The Gospel of Productivity
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So anyway, Brian, you can see where we're going here. I particularly like this pink flare up on the right. And I like what he's done with the blue over top because it suggests tension, like two things smashing together. I hate the circles, but Alex is going to take some time. I can't figure out, and this will come up in the productivity episode, whether Alex is just like he's a genius that needs time or he's wildly unproductive. I think maybe both. Well, unlike you, Troy, I still have a job.

All right. Welcome to People vs. Algorithms, a show about media, technology, and culture. I am Brian Marcy. I'm joined each week by Alex Schleifer. That's me. Who just decapitated Troy Young. Welcome, guys. Welcome, guys.

We're doing a brand review. I'm glad you like it, Troy. No, it's fun. You know what, Alex? It just brings me back to the old days when we used to, in the same kind of

Back and forth, I would sort of make something crappy, shame you, send it over, and then you would make something better. But it was always my strategy to put something out there that you could react negatively to, sometimes positively, but more frequently negatively, and then get you to make something. Do you like that, Alex? Or are you like, stop with the amateur design, leave this to the professionals? Sure.

Troy and I have been working together for long enough, so it's pretty transparent at this stage. I really like working with Troy. I think I do have a very busy job. And on top of that, my... I had a meeting today. I have contractors... Troy just got out of a tennis lesson. He had a morning meeting at the Gramercy or whatever hotel. Crosby Street. Yeah, Crosby Street. Gramercy's closed. Yeah, I know. It's sad. I have contractors in my basement because the concrete's peeling off.

Yeah, I'm so busy I couldn't get my tooth fixed today. So I will do, for the audience, we are talking about doing a rebrand for people versus algorithms. And Troy has been pestering me. And Troy, you know, I think inspiration will strike you at different times of the day and then you just want something done. And I try to accommodate. Also, Troy's trying to get me to pay for his Figma license and I'm not going to do that.

I'm not trying to do that. I just don't understand why I can't literally copy a layer on Figma because I'm not like... Because that's their business models. All these SaaS companies, except for my clients, are scams. I need you to cut the layers up then and send it to me because...

I don't need Figma. I'll pay for anything you want, but I don't need Figma. SurveyMonkey, unless they're not a partner, they're the worst. The idea that someone else needs to log in to actually put the survey on my team and then all of a sudden I've got to pay way more money just because someone else... It's ridiculous. They've made it much easier to catch. It used to be that it was pretty...

invisible. People would just ask for edit permission and you'd just say yes. And at some point I looked at my bill and it was like $720 and I was like, we have four people. And there were 12 people getting free licenses. Big picture is we could go with a design from the Troy Young Design Skunk Works website

which is not the best product that you'll ever see. But it's not bad. There's some ideas there. Heavy on the authenticity front. Yeah, or there's a podcast with someone who's a distinguished design thinker and person who could contribute to it. How long did this take you, Alex? An hour? Yes. Yes. Okay, so let's put a couple more hours in and see what we get out of this thing. Let's see.

We tripled that. We might have something pretty good. It took me an hour and 30 years of experience trying. Exactly. Okay, Picasso. I mean, that's how you become productive. So I want to have this productivity episode. We've got to mix things up every now and again. We don't want to keep it to be stale. And also, we're doing this episode earlier in the week, so there's less to discuss.

And something that has been on my mind quite a bit is about productivity and the promise of productivity and our endless quest for productivity. And then also a lot of what we talk about now and how the economy is changing and how AI will further this quest for productivity. So one of the things I think with productivity is we talk about economic growth. We need productivity. And particularly, we need labor productivity. And it's the most...

you know, direct relationship to economic growth. And that's basically, we want to produce more goods or services with the same or fewer inputs. That's what we're really getting. We're cooking with gas. And a lot of that has come through technology. I mean, the greatest gains in productivity in the U.S. economy were between 1995 and 2004. It averaged about 3.2% annually. Weirdly,

Around the financial crisis. That like corresponds to when I moved to America. I wonder if that is probably you got casual.

Yeah. Weirdly though, then directly afterwards, it dropped, okay, to 1.3% annually since 2005. And if you think about that, we have these like smartphones in our, like we have all of these productivity devices. We have Notion. My God, we have Notion. And productivity has not risen. And now, of course, we have AI coming down the pike and it is promising that

yet more productivity because we worship productivity. And I want to get into whether we're ever going to see that productivity gain, but then also how all of us relate to productivity and try to be productive in our own ways without getting trapped into this sort of treadmill of productivity. Because I think right now we're at a time when we're

The current vibe is around jump-starting productivity. Beyond AI, there has been this cultural shift to greater labor productivity. I think that's underlying a lot of the return to office mandates, even the culling of middle managers. I mean, middle managers in the coordination work, they're not as productive as the people who are on the front lines producing, like Alex with the actual designs.

And then you have just the overall vibe of like being extremely hardcore and

Doge, which is basically about getting the government more productive. They're asking their volunteers. This is old school productivity. You just work more hours. You got to do 80 hours a week, which is such bullshit. Nobody works 80 hours a week. I don't believe it. So let's talk productivity. Okay. You've wanted to do this for a long time. You've been asking to do. I do because I struggle with productivity. So this is, this is the best podcasts are self-help sessions. I mean, not on my list, but.

Let's see how it goes. Let's see how it goes. I put a lot of work into this. Let's do it. I think people appreciate things that teach them something. Well, I noticed just timely that Tim Ferriss, who I've never, he's never really made my thing sing. Four-hour workweek. I just got that. Well, it's not, he's got the four-hour body and the four-hour workweek and the four-hour chef and whatever. Everybody's doing things in four hours.

but he's also got a new book out that he just promoted today and

And it is called, it's something about how to say no, which see, that seems kind of interesting, but I don't know if you need a book for that, but maybe. All these books should be articles. It's called the no, it's called the no book and it's clocking in at 500 pages. I'll just say no to that. Yeah. But I mean, all of these productivity gurus are a little bit of a scam because a lot of it is, is just about, you know, making sure that you hire somebody who,

that works somewhere cheap to do a lot of the menial tasks for you. That's great. Yeah. But what I think is interesting with that, because there are tons of these productivity gurus, and I think Tim Ferriss was early on with this, but YouTube is filled with productivity gurus. I went out looking for some of them. And they all have that sort of surprised YouTube guy face. Yeah.

Listen, speaking of, listen to this is from the intro to the book. I think you'll like this Brian. I, Alex, you'll certainly like this cause you do it basically, but it's co-written by another guy with Tim Paris and he writes, Tim is the master of no as

As I write this in mid-October 2023, his text messages have an auto response that reads, I'm traveling overseas until November 7th. If your text is urgent, please reach out to someone on my team. Otherwise, please resend your text after November 7th if it still applies. Since catching up would be impossible, I'll be deleting all my messages upon my return and starting from scratch. Thank you. I like that.

Yeah, sure. Basically, it's saying that it says the message you sent me is your priority, not automatically mine. It's a screaming yes to life. That's true. That's nice. Although he was sort of part of really kicking off, I think, a lot of this cult of productivity and not to point fingers, but this all emanates, I believe, out of Silicon Valley.

the home of optimization. And they started optimizing these websites, and then they decided to go optimize lives. And so now we have to track everything. We have to track our sleep. We can't go out for a run. We got to track that too and try to be more productive when we're exercising. And a lot of this, I think, is leaving people

feeling like they're never going to get productive. I feel like it's almost like the aspiration of productivity because the data shows that we are not more productive. The smartphone really didn't make us more productive. The internet made us slightly more productive. It did make us more productive. But if you think about the power of the internet, because it distracted us and wasted our time,

And then when we got into social media and the phone, I think we've become less productive because of that, because the internet has evolved into being this adversarial attention capitalism machine where basically everyone is trying to

distract you and make you less productive. I mean, the notifications on computers, Slack. I last had Slack when I left my job in like October 2020. I haven't missed it at all. That ding, oh my God, I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. So why are we productive?

Alex? I mean, there's probably a bunch of different reasons, and I'm not a productivity guru. You're a podcast. You are now. Yeah, I am now. That's true. I think it is the distraction. It is kind of like the fact that it creates noisy environments. So, you know, email has become just assaulted by...

things that people don't want, like spam, but mostly, you know, things that people have subscribed to, like, you know, they might be getting newsletters or ads or when you buy something. So just running through your email feels to be part of work, right? I was asking some people at my last job, you know, and they would say, like, you know, they spent like $40

30 to 40 minutes just sorting through emails on a daily basis just to make sure that they're catching the important stuff. That meant that the executives wouldn't have that problem because they had an assistant reading their emails for them, which is crazy. Slack is a massive culprit. Slack has taught people that it's okay to constantly interrupt people.

And then when people want to get access to the information, they need to kind of read back and try to catch up. You know, it's like walking into a room where conversation is ongoing. And I think people have just become very accustomed to just

Whenever something pops into their head, they send a message. We don't have a sense of what's important or not important anymore. It's a job, so nobody wants to say no to stuff or let people wait. I think the urgency of Slack is something that's kind of breaking people's brains a little bit.

And I think the more the tools got integrated actually on our phone, the more they became interruptive like that. It's been at least like four or five years where I turned off every notification except for messages and maybe my alarm system or something like that. And I told people, email, expect an answer within 24 hours, during work days. Slack, I'll try to get it. You never told me that. Sometimes it takes 48 hours. Yeah.

I have groups. I have groups of priorities. And then text if it's absolutely urgent. And then you kind of, you set up, you know, it's important in life to set boundaries and you set a boundary and then you make people know that if their intention is to disturb you, they really have to mean it because there's no cost in disrupting people right now with things like Slack or email. So it's a big part of that for sure. Troy, what did you get done this week?

Not a lot. I got Alex to make a logo. I have some beefs with what you guys are saying. I mean, I have some behaviors that I'm not happy about for sure. Like I use my phone when I'm watching football a lot and I, but my phone has made me such a good backgammon player.

I've learned a lot from this one backgammon application. But I think, yeah, you're right. Most of it is a time suck that you really don't get a huge return on. But at the same time, I read five newspapers in the morning and I couldn't do that before or tap into as many different people that have things to say via newsletters and such. So it's really a gift in that regard, I think. I feel very informed about

my i don't do this productivity shit brian i i all i do is i look for little lessons you just vibe no no no i don't i just i'm not good at it i'm super just i'm kind of disorganized and i just kind of follow my nose man i just go to what's interesting so do you feel guilt about like not being like organized it's like how do you measure your personal productivity it's that's not a concept over here but

That's amazing. No, and I definitely don't do that. But I do look for lessons. Like when I was struggling to fart out a newsletter every week, you said to me, just write, just write, just get it down. Just like run at it.

Don't sort of edit yourself. Don't overthink it. Really just kind of get the words down and do it like you were entering into a conversation. And that was a incredibly valuable lesson to me that I benefited from. So I like that. And there are other lessons that I value too. Like you can't be creative. You can't put things out to the world. This is why we're living in the age of shamelessness. Yeah.

And the people that do that seem to, to, to, to, to thrive. It's like not caring or really caring, not in a, not in a way that, that, that hurts people, but not caring what people think is, is like vitally important. Like that, if you can, if you can manage that idea and really always kind of come back to what's really important is what you believe in, what you think and what matters to you, um,

and stop sort of second guessing, you know, how others are judging you. Like that's the kind of hack I'm into. Yeah, I think that's exactly it. Because it sort of rhymes with what Alex was saying about boundaries. It's like we're always, and I want to talk about AI next, but like we're always looking for the next sort of hack or technology that's going to solve all of the things that are making us less productive, which comes down to technology and distractions. And we just, it's just this endless loop of,

And ultimately, nothing is coming to like save us. The only thing that can save us is ourselves. But little things are really valuable. I think about this with my ex. I have opened ex like three times in the last week. Okay. And not for 20 hours. I opened threads and I almost puked all over my phone, by the way.

The problem with threads is there's too many people that used Instagram that got the invite for threads that went on to threads, but they're not words people and they shouldn't be there. They shouldn't. Well, you guys should all move to blue sky. We're proud of you, Brian. One day at a time, one day at a time. Blue sky has been pretty good. It's interesting. I do think that part of the, what we're seeing maybe in that drop in productivity lines up pretty nicely with when computers are

which I include phones in, started becoming both personal and work devices. Yeah, remember being work and you left work? Yeah. And you came back in on Monday and put on a computer, a desktop, your AdWi cubicle set. Yeah. And I think it's a really nice thing to be able to go. I mean, we're going to lose some of this stuff in work from home as well. I'm sure there are benefits to it, but the idea of just sitting down

having a machine that's dedicated to just work is very powerful. And it's actually what I'm setting up

which is why my studio is a mess, is that I have my audio area, which is where I record this podcast and make music, and that's all it does. I will have my area where I do all my art and video game stuff. And then my gaming computer, I'm moving out of this space and putting a completely different part of the house. Now, I'm lucky to be able to do that, but I think to me, the separation helps. Do you have an email area? Yeah.

My email area is... Super French. I love it. Where did you make the logo? In what area? Go over there and make more of it. He's got a logo workbench.

I find it hard to focus for a lot of extended periods of time. And I also have time blindness because I have pretty severe ADHD. So I've become very good at being a highly organized person. I know you pretty well, dude. You're like a massive spasmodic creator.

By the way, did you? I was reading this. No, no, no. Like Alex is like, he won't do it. He won't do it. He'll put it off and then you'll bug him and bug him above. And then like in, in, in an hour, something will come out. It was like the Lord touched the guy. And it's just like, what the actual fuck? It took me two weeks to get you to, and you did this in an hour. This is how he operates. Three years of experience. It took me two weeks.

Yeah, okay. It took me two weeks. Okay. But these other guys like, you know, Bach, Edison, Twain, Da Vinci, these guys weren't productivity hackers. Like, you know...

You know, Michelangelo was that guy got a lot. Mark Twain, like was a mess. He wrote books in bed was like, you know, like Einstein office. Einstein's office was notoriously like a, like a disaster zone. What was, what was his quote? Oh, it was if a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind of what then is an empty desk, a sign of, um,

That's a good point. That's good. Yeah, no, I actually need my desks to be empty because the more... I even... I used to be so into hardcore productivity. I used to have three screens, one with where all my emails would come in in real time, one where I would do the work. I got rid of all that. Every computer that I now use has a single screen and it requires me to focus on one thing at a time. I used to have RSS feeds popping off with

whatever news would break and I would immediately get it. And I would also like drink four or five coffees a day, but I would be an anxious, nervous mess. And I think I did work 80 hours a day. I liked you then. I liked that period. I was easy to kind of take advantage of by powerful executives. Easy to scare too. Don't sneak up behind. No, I think one of the great, Brian, one of the great productivity hacks is the simple concept of iteration.

It's like get something out there in one hour.

and then let it live for a minute and look at it and let it stew and then come back to it. And for the most part, you know, the world I grew up in was about finished, perfected, polished artifacts that you put out in the world, largely because I think, you know, that was the system of media. It was expensive to put something into the world. Right. And, and, and, you know, like all media because of controlled, you know, distribution channels was, was very polished and,

And now it's like, you know, the logo is not right, but it's on the website. And now we can smell it. We can look at it. We can have some fun with it and we'll make it better next time. Like that kind of spirit to me is really...

Brian, you said the other day, or Alex was bugging me, write an email to correspond with the podcast. And I put it off, put it off, put it off. Then I did it and it wasn't very good. And then the next day you said, let's do it as a back and forth where we'll comment on the other person's entry. That was a great innovation. We did that. Then you came back and said, add a table of contents and make it into a weekend journal. Like...

that to me is the absolute essence of it. It's, it's,

it's iteration that's the most important. Right. But that runs counter to like what I consider the current like cult of, of productivity, which is optimizing our time to get more output than our input. And our inputs are our time. Right. And a lot of us are in the knowledge economy. We're not working a lathe or something. Maybe Alex is on the side, but we're always under pressure to produce more. And,

no matter what, right? And if you're worried about yourself too, it's like, it's literally in your face. Like, I mean, you're like on a treadmill constantly trying to produce more because when you produce more in capitalism, you get more and you're running around this maze. And I think the part that I struggle with is how to divorce. Yes, we should all try to be productive in our own ways and lead a

a life that is true to whatever our goals are, but to not get caught up in our labor productivity being like synonymous with like worth or something. I mean, dude, you're going to die, right? Like what? Yeah. I'm reading this for 4,000 weeks. It's like literally we have 4,000 weeks basically. No one ever went to their deathbed saying I should have been more productive. Yeah.

That's crazy. But there is in, maybe I just like. I mean, you should have found more joy. I should have been better, a better husband, a better father, or, you know, I should have done more, but like I should have been. But in the moment, in the moment, I feel like the way our modern society is and our version of capitalism in particular, we are pressured into feeling that every single day is a test of our self-worth by how productive we are.

I mean, if you're on Tinder and you see someone that says they're in tech, whatever. If you meet a person that's an inbox zero person, run. Yeah. Well, I am an inbox zero person. Oops. Guys, I do feel like the idea of productivity has been hijacked. And in tech specifically, we have these highly productive companies.

Meta makes more than 2 million per employee, right? That are also in their own way incredibly wasteful. And in part it is because we've gone through a... You got to do as much work as possible, throw as much stuff at the wall. And a lot of it is actually... It's not actually very considered. And I...

I have a theory that I don't think any company fails because they're not productive enough. I think every company, any, I think it's always, or hasn't, doesn't have the right ideas most of the time. I think it's all about prioritization. I think most companies, and if, and I've consulted many companies and you step in and the, the,

the issue that I see over and over again, and even in people's lives, is that they're not prioritizing the things that they should be productive on, but rather are trying, you know, a thousand different things because it's so much easier to start a thousand different things right now and see what sticks. Well, that's the optimization thing. You don't need to have a point of view. You just throw a lot of stuff out there and then you optimize based on like... And I have butted heads so many times, which is why like, you know, I've struggled...

Not all, but a lot of product managers because a lot of the work became, well, let's try 100 things and see which one turns the spreadsheet green. And that's the one we keep rather than, well, let's maybe think about it for a little bit longer and try three things or even better. Let's do one thing incredibly well.

That would annoy me if I was a product manager. But I get it. I get the vibe. I brought quotes for you, Alex, because I thought that the great industrial... You already had Einstein. Where are you going next? No, we're going to go to the great industrial philosopher, Peter Drucker, who said, and you'll like this, Alex, there was nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

Exactly. And, you know, when we start rewarding our engineer for lines of code or writers for words that they write, then that's what happens. And in some ways, you know, social media is rewarding us for the amount of shit we put out into the world. It's the amount of like, you know, when you see like, you know, the official Instagram page saying you need to post 12 times a day. It's amazing how much is expected of our attention at a time and how little time we're meant to take on the stuff that we put out into the world.

I once had this argument with somebody at Airbnb who told me, and I was looking at some work and I said, this is a terrible experience. And they told me, but it's only going out to 1% or something like that. And I was like, shit, that's 2 million people or something. Or even if it's 200,000 people, that's like a third of the population of San Francisco and we don't care? Yeah.

And I do feel that in the end, that type of behavior leads to less productivity because you have more stuff going through the system, you require more managers, you have more noise in your system, there's more meetings happening, rather than saying, hey, why don't we all work on this one thing? Which is what I'm trying... I mean, it's a much smaller team, but what I'm trying to do with our studio is that any given week, we're all working on the same thing. And we don't need a bunch of meetings and managers and things like that. And

I really believe that most companies, most enterprises fail because of prioritization and leadership has a hard time prioritizing, has a hard time saying these are the one, two, three things we're working on. Guilty. And if they did, yeah, no, I mean...

For sure. So am I. I think we get excited about ideas. We have resources. We can make things happen. But I've become much better in part because I'm likely neurodivergent and crippled by a DHD to say I'm going to do three things right. I want to do five different podcasts.

But, you know, I'm just doing one. And it's not always fun, but I'm here every week. Sometimes. Kidding. I love it. But doing things that you love, being intentional. Yeah. Remember when you just wanted to be an observer slash producer? I did. I like making content. I don't like being in the limelight. That's bullshit, but we'll just go with that.

Let's just go with that. So where do you want to take this next? What can we do for the audience to help them? Well, I'd like to know, like, you know, we're not like productivity gurus, but I want to talk about like our specific approaches to... Elon seems pretty productive. Well... My favorite productive person, Brian, is... I don't think he is. That's interesting that you said. Let's actually, let's visit that for a little bit because Elon...

Both he, like he has like a very 1980s sort of approach with the, like, he's going to work like 920 hours a week, whatever. I have no idea what the number is. And obviously he's, he's, you know, some sort of Mensa genius and you combine the two. I find, you know, the, the idea of working 80 hours a week is, is,

It's farcical. Anyone who claims that they work 80 hours a week, I think is lying or has an extraordinarily expansive definition of work.

At least that's my view. I mean, because you have diminishing returns and to be truly productive, to just add time, it's been proven over and over again in studies that you just basically fatigue causes more errors and worse decisions, et cetera. That's why I never understood. You work 80 hours a week. I don't really. Because I can call you at nine o'clock and that's work.

And you'll pick it up and we'll talk about something work related. Okay, maybe, but I don't like that. No, I like talking to you, Troy. I don't know. I'm like very focused on this because I do think that, like I read this wonderful essay. I've never called you and you said to me, I can't talk right now. I'm not working right now. Well, that's my own challenge. But like I read this wonderful. That's why I said boundaries and priorities.

Yeah. I mean, ultimately, I guess it comes down to that. But I'd love to talk about like how you guys think about and how you approach your own sort of labor productivity. And also within your own like organizations or, you know, Troy, if you go back to like Hearst, how you ended up measuring productivity. Because it's easy in something. It's like sales is pretty easy. It's like you sell stuff or...

Yeah, in most cases, it's outputs, right? Not inputs. You don't want to measure inputs. You want to measure outputs. Did you? I don't know. I mean, maybe, but I mean, so for instance, like if you go into a, like newsrooms are a good example, right? Yeah.

I can't believe because a lot of times I feel like things that come out of the UK are a little delayed by four or five years. And something that goes like the mirror, it's like they've just instituted page view quotas. What year are we in? It's very strange, like a little delayed transatlantic phone call. But that was always the thing. It's like, how are you going to judge the productivity of...

you know, content people, whatever journalists, whatever you're doing. And, you know, page use was always, was always the one that stood out. I was like, okay, well that's the output. Right. And I think always journalists are,

or anyone who was making stuff was against that because they said, well, you know, it should focus on the inputs. And there's so many different things, which is we know particularly now that controlled those outputs. Like, I mean, the fact that a Facebook algorithm picked up a story had nothing to do with the inputs. Like what? I have very strong opinions about that. I think that, I mean, I'm sure it's the same in the media, but it's the same in tech, same for a lot of knowledge work.

that I don't think we should track people's performance against outputs because the input metrics are actually the ones that you decide as a leadership team strategically to say, okay, this is what we want to do. We want to hire good people that can write this amount of stuff. Okay? That's what we're tracking. Then what happens to that is something like the page view is

That is out of anybody working on the team's control even, right? Like you want to make sure that you hire the right people, but like put it at kind of responsibility. When you say the team, you mean the broader team? Yeah, yeah. I think leadership should...

be held accountable for how many page views something gets, right? But at the end of the day, or whatever that, or sales or whatever that, you know, that output metric is. But what really matters to people every day is like, here's what we expect you to do. We expect it to be of this quality. And that's fine. Like, I don't, I always find it weird when you kind of reward it

writers based on page views because they don't really have much control over like strategically where the company is going or whatever it did all these metrics get people to it's a really tough one alex i understand what you're saying and every sort of money person that i've ever worked with on a on a media deal wants to understand the productivity of the content investment

And in order to do that, you got to say like how much money we were putting in and how many heads, you know, and what is the outcome? And the outcome is either soft things like impact and influence, which is, you know, hard to measure. Or it's something quantifiable and, you know, unique subscribers page views.

And then those translate sort of elegantly into money. If you're looking at someone that then comes to you and says, we have 150 people in the newsroom and we need 200, like somehow you have to, you got to have a system or a kind of rubric to evaluate, you know, what you should be investing in.

It's a tough problem. I think what I'm saying is very specific, is that the leadership team can look at the metrics of sales or the core high-level metrics that are important to the business. I just feel that we've become very quick to assign those metrics to individuals.

Yeah. Well, it's also, people like to go to the unit economics approach. So it's not just the individual. It's like every piece of content is evaluated, like, did it succeed or did it fail? Did it hit this quota? And it's always, to me, that was always...

problematic as an approach? Like, did this convert someone? Well, that's like last click attribution. I mean, all media is like that, Brian. We talk about box office numbers. We talk about ratings. We talk about, there's always a kind of quantitative thing at the end of the line. And sure, and you can maybe pay bonuses to people where I think it becomes a little bit more perverse and easy to manipulate

or like create just like the wrong behaviors is when you tell a writer, you know, your pay is going to be based on how many page views these articles get. Because it gets them to focus and obsess over metrics that they don't really have any control over. And technically they would write the best article. But I think we're beyond that now. I think it would be a mixed measure and it wouldn't just be page views. It would be a qualitative assessment of impact and

It would be the number of subscribers generated and it would be page views. You would look at that. And the people, the stars inside of an organization that were generating more audience and more of the thing that matters to the company would be compensated for that. I really feel strongly that you don't want...

the people making the stuff to be overly burdened by the impact their stuff is going to have on the business. There's a few reasons why. One is when you tell someone like, you know, this is the number you need to move and that number is like, you know,

0.1% of the overall revenue, that becomes 100% of their focus. That is the one thing. It relates to their career and how much they're getting paid. Two, they are working against

constraints and factors that they have no control over like more subscribers that could be a UI issue that could be socio-economic issues this could be because the marketing right but in all businesses you apply pressure I know but I think I think it's like saying like all right

people putting the tire on the tire on the Ford trucks, you know, you're going to be, you're going to be responsible for how much, how, how, how these F-150s sell. And, and I think, I think that there's been to me, like I've,

I feel like there's been kind of a way, way, way, way, way. I don't think that someone working on the assembly line, putting tires on a car is the equivalent to the person that's making the entire package of content and putting it out to the world and measuring whether or not that was effective or not. They're completely different ideas. I don't think they're as different as you say they are. They're massively different. Well, I think you're accountable for the output, like for the total product.

Like, I want to come work for you. But how are you accountable for the total product? How are you accountable for Google's algorithm? How are you accountable for Facebook changing the way your articles show? Everybody lives in that ecosystem. For the content management team to have built the tools that you need. More beyond that, Alex. The content's out there. It's sent out in an email. It's not because of the CMS.

Are you kidding me right now? I mean, I think that at some point, like if you're going to be held accountable for the traffic that you have, that you generate for business as a content creator, you might as well just go on your own and do it for yourself. I mean, like why do you even need leadership? Like,

Guess what? We're just going to hire a bunch of people, the ones who make money for us. Sadly, Alex, there's a lot of other pieces to the job, right? The monetization of that content, the promotion of the company. There's all kinds of other sort of mechanical pieces to make a media company work. It's a race to the bottom. You can always incentivize people making pieces of a product for your company. How do you look at the productivity of someone on your gaming team, someone writing code?

We look at what's been done and how fun it is to play and how much we like it. At the end of the day, they're not going to be responsible if the game isn't successful. It's my responsibility. So you abstract it basically from the like... I think we're basically saying like...

There's different levels of productivity. When you're on a leadership level, you're going to take accountability and for a lot of stuff that's outside. How can we put people that are like, hey, you're on a base level salary at this company and you're also responsible for the sales that your stuff generates? Nobody said that. Well, I mean, you are, right? No, the salespeople are accountable for the sales. The people that make the product are responsible for the amount of audience that it generates.

Right. The people that write the code are responsible for some other type of, you know, technical productivity measure. But then they're responsible for the audience that is generated without having like full strategic control over the editorial strategy, over the platforms that you're publishing on. You know, I think... I mean, it sounds like a lot of... I mean...

I think when everybody's working together to make a thing like a movie over a long period of time, then it's different. You're focused on the craft and collaboration. Was it fun? Did that scene entertain me? Then at the end of it, there's a kind of measure. I think in terms of discrete products being made every day, on some level, you're going to be looking at some measure or you're going to end up making shitty cars like they did in

Russia. I think you turn out making shitty whatever you are if you measured people based on the audience that they generate. I want to spin this forward just a little bit. This has been fascinating. No, I mean it.

We got a little, it got a little repetitive. Let's talk about how AI is going to impact this and particularly our relationship. To me, like what I wonder about is our relationship with productivity, right? Because like productivity has always been held out because we're basically competing against each other, right? If you're not productive and someone else is going to be more productive and then they're going to get some rewards or they're going to get your cubicle and that's how it works.

But then we're left with the idea that, and we see this with developers, it happened immediately, they can't compete. Like, you know, they can't compete with the bots and AI. Zuckerberg, in his Joe Rogan interview, was talking about how most of the code

That meta will be written by AI fairly shortly. And this is obviously going to come to a lot of different professions. And I'm interested in how it changes our

our relationship with productivity being about outputs when you were never, ever going to be able to produce like at the level of like of the bots at the end of the day. Yeah. I mean, correct. Like if you think that true success comes from prioritization, the ability to set, you know, to, to pick the right bets, et cetera, the, the idea that we're, you know, we're just going to need less, less,

engineers because of AI, I think I struggle with sometimes, or engineers or anyone else, because there are downstream effects for each of these things. So I'm just going to give these two examples. I'm going to talk about engineers and writers because I was thinking about this for this podcast. Engineers will just be able to do more, but also there will be more of a demand for software. I think there's always more of a demand for software. Like

you know, A, most software is pretty bad. B, a lot of things that require software still don't have software. And so I think there's just going to be as much demand for this stuff. The job is going to change and there's probably going to be more lines of code generated. And a lot of these things are not going to run unattended. I think it's just that, you know, an engineer will be able to write, you know, five, six, seven, 10 times the amount of code. There are different parts of engineering like, you know,

kind of managing the source code and all the different things coming in, and that stuff is going to be helped by AI. So I kind of struggle with the term replacement here. I think there's some structures that are maybe...

Like I think, you know, Indian code shops are going to be probably in trouble. You know, like these places where they have five, six, 10,000 low to mid-level engineers that they rent out to companies. That type of stuff might get disrupted for sure. And then on the writing side, I think when you have such an abundance of content, then the AI generated content, I think there's not going to be any value in it. It's going to be worth no money, right?

And I don't know how much these companies are just going to get away with it. Like, I think, you know, why do you want to write all this content that's AI generated and nobody reads? I don't know. I haven't seen like a clear path to like just jobs being, you know, blanket replaced by AI yet. Yeah, I didn't mean jobs being replaced. I mean, I just saw one study that said like AI makes software developers 26% more quote unquote productive. And that's,

with output, output of code, right? I mean, I think there's places where, you know, the connection between the human and, you know, the AI will become seamless and it'll just be part of what you do. Like we use computers today will be a kind of extension of your skill as a decision maker, as a taste person, as someone that understands what people need.

And I think there's places where it'll just chase the humans out of the building. Like today, there was an article in Bloomberg where, you know, they used to have human beings. You know, do you ever drink the lemonade at Chick-fil-A? It's pretty good, actually. They have the Slurpee one. They just opened a new Chick-fil-A in my neighborhood. But now they got these gigantic machines that are just incredibly good at squeezing lemons and then, you know, packaging it and all that kind of stuff. So there's no need for humans to do it.

And so, yeah, there's going to be all kinds of places where our behavior... But this has been going on forever. You know, we evolve. Certain roles are no longer valuable. And then I do think, though, there is a kind of... There's probably a point where things get a little surreal. And that's where we need to probably think about things like basic annual income, where...

our ability to manifest intelligence with software through hardware, like meaning robots are smart and doing things for you and cars are driving you and AI is doing all the work that you would have done where there's going to be a lot of surplus labor. Right. But I guess what I'm trying to get at is productivity in that scenario

I mean, productivity has been basically synonymous with how useful a person is in the economy, correct? Do you feel your productivity has gone up with AI? Oh, yeah. Me? Yes. I know Troy's has. I know mine has. Yeah, I think it has. I don't know whether it's like 10% or 15%, but it's gone up.

I mean, just researching this productivity episode. Yeah, you're writing little essays with Gemini on influencers and stuff like that? No, I'm going back and forth with lots of these bots and trying to get... I find it useful. Yeah, sure. I mean, I think I'm probably saving at least three hours a week just by not going and

scanning Google to try to find an answer to something. I think that the productivity is going to be amplified. I feel like, for example, call centers are interesting because a lot of these call centers are...

People are saying call center jobs are going to go away. I think there's definitely going to be a lot of changes in the call center. But right now, most call centers are understaffed. You call... I call the local electric company. I wait for 15 minutes. And instead, maybe with the same amount of people, they can answer immediately and then have the humans handle the more complex tasks that are coming in. I think...

I think that these roles are going to be fundamentally changed and amplified with AI. I'm relatively optimistic about that stuff. I think that some of this stuff is going to be okay and just better for all of us.

We're always going to be promised that. I mean, Troy, I think you shared the thing from OpenAI. Like they're getting agentic with chat GPT can now handle reminders and to-dos. And there's always going to be this hype that,

Whatever new technology comes down, this is going to be, this is the productivity. This is the secret to finally being productive. And the reality is it makes you more productive in one area and then you fill it in with other areas. It's like traffic. Robert Moses was- I mean, do you buy that stuff? Robert Moses was obsessed with getting rid of traffic. And so he kept building highways and he kept getting more traffic.

Well, I'll share some other things that I'm working on around productivity that I think are important.

So there is definitely more information to read. My hero in that regard would be someone way smarter than me with an ability to digest tons of information, a person like Tyler Cohen. Like his output, he's an economist and has had a blog since, I don't know, the 90s and seems to process an immense amount of information and is incredibly knowledgeable. I don't know how he does it. I can't do it like him. I wish I could do it like him.

One thing that I would like to do, I don't read, I don't read enough books. I'm real. I find that it's really hard for me to get from, I want to read a lot of books, but then it comes in waves and to get deep into a book. I just find that I'm, there's so much other that tempts me, the other stuff that tempts me. It's really hard. But anyway, one thing that I'm, I'm, I'm interested in is learning to skim more effectively and

How do you read more with less time? That I'm interested in. How do you just sort of like take a newsletter? Like there's so much stuff and people write so inefficiently. I have a bunch of things. AI summarize, man. Yeah, but the problem, AI summarize isn't always that good. It misses a lot of things. And I think you lose a lot of nuance when you do the AI summarize, dude. But I do it a lot. But I think learning to skim is really important. I think that people...

This, this, this is going to sound bad, but don't, don't take it the wrong way. People are tremendously inefficient in how they communicate verbally, because by the time you open your mouth, Alex or Brian, I know what you're going to say most of the time. And so I think that we being efficient as a communicator is really important for me.

Even though I'm, you know, we restate things, we over contextualize things, we, we package up information when someone gets what you want to say, or what you're trying to say very quickly, right? And, and so I think those are interesting things. How do you communicate more effectively? And how do you consume more efficiently?

Do you listen to podcasts on like 1.5? Sometimes, yes. Yeah, yeah. And a lot of times I listen. Yeah, I got it. Yeah, I do. I do. And sometimes I listen to podcasts for different reasons. Speaking of which, I think it's important to match the things that you're doing, like match modes to activities, like walking in silence. That's a good match.

very very productive why because there's something about taking steps and moving your body that allows your mind to go to new places it's always productive i think cars and podcasts insanely good mix peanut butter and chocolate cars and podcasts right i i i i think that forcing yourself to run at the things you hate like doing your taxes is just like

You just have to push yourself to get in front of it. Then it's not that bad, but it's the beginning that's really, really, really hard to do. And I have tried many, many times to do two things at once, and I haven't figured it out. I wish I could figure that out. Like, I can't play backgammon and watch a drama and keep up with what's going on on the television. Maybe that's a way for your brain to tell you you shouldn't be doing that.

Yeah, I mean, I can play backgammon and watch a football game because there's so many ads. No matter how much tools improve our ability for an output, I think what you're talking about, Troy, is setting the right boundaries for yourself, developing focus,

and making sure that you prioritize the right things, right? And you can put 80 hours of effort into mostly the wrong stuff, and it's way worse than 20 hours of effort on the right things. And I think that part of the problem with prioritizing and setting boundaries is that if our brains are constantly stimulated, it becomes harder to do those things. Yeah, I think that that's the master level stuff.

I think it partly, you know, it is, you know, saying no and focus and structuring time spent against the right things. But to me, that last thing is really important. Like I, for example, I,

I worked on a deal for eight months and I feel like I wasted so much time doing things that were just like, that I thought were important part of getting the deal done, but we're not. And now I'm kind of looking at a new deal as an example. And a deal is a long process. You got to get, you got to evaluate a company, right?

You've got to sort of figure out what your thesis is. You've got to put all the money, the models together that says this is how the math works. You then have to line up all the people that are going to help you do that, help you pay for it, help you do all the legal work, all that kind of stuff. And now the way I'm thinking about this new one is sort of like what actually is going to be, what are the most important things that I can do early on to assure that this is worth my time?

Like the stuff that I would have avoided, you know, because I just wanted the deal to keep going. I want to ask those hard questions at the beginning so that you can kind of like figure out whether or not the, whether or not it's actually real.

It's sort of like when you become a, you get to a like level of mastery or some of something, you can see what's going to happen down the line. And so you bring a bunch of that stuff forward to say, is this the right thing to be spending time on? You know what I mean? Like, you know, you know where it's going to be a waste of time because you've wasted time doing it before.

Yeah. I mean, I think that's definitely a big part of that. But always, I mean, I think you should always think that you're probably doing like 30% more than you should be focusing on. You know, I feel the myth of the multitasker, which technology like is really good at trying to enable. And so I like the idea of just like,

setting up these rules where you say you know when i'm walking i don't listen to a podcast podcasts are great for and and also like you know i do think that turning off your notification is the dumbest thing like literally i just have reminders and text messages on my phone oh i even turned off text messages

I have a rule in my email now that any email that has the word unsubscribe in it goes into a folder. And I check that later. It's just not as important, whatever it is, even if it's a newsletter. And I check my email twice a day. And I always get to inbox zero.

The twice a day thing is something I aspire to get to. You get to inbox zero. Yeah, it's not rocket science. Here's the thing. I got, I think, 230,000 messages in my folder. I've always had that.

You need to do an amnesty because it's not good for your brain. Look, part of that is that I think having ADHD means that time is an issue for me. There's either now or not now. So what I do when I go through my email, and I also like finishing tasks. That's how I get my dopamine hit. Do you actually have it, though? So many people say they have ADHD. I'm just like, bullshit.

It's fine to me. Yeah. No, I have it pretty strongly. I got both types. It's probably a competitive advantage because the rest of us just have amateur ADHD. Yeah. I mean, I think it's an advantage in certain things. But I'm pretty typical ADHD. But on the email front, the reason I like going to email inbox zero is that

Most email clients have a snooze thing. So either there's three things, three decisions you need to do when you get in front of an email. You either handle it now and send them an answer. You either ignore it and archive it. You don't need to get to it again. Or you snooze it because you know you're going to handle it later. There's no reason for that email to remain in your inbox. Is there a snooze function? Yes. Okay.

Well, I mean, and this allows you to just... So how do I get through the 236,000? Do I just select all and delete? Just like archive. Yeah, just like select all and archive them. You're in too deep. One of the things, and then we can wrap it up. I like dividing the day into like, I try not to have any...

business-oriented meetings in the morning. The mornings are only about content stuff. That's a good rule. Because I find context switching makes me incredibly unproductive because you have to do so many different things, at least in what I'm doing, and they're wildly... They require different types of thinking, and I find reorienting to having a sales conversation after...

you know, in the midst of writing. It's just, it's the worst. So I like the idea of having like email in batches, having writing in batches, having sales and business type stuff at certain times. This is in my business time, by the way. Yeah.

I think blocking out your day like that is really good, actually, because it creates like a structure and it removes another decision for you to make. Like, do I take this call or not? It's just like, no, I committed that I wouldn't. Right. And we do get decision fatigue. I think we're making decisions.

hundreds of decisions every day. Should I answer this email? Should I take this call? Should I whatever? And the more rigid we are about our boundaries and they're easier there to remember, the less overwhelmed we'll get because it's all taxing at the end of the day. And these things are not rocket science, but technology is...

is really geared towards any tool. It doesn't matter if it's a SaaS tool or TikTok. Any tool is kind of built in generating engagement. Every one of these tools measures how much time you spend on it. So their metrics are completely perverse and mean that they're actually not making you more productive. So the better you are with boundaries, the better you get. Yeah, and I also think, Brian, this cult of productivity thing that you talk about is...

He's kind of a sickness. And I think most people are kind of full of shit around this stuff where they lament not having any time or being too busy. Oh, the busyness disease. Very busy. Yeah. But they're not that busy, actually. And they feel like they have to be busy because that's a sign of their value in the world. And that's... Yeah, it's part of our existential dread. Yeah.

We're going to do religion in the next episode. Do you have a product, productivity edition? Notion? Also, the Notion people. Do you know the Notion people? There's a certain type of person who's really into Notion.

They're definitely deep into the production. Notion is a little too complicated for most people. It's hard. I think it's hard to integrate into a relationship. But there's a personality type that's in Notion. Oh, for sure. It's a good product. There's a nice Peter Drucker quote again that sums this up from 1974, which is,

Productivity, when linked to purpose, and this is the vital link, right, can become the engine of human fulfillment. Without purpose, it's mere toil. And I think that's accurate. But that'll take us to our beloved Good Product segment. Good Product.

My good product this week, I mean, I love, I got to say, I'm really into, and I used to think they were despicable, Medjool dates I really like right now. We've got these big fresh ones, and I think they're unbelievable. They're great in a smoothie. They're a natural sweetener, but they're good on their own. But that's not what I think people should do on the productivity episode. I think that maybe the most important thing you can do is prioritize your

fresh cut flowers. And, and I do think that that's a good service. I don't know that there is one. I mean, we have a local flower seller that has beautiful stuff, but having fresh cut flowers in your home, on your desk, near your work area, in the place where you hang out is, is, is an embrace of the nice things in the world and life.

And I think you should always do it if you can, if you can afford it, if it's accessible. You can cut them in the garden, you know, in the summertime. You know, that would be my good product. I don't know if you guys do that, but what could be more simply beautiful? Yeah, the bodegas usually have a good selection in New York. Yeah, I mean, go home with flowers tonight.

everybody and and just find a nice thing take it home just don't it's not a necessarily an offering just say i bought some flowers for the house or for my workspace i like making bouquets from stuff i pick around the property here so yeah that's nice that's a nice thing no that's a nice it's a yeah it is a nice thing it's also i mean having nature in the house is always you know our brains react very specifically to nature and

And so you were talking about walking before and specifically walking through nature can really unlock your mind. As far as like a productivity tool, I also have a good product. I tend to change and try tools all the times. One of my commitments last year was like to use less tools. And I just started using the app stuff that's on my phone more readily. So I use reminders for everything. Also, I set myself... Does that mean your phone, the alarm goes off all the time? Yeah.

Well, they pop up and they do. The reason my phone's alarm goes off all the time is that most of the day I set recurring 20-minute alarms. So every 20 minutes, my phone reminds me that I've been doing whatever I've been doing for 20 minutes and asks me if I want to keep doing it or do something else.

Only 20 minutes? That's hardly deep work, Alex. You can do a lot in 20 minutes. Were you going to bring this? So this is like a big revelation. Were you going to bring this up earlier in the episode? You're like Ben Franklin. It doesn't mean that you have to stop doing what you're doing. You just get a reminder that you've just spent 20 minutes. Does your life partner or anybody in your life ever say, can you just stop with the alarms? Because one of my kids has an alarm constantly, and it's so aggravating. It buzzes on my watch, actually. So nobody else notices it. Interesting.

I mean, it's like a Pomodoro type system. Oh, God, the Pomodoro method. We didn't get into that. Well, the main thing for me is that I have three chunks within an hour. And sometimes I notice that I've sat down to do something and...

20 minutes went by and I haven't actually truly started it because I went down a search and fucking, and, and just being, you remind me of a dog that circles a lot before they lay down. Yeah, that's exactly what I do. I circle a lot around my laptop, but two weeks you circle and then you pop the logo out in an hour. Yeah. Yeah. I think the key for your productivity is to like figure out how to turn that circling into one week. Well, I mean, I think, you know, uh,

You just need to keep pestering me at all times of day, night, weekends. So prioritization, boundaries. Prioritization, boundaries, focus. Focus, self-forgiveness. Because you're never going to be productive at the end of the day as you thought you were going to be at the beginning of the day. Because most people suck at prioritization. You should only try to get three things done. You're never going to get the eight things done. Turn off your notifications. Don't try to multitask. Only use one screen.

Maybe put a guitar in your office so now and then you can have, you know, just...

distractions that are... You know, in closing, I was just like, before my last two years at Airbnb, I took on a lot more of the product stuff and we tried to work on less things and there was a worry that the velocity would go down because rather than working on 100 different things, we work on 10 things at a time. And it did feel, especially in the beginning, like things were moving slower, but once it started picking up, once the co-organization got more

aligned to that things do end up moving faster like i think that there's there's you could walk into most companies today whether they're media tech or and we're talking you know knowledge worker white collar worker and they're they're trying too many things out at once because technology allows you to do that and the hardest thing and i think that you know thing that steve jobs was really good at was just like saying like these are the four things we're doing and most leaders aren't

good enough at that. We just saw it this week with Sonos where I think Sonos tried to do too many things and they just had to focus on fixing the software or doing something and they tried to do too many things at once and it broke the company. I think that's right. And then what happens, Alex, is that meets the fear of executive management that's driving against

some type of business objective and really feels like they have to see evidence of productivity to feel like they're going to achieve a goal. Exactly. Because productivity is easy to track. Look how productive we are. And you know what's not going to get you fired is trying 100 things and picking the three things that work. But what might get you fired is picking the five things that you should work on and maybe making the wrong call. And I think that it's kind of the modern structures of tools and stuff like that has allowed

leadership to step away from the responsibility of making decisions, making calls and prioritizing because prioritizing is hard.

So most of the time, I think most companies that fail is because there's like no leadership courage in making the calls as to what are the top three things that the company should work on. Yeah. And I would just finally echo your point on Sonos that they've completely failed with that app. I just had my house rewired for Wi-Fi.

And I had to reconnect all my Sonos devices and I wanted to kill myself. It's a disaster. It's not worth it. It's quite terrible. Software is hard, but maybe not that hard. That's it for this episode of People vs. Algorithms, where each week we uncover patterns shaping media, culture, and technology. Big thanks, as always, to our producer, Vanya Arsinov.

She always makes us a little clearer and more understandable, and we appreciate her very, very much. If you're enjoying these conversations, we'd love for you to leave us a review. It helps us get the word out and keeps our community growing. Remember, you can find People vs. Algorithms on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and now on YouTube. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you again next week. All right, cool. Thank you. This is a cool episode. Appreciate it, guys. Yeah, see you later.

Thank you.