Study Hacks on Convenience as Anti-Productivity
Distraction is a Symptom of a Deeper Problem: The Convenience Principle and the Destruction of American Productivity is a good article on distractions versus getting things done. With extra emphasis on how many of our distractions are the result of a desire for convenience rather than something more substantial.
Due to its ubiquity, it’s easy to see the convenience principle as self-evident. I argue that it’s actually contrived and harmful.
To understand this perspective, let’s contrast it to an alternative. The goal of any knowledge work organization (or student, which is really just a one-person knowledge work firm) is to produce information that is rare and valuable. With this in mind, consider the net value principle of selecting work habits. This principle says that the adoption of a work habit should be based solely on its net effect on the value produced by the organization.
This principle also sounds obvious, but when you dive deeper into its implications you’ll find that it often conflicts with the conclusions of the convenience principle. The reason for this conflict is that convenience often has nothing to do with value.
Why do office workers generally have internet connectivity at work? Is it for the actual work (which is enhanced sufficiently to compensate for Facebook wastage [1]), or to compete with other employers on perks? I would think it’s the former, but that’s just my internal human modeler—are there any studies?
[1] “What the hell did people do at work all day before the Internet?”
Is there any actual evidence that using facebook (or other ‘distractions’) decreases productivity significantly?
Perhaps we’re getting the direction of causation wrong and employees who are least able to generate work in a given time spend their idle time on facebook. (Subjectively I’ve found that when I block facebook etc but aren’t productive I end up staring into space or finding other methods of distraction, but when I’m feeling especially inspired all the wonders of the internet cannot distract me.)
What evidence would distinguish these two possibilities?
Select arbitrary productivity metric. Select people in a controlled environment (like cubicles). Randomly assign their IP addresses to a correctly configured DNS server or a DNS server with a faulty entry for ‘facebook.com’. See if there is a difference.
I was orders of magnitude more productive at work in the days before web access on my desktop than I am now, but there are other contributing factors.
Just in case you wanted a serious answer to your question… in the engineering profession we spent a whole lot of time looking for information. Including:
Finding books/manuals with the right formulas, then looking up the formulas in the book
Finding data, eg. “latent heat of evaporation of methanol”
Finding installation/operation/maintenance manuals. We had a massive library full of manuals.
In many cases, the right resource was not on hand, and you’d have to find the person who had it or knew where to find it. Many times this had to be done via correspondence (fax by then, thank god, not postal mail)
Worst of all, many times you just had to generate the data yourself, by experimentation. This included things like actually measuring the latent heat of evaporation, for example, or trial-and-error wrt eg. disassembly or maintenance procedures. Often “stuff” was designed far more conservatively, to compensate for lack of data.
The internet has been a stupendous boon to engineering productivity, and largely generated the free time that some people spend now on Facebook etc.
If you don’t get your work done, you lose your job, so whether you have internet access or not doesn’t much matter. You will regulate your own distraction or you will perish.
That being said, there can sometimes be lots of downtime in office work. I imagine that the internet is there because it LOOKS a lot like doing actual work. It’s much easier for the employee to pretend he’s working, and it’s much easier for the boss to pretend she hasn’t noticed her employees are being unproductive. A boss that sees her employee spends four hours a day chatting at the water cooler has to “address the problem” to save face. If her employees stay in their cubes she can lie more convincingly to her superiors that everyone in her department is quite busy. It is simply covert idleness.
Just channeling my inner Hanson. (for what it’s worth, I do all my LessWrong reading/posting from work)
It’s possible (indeed, standard) to have internet connectivity at offices but with time-wasting sites blocked.
They tried that at my work—blocked all blogs. We have a pile of developers. Guess how developers share ideas and tips?
I can’t imagine a class of office workers that I wouldn’t want to have Internet access. Having access to Wikipedia straightforwardly increases your knowledge about everything.
Wikipedia is not a sufficient justification for internet access because it is fairly easy to put a copy on the company LAN or even on each desktop.
I had no idea it was fairly easy to copy. Though checking Wikipedia, it looks like there’s no easy way to get the images.
That said, there are lots of other things that I’d generally consider sufficient justification, but some of them (like e-mail and chat) can just be installed on the LAN, and others (like Stack Overflow and Github) are a bit computing-specific (and why computing professionals need Internet access is more of a no-brainer).
More importantly, if you don’t have Internet access, you won’t discover that something like Wikipedia might be helpful for your job.
Maybe I just don’t have experience working in non-creative office jobs, and there really are people who never have questions that can be best answered by the Internet.
Why the flaming Hell would employees want to adopt work habits based solely on their value to a fictional entity?
If you actually desire knowledge more than ‘distraction’, then you should ask yourself how your actions advance this goal. But let’s not lose track of the fact that the partying students in the article may be doing exactly what they want to do.
Simple, good observation.
I wondered exactly what “The Convenience Principle” is. The article doesn’t define it, but the examples seem to say: when some process/tool sometimes helps, especially in making something feasible that wasn’t before, people will think of only the use and not the harms. Surface level, fast thinking. Liking. Probably this applies more in defense of things people are used to than to entirely novel things.
I think the essential problem with convenience is this: -- If you make X more convenient, you expect to have the same amount of X for smaller costs. What often happens is that when X becomes cheaper, people will use much more of X. At the end of day, your costs of one X have decreased, but your costs of total X may have increased.
For example it is more convenient to send an e-mail, than to write a postcard or a paper letter. Problem is, people will start to send many trivial e-mails with jokes etc. After a few decades many people spend more time maintaining their mailboxes than they previously spent writing and sending paper letters. Sure, we also get a lot of useful information this way, so perhaps it is a net benefit, but you have to be careful about things you did not have to be careful before.
One part of this problem may be shifting the burden of communication. If someone writes a paper letter, the writer pays the costs of communication (literally, and also in time and work), so the writer will think whether it’s worth doing. In e-mail the costs are shared; and if someone sends an e-mail to a group of people, then the total (time) costs of reading that e-mail are larger than costs of writing it.
Another part is that some things are easier to automate than others. Generating noise is easier than filtering noise. Sending e-mails is easy, writing spam filters is difficult, but I would need something even better than a spam filter… something that would separate important e-mails from nonimportant, and show me only what I need and when I need it.
Gmail has a ‘priority inbox’ that tries to do that. I’ve been using it several months now, and I rather like it.
Good points, but they seem specific to communication. X cheaper → more X used doesn’t tell me much (could be good; could be bad). When X=communication, sure.