If you want to go fast and call that being productive, go fast and be productive. But don't gate-keep and turn personal preferences into "should" and "ought". There's a lot of world out there and not everyone wants to organize their lives around work.
He literally discusses all your points in the first paragraph:
> The top reasons I see people say that productivity doesn't matter (or is actually bad) fall into one of three buckets:
1. Working on the right thing is more important than working quickly
2. Speed at X doesn't matter because you don't spend much time doing X
3. Thinking about productivity is bad and you should "live life"
Here's his argument for your last point:
> The last major argument I see against working on velocity assigns negative moral weight to the idea of thinking about productivity and working on velocity at all. This kind of comment often assigns positive moral weight to various kinds of leisure, such as spending time with friends and family. I find this argument to be backwards. If someone thinks it's important to spend time with friends and family, an easy way to do that is to be more productive at work and spend less time working.
Personally, I deliberately avoid working long hours and I suspect I don't work more than the median person at my company, which is a company where I think work-life balance is pretty good overall. A lot of my productivity gains have gone to leisure and not work. Furthermore, deliberately working on velocity has allowed me to get promoted relatively quickly4, which means that I make more money than I would've made if I didn't get promoted, which gives me more freedom to spend time on things that I value.
While Dan Luu's post resonates with me to an extent, I think you are missing the GP's point.
In practice, if you improve your productivity at work, it's going to be mostly for your employer's benefit (other than bragging rights and some personal satisfaction).
Gaining time back is not always possible, and that is the core desire for most people (as your OP quote suggests you could do): incentive to improve significantly is not there in a job (even Luu acks this in his blog).
But GP is making a point that it should be perfectly acceptable to not want to (significantly) improve at work while meeting the bar for staying employed.
Not that GP and OP are not really in opposition: Luu is arguing for why it's ok to work on your speed/performance with deliberate practice, GP is arguing that it is ok not to. And I agree with both.
> In practice, if you improve your productivity at work, it's going to be mostly for your employer's benefit (other than bragging rights and some personal satisfaction).
This is true if you're bagging groceries, but certainly not true for most software developers. To quote the post again:
"I'm sympathetic to the argument and agree that upper management and shareholders capture most of the value from work. But as much as I sympathize with the idea of deliberately being unproductive to "stick it to the man", I value spending my time on things that I want enough that I'd rather get my work done quickly so I can do things I enjoy more than work. Additionally, having been productive in the past has given me good options for jobs, so I have work that I enjoy a lot more than my acquaintances in tech who have embraced the "antiwork" movement."
> But GP is making a point that it should be perfectly acceptable to not want to (significantly) improve at work while meeting the bar for staying employed.
I don't see any point in Dan's post against this idea... it's the GP who is elevating this into a moral choice, i.e. from his/her response to mine:
> Yeah but he doesn't recognize that his entire argument is personal choice elevated to moral imperative.
Yeah but he doesn't recognize that his entire argument is personal choice elevated to moral imperative.
> an easy way to do that is to be more productive at work and spend less time working
Why is need to be more productive at work framed as a prerequisite to spending less time working? Just spend less time working. His moral stance, which he never reflects on, is that working is good, and relaxing is predicating on completing the work first. None of that is necessarily true, but it does fit well with the Protestant Work Ethic, which is, of course, a moral framework for putting work before leisure.
While I agree with your point that it should be perfectly acceptable to not invest oneself fully in getting the best performance in a job as long as you can do the job you are hired for, I think you are mistaking OP's statement for an absolute one: these are from an opinion piece on a personal blog, and the arguments they bring up resonate with them.
Nowhere did I see any judgement for those who don't agree with them: they merely proclaim what you can easily achieve with deliberate observation and practice and how it matters to them.
You will get fired if you don't get enough done at work. Higher productivity means you can accomplish enough tasks to not get fired in less amount of time.
But that's just taking the moral argument another level deeper. Why should a person's leisure be subject to the whims of employment?
> you can accomplish enough tasks to not get fired in less amount of time.
And how many employers will look at the work you got done in less time and tell you to go home for the rest of the week because you've finished everything assigned?
> But that's just taking the moral argument another level deeper. Why should a person's leisure be subject to the whims of employment?
This isn't a philosophical discussion, fact is that either you produce enough value at work or you get fired.
> And how many employers will look at the work you got done in less time and tell you to go home for the rest of the week because you've finished everything assigned?
You don't have to tell them you are done, you can just relax and browse HN or whatever. Being very productive at work gives you a lot more freedom at work, even if that freedom isn't 100% fairly allocated to you it still improves your situation.
> Why should a person's leisure be subject to the whims of employment?
Even the leisure time of fish and rabbits are subject to eating leaves and kelp. Time is useful. Your work may give 100x more leisure time to thousands of people. And even if it doesn’t, it’s still necessary - who will maintain the back ends for the porn sites? The mind reels to think of what would happen if Netflix’s sysadmins became simple bumbling 1xers. So many kdramas unwatched! One slip up in 2010 and million basic whitegirls not knowing be soft touch of The Office!
every moral imperative is also a personal choice. And honestly, if being a better coder saves 100k people a few hours in wasted time once, that’s ten person years - coming close to moral imperative! If your productivity tool’s new feature enables some engineering collaboration that builds a new bridge in Kenya, that saves a thousand person years?
I mean, you could choose a different employer with lower expectations or reduced obligations if that's an option where you live. But no employer is required to keep you employed if you don't get your work done. It may be harder to fire people in some places and in some industries, but it's rarely impossible. If you want to be able to have leisure and enjoyment, you probably need money, which means being employed, and to remain employed you need to meet your obligations.
So be unproductive and risk getting fired but go home at a reasonable time. Be unproductive and work long hours to meet the obligations and not get your leisure and enjoyment. Or be efficient and go home at a reasonable hour and have your leisure and enjoyment. I choose the third, because it's sensible. Unlike my 90-hour workweek colleagues who stress about everything.
No, and you raise a good point. Someone with a trust fund or other form of inherited wealth, or just with sufficient passive income, doesn't need to be productive. That person can claim as much leisure time as they want, when they want. So the argument the author of the post makes, that productivity is a necessary precondition for leisure, is really not true at all. In our society we may find that money and income are preconditions, but there's nothing inherent about the need for productivity to have those.
