

Increasing Productivity is a Load of Bullshit - mbesto
http://www.techdisruptive.com/2012/10/07/increasing-productivity-is-a-load-of-bullshit/

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mvkel
From the article: Link Bait – Articles with catchy titles, but no relevance to
the purpose of the article, severely detriment our ability

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Karunamon
If I had a penny for every linkbait title with profanity included...

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yummyfajitas
The claims that productivity maxes out at 40 hours are extremely weak
empirically.

[http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/work-hour-
skepticism.h...](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/work-hour-
skepticism.html)

The most current evidence I've seen suggests 60 hours is optimal for
productivity, not 40.

[http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/construction-
peak-60hr...](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/construction-
peak-60hrwk.html)

[edit: let me clarify that there is basically no data on knowledge workers.
Anyone making claims about them, whether the magic # is 40 or 60 hours, is
extrapolating from manufacturing and/or construction work.]

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dasil003
I realize this is orthogonal to your point, but when it comes to knowledge
work, _especially_ startup work, I'm highly skeptical of any prescriptive
approach to hours worked.

Optimal hours is of scientific interest, but I think someone in a startup even
thinking about this is a bad signal. Instead ultimate productivity is more
closely related to how focused they are when they are actually working. It's
easy to spend 16 hours a day in the office and fritter it away with a million
small but unimportant tasks. Likewise, if you come in and get in the zone for
6 solid hours, you might be able to create something of much larger value than
anything the multitasker achieved in a frenzied and overworked 80-hour week.

Of course the holy grail is combining a high degree of focus with extended
hours, but you can't manufacture this. This is probably the best argument for
hiring young idealistic people over seasoned veterans it that they are more
likely to naturally put in a lot more hours. However, even unspoken peer
pressure to stay in the office is going to be counterproductive, ideally you
want people to work as long as they are productive and then unplug completely
to recharge quickly. If you get it right and create the right kind of
excitement and intrinsic motivation then you can get large gains of
subconscious problem-solving as well.

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yummyfajitas
I don't think it's necessarily a bad signal. Some people are more productive
when they force themselves to devote N hours of time to a particular topic.

I do it myself sometimes - I decide I'll devote at least 4 hours to
$BORING_BUT_NECESSARY_AND_UNENDING_TASK, and then do it and get it done. At my
current job, this was (until very recently) searching our logs for slow
queries and fixing them.

Different people have different productivity strategies. Being "in the zone"
is an effective one, but it's hardly the only one.

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dasil003
Let me clarify. I meant startup management thinking, "what should our work
hour policy be?"

Personally yes, I have become much more efficient since having a kid and add
hard timeboxing to my schedule.

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VexXtreme
My productivity actually took a measurable hit after I switched from one
platform/framework to another. The first one was a dream to work with,
everything was documented, the framework and 3rd party APIs were well
maintained and the whole community was very serious about maintaining a
certain standard of quality.

The second platform (the one I have to work with now) is crappy, slow, most
IDEs are shit, nothing is documented properly, the community is in the state
of total disarray etc. You probably know what platform I'm talking about.

Just going back to my old platform (if my workplace allowed me to) would
probably increase my productivity by at least 50%.

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menacingly
Did I miss the part where this article gets around to saying anything?

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d--b
Increasing productivity is the main point of Information Technology. Of
course, everything you can do with a computer, you could do with file cabinets
and multiplication tables, but the only goal of information technology is to
increasing the speed at which you can process your information, ie. increasing
the productivity of your users. That's why sales pitch put this forward. Yes,
sometimes it's bullshit, and yet, sometimes it's not. Overall, productivity
has increased since 1950, so that must have come out of somewhere...

