To name another example, consider the common practice of setting up regularly occurring meetings for projects. These meetings tend to pile up and fracture schedules to the point where sustained focus during the day becomes impossible. Why do they persist? They’re easier. For many, these standing meetings become a simple (but blunt) form of personal organization. Instead of trying to manage their time and obligations themselves, they let the impending meeting each week force them to take some action on a given project and more generally provide a highly visible simulacrum of progress.
Also consider the frustratingly common practice of forwarding an e-mail to one or more colleagues, labeled with a short open-ended interrogative, such as: “Thoughts?” These e-mails take the sender only a handful of seconds to write but can command many minutes (if not hours, in some cases) of time and attention from their recipients to work toward a coherent response. A little more care in crafting the message by the sender could reduce the overall time spent by all parties by a significant fraction. So why are these easily avoidable and time-sucking e-mails so common? From the sender’s perspective, they’re easier. It’s a way to clear something out of their inbox—at least, temporarily—with a minimum amount of energy invested.
The Principle of Least Resistance, protected from scrutiny by the metric black hole, supports work cultures that save us from the short-term discomfort of concentration and planning, at the expense of long-term satisfaction and the production of real value. By doing so, this principle drives us toward shallow work in an economy that increasingly rewards depth. It’s not, however, the only trend that leverages the metric black hole to reduce depth. We must also consider the always present and always vexing demand toward “productivity,” the topic we’ll turn our attention to next.
Busyness as a Proxy for Productivity
There are a lot of things difficult about being a professor at a research-oriented university. But one benefit that this profession enjoys is clarity. How well or how poorly you’re doing as an academic researcher can be boiled down to a simple question: Are you publishing important papers? The answer to this question can even be quantified as a single number, such as the h-index: a formula, named for its inventor, Jorge Hirsch, that processes your publication and citation counts into a single value that approximates your impact on your field. In computer science, for example, an h-index score above 40 is difficult to achieve and once reached is considered the mark of a strong long-term career. On the other hand, if your h-index is in single digits when your case goes up for tenure review, you’re probably in trouble. Google Scholar, a tool popular among academics for finding research papers, even calculates your h-index automatically so you can be reminded, multiple times per week, precisely where you stand. (In case you’re wondering, as of the morning when I’m writing this chapter, I’m a 21.)
This clarity simplifies decisions about what work habits a professor adopts or abandons. Here, for example, is the late Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman explaining in an interview one of his less orthodox productivity strategies:
To do real good physics work, you do need absolute solid lengths of time… it needs a lot of concentration… if you have a job administrating anything, you don’t have the time. So I have invented another myth for myself: that I’m irresponsible. I’m actively irresponsible. I tell everyone I don’t do anything. If anyone asks me to be on a committee for admissions, “no,” I tell them: I’m irresponsible.
Feynman was adamant in avoiding administrative duties because he knew they would only decrease his ability to do the one thing that mattered most in his professional life: “to do real good physics work.” Feynman, we can assume, was probably bad at responding to e-mails and would likely switch universities if you had tried to move him into an open office or demand that he tweet. Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.
I mention the example of professors because they’re somewhat exceptional among knowledge workers, most of whom don’t share this transparency regarding how well they’re doing their job. Here’s the social critic Matthew Crawford’s description of this uncertainty: “Managers themselves inhabit a bewildering psychic landscape, and are made anxious by the vague imperatives they must answer to.”
Though Crawford was speaking specifically to the plight of the knowledge work middle manager, the “bewildering psychic landscape” he references applies to many positions in this sector. As Crawford describes in his 2009 ode to the trades, Shop Class as Soulcraft, he quit his job as a Washington, D.C., think tank director to open a motorcycle repair shop exactly to escape this bewilderment. The feeling of taking a broken machine, struggling with it, then eventually enjoying a tangible indication that he had succeeded (the bike driving out of the shop under its own power) provides a concrete sense of accomplishment he struggled to replicate when his day revolved vaguely around reports and communications strategies.
A similar reality creates problems for many knowledge workers. They want to prove that they’re productive members of the team and are earning their keep, but they’re not entirely clear what this goal constitutes. They have no rising h-index or rack of repaired motorcycles to point to as evidence of their worth. To overcome this gap, many seem to be turning back to the last time when productivity was more universally observable: the industrial age.
To understand this claim, recall that with the rise of assembly lines came the rise of the Efficiency Movement, identified with its founder, Frederic Taylor, who would famously stand with a stopwatch monitoring the efficiency of worker movements—looking for ways to increase the speed at which they accomplished their tasks. In Taylor’s era, productivity was unambiguous: widgets created per unit of time. It seems that in today’s business landscape, many knowledge workers, bereft of other ideas, are turning toward this old definition of productivity in trying to solidify their value in the otherwise bewildering landscape of their professional lives. (David Allen, for example, even uses the specific phrase “cranking widgets” to describe a productive work flow.) Knowledge workers, I’m arguing, are tending toward increasingly visible busyness because they lack a better way to demonstrate their value. Let’s give this tendency a name.
Busyness as Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.
This mind-set provides another explanation for the popularity of many depth-destroying behaviors. If you send and answer e-mails at all hours, if you schedule and attend meetings constantly, if you weigh in on instant message systems like Hall within seconds when someone poses a new question, or if you roam your open office bouncing ideas off all whom you encounter—all of these behaviors make you seem busy in a public manner. If you’re using busyness as a proxy for productivity, then these behaviors can seem crucial for convincing yourself and others that you’re doing your job well.