Slow Productivity

“Pseudo-productivity – the use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual productive effort. It’s safer to chime in on email threads and jump on calls, than to put your head down and create a bold new strategy.” “How do knowledge workers decide when to say no to the constant bombardment of incoming requests? In the modern office context, they tend to rely on stress as a default heuristic for moderation. You need to feel sufficient personal distress to justify the distress saying no might generate in the other party. The problem with deploying the stress heuristic, of course, is that you don’t start turning away incoming tasks until you find yourself already creeping up to the edge of unsustainable workloads.”