13 May 2022. Time | Writing
The curse of ‘productivity’ // A manifesto on the purpose of writing
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.
I’m heading into a particularly busy period of work over the next two weeks, so Just Two Things will be on a reduced schedule. You can expect an edition next Monday and Tuesday, and on Monday and Friday the following week. There might be some short extra episodes if I see things and can make the time to write them up.
At my son’s suggestion, I have turned on comments, to see what happens.
1: The curse of ‘productivity’
I’ve been meaning to write about Oliver Burkeman’s book Four Thousand Weeks, on time and productivity, for a few months now, without ever finding the right article to discuss. Fortunately for me, Laetitia Vitaud has written a terrific piece about it in her newsletter, based on her recent book (published in French).
We are constantly fed productivity tips to better optimise our lives. I’ve personally always faced a cruel paradox: the more I try to optimise my time, the more time-strapped I become and the more dissatisfied I feel. The more I try to control my time, to make it fit into my schedule, the more it escapes me.
Time, says Burkeman, following the American anthropologist Edward Hall, is like a conveyor belt. Tasks are constantly arriving. Doing more of them doesn’t reduce them—in some cases, as with email, doing more of them only increases the flow, as people start to respond to whatever you have sent them.
(Swiss railway clock. Image by Jahoe via Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 3.0)
Vitaud quotes the relatively well-known (but delightful) story, originally written by the German writer Heinrich Boll, of the American investment banker who visits a small Mexican village:
(H)e talks to a fisherman who tells him that he only fishes a few hours a week, because he spends most of his time playing with his grandchildren, sunbathing and napping. The billionaire is surprised: "But you could fish longer, catch more fish, then buy more boats to catch more fish, build a fine business... and in twenty years you could be rich!” the billionaire says. The fisherman asks, “what good would it do me?” And the billionaire replies, "Then you could retire, play with your grandchildren, sunbathe and take a nap."
And this opens up an interesting discussion about the difference between living mentally in the future and living in the present. (This in turn reminded me of Barbara Adam’s discussion of how capitalism is about ‘the future traded’).
When you find yourself always living mentally in the future, you tend to locate the value of your life at a moment in time that has not yet been reached (and will never be reached because it is constantly being pushed back). The present exists only as a means to a higher future state. It cannot stand on its own...
So we spend our time pursuing the various goals we want to achieve, which condemns us to permanent dissatisfaction, because there are only two possible scenarios: either the goal is not yet achieved, and we are frustrated and dissatisfied as a result, or it is finally achieved, and we are even more dissatisfied because then we no longer have that goal to justify our actions.
Sp the whole weight of the productivity literature is about treating time as a resource, something we have to use. Vitaud suggests that women are much more vulnerable to this, partly because of the way in which self-esteem in contemporary capitalism is linked to the value of our (paid) productive work, and partly because women’s mental health suffers from the double load of paid and unpaid work. (There’s data on this).
The myth of multi-tasking also means that women suffer from cognitive overload, which increases their stress. Reading this, I was suddenly reminded of the book Superwoman, by Shirley Conran, which emerged as women were coming into the labour market in large numbers, which attempted to help people—well, women— manage this damaging multi-tasking myth. It’s striking that the idea of ‘multi-tasking’ is a metaphor that comes from computing.
So, clearly, as Vitaud suggests, the best way to be productive is to choose to be less productive.
It means reducing the disproportionate place that work has taken and not letting productivity take over every dimension of our lives. It means going more slowly and learning patience. Cal Newport, in a beautiful eulogy of "slow productivity" published in The New Yorker, calls for a reorganisation of work around the principle of slowness: the movement he calls “slow productivity” aims to keep the amount of work at a sustainable level.
2: A manifesto on the purpose of writing
For futurists, the word ‘manifesto’ is like catnip. It promises someone trying to say something different about the world. It’s a sign of change. It’s someone trying a different sort of sense-making.
So of course I was a complete sucker for George Saunders’ newsletter edition this week headlined ‘A meandering, retractable manifesto’.
In truth his Story Club newsletter is hard work if you’re only lightly interested in fiction, just because there’s a lot of it. (I can also see that for those who’re developing their fiction skills it’s a goldmine—Saunders is a busy newsletter writer, he pumps the stuff out, and as an educator he expects his readers to work at their craft.)
It’s a long, long piece—he’s not being inexact when he calls it ‘meandering’—so all I’m going to be able to do here is to sketch in some of the elements that I found most interesting. His piece was prompted by some work he’s been doing with his readers on a dark story by Isaac Babel, ‘My First Goose’. Let’s dive in:
What, ultimately, is the purpose of art? To get out on the perimeter, where the most terrible deeds occur, and reside there, reporting factually back, no matter how hard the result is to read? I used to think so, back when I was a Hemingway acolyte. I thought that fiction was a slightly poetic form of reportage – the most important thing was the relaying of actual, lived experience. But it seems to me now that Hemingway’s best war stories, and Babel’s, are really myths.
He expands on this a little. A story is “more of a cartoon or line drawing than a fully executed oil painting or photograph”. It is realistic enough that we believe in it, so that it can get on and “do its mythological work”. Improbably, maybe, he mentions Charles Schultz’s ‘Peanuts’ cartoon strips in this content. They’re clearly not real kids, or in a real neighbourhood, but they convey an underlying truth.
And that truth is generated in the dialectic (not Saunders’ word) between the writer and the world. it comes from
the intersection of his mind and the world. The thing that resulted, that work of art, has the world in it, but is not the world itself; it is something that speaks to conditions in the world, a lovingly distorted scale model of the world. So, a story is an export of one human mind.
But why should anyone else care about that? Saunders mulls this over—he says he’s thought about it a lot, but he still doesn’t have an answer to it. But something that might be related here is that often that “lovingly distorted scale model” doesn’t have complete intention behind it. During that process of intersection between mind and world, unintended things happen, and that matters.
we don’t really know what we’re trying to do when we start out to write a story. We really don’t and shouldn’t, per this model. We just blunder into it, by revising to our tastes, and thrilling ourselves by indulging in a thousand micro-choices, and so on. So, we might ask: What is it that winds up happening, all on its own, separate from our intention, when we make up a story?
Saunders is clearly a fan of Charlie Chaplin, and he’s referenced a few things from Chaplin’s work in recent newsletters. And he returns to Chaplin here, at some length. I liked this Chaplin quote:
“I’m not interested at all in reality, except to make my stories believable—make the unreal real, to hypnotize the audience into swallowing my premise. Once I had decided to base City Lights on a pretty girl interested in a character like my Tramp, I had to think up convincing situations to bring that about believably.”
As Saunders says, we all know what reality is like. We’ve all lived there. What the writer or artist provides is “something wondrous” to add to that reality. Or, in a different phrasing, “a response” to that reality. Which more or less gets him to his conclusion:
So, art is an offering of sorts – a hypothesis for both writer and reader to take up and consider together. And the goal of that offering might (might) be to ease the reader’s way; to make the difficulty of this life less for her. We try to give the reader a way of thinking about reality that is truthful, yes, and harsh, if need be, but not gratuitously harsh, a way of thinking that, somehow, helps her. And also, not gratuitously comforting (for she’ll feel the falseness in that, and take no comfort from it).
And if we do it right, at a tender moment, the reader will feel she has a friend, in the story and its writer, even if that writer is long dead or from some faraway place.
And by way of an example of this kind of art, he turns back to Chaplin, and a wonderful clip from his film Circus:
Have a good weekend.
j2t#314
If you are enjoying Just Two Things, please do send it on to a friend or colleague.