Dr. Cal Newport

How I'm managing my work is entirely obfuscated, right?

In knowledge work, organizational ideas is entirely left up to the individual.

How you manage your work and your workload and collaboration, that's like up to you.

That's all obfuscated.

There's no number to measure.

There's no system to improve.

So I think it was a real quandary.

My argument is what essentially the management class came up with is pseudo productivity, which is, okay, in the absence of being able to be quantitative about this, we will use visible activity as a proxy for useful effort.

So that's it.

Like we see you doing things that's better than not.

The more we see you doing, the better.

I call that pseudo productivity.

And I think that's implicitly how we've been organizing the management of knowledge, work, and labor since the 1950s.

Yes.

And so the problem came when we had this general way of measuring approximating productive effort, which wasn't very good, but whatever, right?

I mean, I want to see you're at the office and you're doing things.

The problem was the front office IT revolution.

Because I'm essentially a technocritic.

I see everything through the lens of technology in my writing.

We got computers.