2023-09-20 ◦ Ep. 255: The Failure Of Cybernetic Productivity - YouTube

Cybernetic Productivity Principles: dominated since the early 2000s

1. Automate and speed up shallow task as much as possible
   • Have this software tool speak to this software tool, send data from your browser to your Exceel sheet or to your editor (and vice versa)
   • use as less clicks as possible
   • automate all the things
2. Try to keep needed information at your finger tips
   • make it easy to organize and get access to information
   • the more we have the right information when we need it, the more effective knowledge workers we are going to be
   • Google: You can search for all types of information
   • In general Knowlegde Management tools implement this principle that information should never be to far from the person who needs it
3. Remove friction from communication
   • communication has to be easy
   • if friction is removed, high velocity communication/colaboration can be achieved
4. Simplify the extraction of actionable wisdom from data
   • the information we need to do things is often hidden in data
   • we need tools that can find trends
   • we need tools that can extract wisdom from data so we can have it at our finger tips

This does not work because of the infinite buffer which is a sort of inbox that never ends.

• for knowledge workers the supply of work is infinite

• potential tasks are stored at individuals

  • you push things towards people until they’re ready to work on that task
  • the buffer of work is growing so you always have more work to do

• combined with cybernetic productivity it has following effects:

  • it speeds the shallow tasks (overhead work surrounding deeper work)
    • that frees up time (for more work to fill the buffer)

  We’re jumping from project to project, google is findin this information or maybe if we’re more advanced chatGPT is grabbing the information for us that we’re automatically sending it over between different types of tools and this data automatically goes over there and it’s the cloud and it syncs. We’re moving faster, faster and faster and more work comes in to fill that void and there is no time left to do the important stuff all those overheads are trying to support in the first place.

  So we feel tired, we feel exhausted, the context switches are making us dumber and we’re spending less time actually doing the underlying work that creates value, the actual work that is valued in the marketplace.