Towards Efficacy

Cal Newport recently wrote an article responding to his readers’ distaste for “productivity language”. He starts defending productivity so quickly that he hardly addresses the actual concerns, but I can make an educated guess.

Early into one semester at MIT, a friend of mine commented that she felt guilty for not working, but she didn’t have any schoolwork to do, so she couldn’t get rid of the feeling. If I had to guess at Newport’s reader’s concern, it was not with the actual productivity advice (he said they embraced that), but with the subtext that it is better to be more productive, and we can therefore use “productivity” as a metric for moralistic judgments about others as well as ourselves.

Newport rightly notes that many modern “productivity” books don’t deal with productivity in the strict sense of maximizing output but rather with higher level skills that are common across knowledge work such as organization, stress reduction, motivation. Everyone understands that a book about how to code more efficiently isn’t telling you that you should be coding all the time, but a natural side-effect of books about how to stop procrastinating is that they imply that you should be working when you’d rather not. Another way to think about this is that if you’re bad at coding (or teaching, carpentry, professional basketball) people will tell you to try a different job. If you lack motivation or organization, people start making character judgments.

One of my favorite thought experiments lately is whether I would take a pill that allowed me to focus on work for 8 hours a day. On the one hand, I don’t like thinking about my work. Obviously it’s more cognitively demanding than just letting my mind wander, but it’s also less interesting. The less I think about work the better. The less “into” work I get, the better I am able to preserve my goals and hobbies outside of work. On the other hand, when I actually do get into work, it makes the time go faster, and I feel like I learn more and get more out of it.

I don’t think it’s an accident that a pill is the first thing that came to mind when I came up with this. At the risk of psychoanalyzing myself, a pill implies that I’m trying to fix something that’s broken. In this case, that my lack of motivation is my own problem that is my resposibility to fix rather than a signal about the work that I’m meant to be doing. I think books are sort of less efficient versions of pills.

Now that I’m writing I’ve gotten this far, my proposed solution to use “efficacy” instead of “productivity” in most cases. Even if I were a language prescriptivist, I doubt I’d have any power to effect this change. And even if I did somehow get everyone to switch, it runs the risk of becoming a euphemism treadmill where people just start thinking of efficacy in the same way that they now think of productivity.

So anyway, with no consequence, the reason I like efficacy more than productivity is that productivity is about maximizing output of goods or services, usually for an employer. Efficacy is only about having the ability to achieve a desired outcome. It leaves more room for that desired outcome to be whatever they choose whether that is working, relaxing, pursuing a hobby, or going to watch their son’s baseball game without taking work calls.

Then the only hard part is figuring out what your desired outcomes are.

Full disclosure this was meant to be a shorter post, but then I realized I didn’t exactly know what I thought about this, so it took a little longer to figure out. That’s a roundabout way of saying I don’t know if I’d totally endorse this opinion. Anyway, music for this week is Moth by Chairlift. Basically the whole album showed up in my Top Songs of 2021.