I am a big fan of Cal Newport. I have read all his books. His thoughts on the insidious nature of social media and, more generally, internet distraction were revelatory. I appreciate his thoughtful approach to developing one’s productivity. I wish I were more like him. I earnestly hope my kids are as focused and dedicated and productive as he is. One needs these voices in the weird world of knowledge work and digital distraction that we live in. Fundamentally, he fights the good fight against the trashy crassness of modern internet-saturated culture, and he provides useful tips for how to get stuff done.
But…but. There’s something that has always been off about his argumentation to me. I started thinking about it while listening to his podcast. He discussed some of the pushback against his method. One of his responses stuck out to me. In short: he referenced economic materialists who challenged his method as a method to increase productivity within an exploitative system. His response: his organization method (the funnel of productivity) is a general process. It doesn’t need to be tethered to the particular capitalistic system. Use it as a general tool applied to your particular goal. Everybody needs some method of organization system (not having one is itself a system), everybody needs to do things. Use this method for your general aims.
This sounds quite reasonable. And I think that it’s 90% correct. But that 10% lingers and irks my contrarian sensibilities. I think two stories help explain my views.
The first: have you ever sat in a meeting with university tech folks launching a new platform (or whatever the contemporary words are)? A common refrain that I’ve heard: "You’re the expert. You provide the content, we’re just setting up the medium that allows you to X. “ That’s obviously not true. Content and medium are not easily separated, as anybody growing up with and without the internet or smartphones should be well aware. The medium is the message, right? Anybody using Canvas or Doodle or KaBoink or LoopyDoop or whatever’s coming next knows that the medium creates very real structural constraints, values, and incentives to work in certain ways.
The second: the modern professional managerial class, their children, and their educational institutions are stressed and straining. White collar parents are exhausted porting their children between Mandarin immersion lessons and upsidedown polo club. Universities are opening lazy rivers and fancy student housing. Why doesn’t everyone just chill out, am I right? Frankie says relax, and I’m sure it’ll work out! Well, in a modern winner-take-all economy, what matters is comparative advantage. So falling off the race creates very real risks of falling into precarity (the middle class and a life of mediocre security has fallen away, if you’re not aware). It’s not the absolute development of upsidedown polo that matters: it’s the comparison between your kid and the kid who’s doing it all, when gunning for a highly competitive and narrow set of opportunities.
The former story highlights the fact that general tools can of course be ported across contexts or content. But they embody incentives and constraints, necessarily.
The latter story highlights that one’s place in the world is developed in comparison to the place and activity of others.
Newport tries to address anti-productivity critiques and argues in favor of a “productivity funnel,” in which productivity is a function of three processes: selection (generally, what you say yes to) organization (planning/mapping/processing your tasks) and execution (doing things effectively). Newport states in a recent email newsletter:
“This detailed definition also adds nuance to anti-productivity criticism. A lot of this recent debate loosely associates the term “productivity” with an exploitative capitalist drive to maximize accomplishment. When viewed against the specificity of the productivity funnel, however, it becomes clear that this critique more accurately concerns only the activity selection level.
I agree that there’s an important debate to be had about how organizations and individuals implement activity selection (e.g., my recent post on slow productivity), but regardless of where this debate takes us, the other levels of the funnel remain important and largely orthogonal. In a post-capitalist collectivist utopia, where work is optional, and we’ve excised our souls of our past bourgeois internalization of the narratives of production, we’ll still have things we need to get done, and having an organizational system will still be better than haphazardly trying to keep track of these things in our minds (even Lenin had a task list).”
I get it. And from a certain perspective, this makes so much sense. But it ignores the fact that seemingly general systems impose constraints, incentives, priorities, values. And it sidesteps the critical point of comparative advantage: my ability to live life minimizing productivity is partially contingent on the risk of falling behind others in an increasingly winner-take-all, commodified society. A relentless focus on maximizing productivity at work and self-actualization in non-work time shifts the competition in the game, especially in a world of increasing inequality and polarization (ask the white working class how not keeping up with the Joneses (MS, ED, PhD) is working out). The relentless maximization of productivity, or cultural talents in our children, or amenities in university rec centers, flows from relative comparison, not absolute within-person productivity levels.
So I’m definitely going to use the productivity funnel concept in my work life. I actually love the concept. I’m definitely going to continue to try and maximize work at work time to maximize the quantity of time I can spend with my children. But my personal productivity emerges from a deep reluctance and sorrow, from the turning and turning in the widening gyre as the center collapses and the peak of opportunity narrows. I argue that the system of productivity or actualization maximization is partially a low road of development. We’re far down that path so there’s not a lot to do to fight against it.
Productivity practices and systems are so useful. But the whole thing feels like a self-perpetuating system of perverse incentives and requirements. No need to rally against a caricature communist utopia nor wholesale adopt an organization system as a general portable tool to realize this, and I’m not convinced any individual decision can solve it.