike rides—so the imperative to optimize devolves into a game of internal brinkmanship. This is an impossibly daunting and fraught request, and yet we pretend that it’s natural and straightforward. It’s hard enough to optimize a factory, and a factory doesn’t have to worry about getting home in time for school pickups.
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I’m convinced that the solution to the justified exhaustion felt by so many in modern knowledge work can be found in part by relocating the obligation to optimize production away from the individual and back toward systems.
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Instead of demanding that employees individually produce more, we should instead seek systems that produce more given the same number of employees. This shift might seem subtle but its impact can be enormous, as it frees individuals from the complexity of optimizing output all on their own, and defuses the psychological torment of pitting the personal versus the professional.
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These types of management-labor negotiations become impossible when productivity is instead individualized. If it’s up to you alone to get more done, then attempts to moderate your workload can be misinterpreted as laziness.
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Leaving individuals to focus on executing their work well, while letting scrutinized systems tackle the allocation and organization of this work, might just be exactly the balance needed to allow growth without dehumanization.