(2017-09-01) The Politics Of Productivity

Venkatesh Rao: The Politics of Productivity (Time Management)

The point of getting organized is to take control of your life, not efficiency

Otherwise you risk someone else taking control.

definition of organization: degeneracy in the arrangement of system elements to induce uniformity in flows and behaviors.

This is the external way to create habits, by squeezing out variation from the environment. It is much faster than the internal way: learning to accommodate variation.

An organization system is a "field" that "magnetizes" a "flow" to make it more powerful by inducing certain uniformities. I wrote about this field/flow mental model in Tempo.

Lowering effort by creating uniformity is central to the politics of productivity. To make an aspect of a domain uniform is to choose not to learn about a dimension of variability.

But who decides what is and is not of interest? Who decides what variation to squeeze out through forced uniformity, and what variation to learn and master? (Meta-Level)

By contrast, what you might call "organic" habits are created by learning to handle variation rather than squeezing it out. The "unconscious competence" of martial arts.

As the opening hanger-thieves anecdote illustrates, the moment you create a dimension of uniformity to save yourself learning, you also create an attack surface.

This is what it means to make a system legible in the sense of James Scott in Seeing Like a State. You should only do it if you also have the power to defend the system.

To create legible organization is to assume nobody is working against you, or that you are powerful enough to control them through intimidation and fear.

The weaker you are, the more obfuscated your organization must be to resist control. If you are really weak, you must actually behave chaotically, not just obfuscate order: give up efficiency for security.

Today, we are seeing a replay of the politics-productivity nexus in relation to machines, particularly in relation to machine learning and system boundaries like APIs.

biases-in-biases-out (BIBO)

Organization is inseparable from creating order out of chaos, fragility out of robustness, politics out of degeneracies, and power structures out of uniformities.

This is neither bad nor good. Neither industrial or post-industrial