The Vision of Productivity Pran largely Didn’t Work Out
Summary:
When i was coming up in the late nineties and early two thousands, this moment of what was known as productivity prand really believed that te could be atthe core of satisfying productivity. This was the vision. If you just had the right configuration of omnifocus hooked up with quicksilver going into your your souped up emax short cuts, it would make everything kind of effortless. And essentially you would be out sourcing a lot of the difficulty of work in too, soft ware....
Transcript:
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Like one of things i wrote about in that recent new yorker article
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on personal productivity was how there was this moment when i was coming up in the late nineties and early two thousands, this moment of what was known as productivity prand really believed that te could be atthe core of
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satisfying productivity with
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the right soft ware, the
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right inner faces, the
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right digital tools, the difficulty of work could be significantly reduced. This was the vision. If you just had the right configuration of omnifocus hooked up with quicksilver
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going into your your souped up emax short cuts, it would make everything kind of effortless. And essentially you would be out sourcing a lot of the difficulty of work in too, soft ware. Work would be less difficult. You’d be more successful. You’d be happier. You’d be less stressed out you went to procrastinate, et cetera. As
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i wrote in that article, that vision of productivity pran largely did not come to pass.
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Better technology helped some things at the margins, made a few things more efficient, youo made some things easier to do, but it missed the reality that work is just ultimately hard. Ther’s just that there’s an unavoidable cognitive friction of trying to take your brain and produce valuable information to figure out how to reply to this message or to write this memo. It’s just hard. It’s always going to be hard. You can’t off load that to the computer. And
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so this vision of tek making work easier didn’t really work out. Basically, what tek did as made
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particular activities more
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efficient. But
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as i write about my new book coming out in march, even that often had unexpected side effects. So a emale, for example, made it easier to communicate. It was literally less friction for me to send you an email than to leave you a voice message. But then it had the unintentional side effect of making us communicate a lot more, which actually made work much more difficult and made us less happy. So it’s really been a mixed reaction what kek has brought into the (Time 0:47:36)