Dr. Cal Newport

So to me pseudo-productivity was the answer that we came up with in knowledge work to a real dilemma, which is that's a sector using your brain primarily to create value.

That's a sector that emerged as a major part of the economy in roughly the mid-20th century.

When that emerged, all the definitions of productivity that we had were inspired from agriculture and industry.

right?

So in agriculture, we can have ratios, bushels of corn per whatever acres of land under cultivation.

In industrial manufacturing, we have ratios, model T's per input labor hour.

So you could just measure these things.

We also had clearly defined systems of production.

So you could then say, if I change this about the system of production, what happens to this number?

And you could do gradient descent, right?

Okay, I do this, that number goes down.

Let's not do that.

But I make this change, it goes up.

That's a better way of building it.

Like,

This was the dominant way of thinking about productivity since basically Adam Smith.

The knowledge work arises.

That doesn't work, right?

Because I'm working on whatever, five different things.

It's different than what you were working on.