Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

by Cal Newport

Furthermore, as we just established, the dynamics of cognitive labor are different from those of physical labor.

Sorry but, the fundamentals are still the same. When Marx explains about the exploitation he uses the factory as an example but the main ideas applies for the knowledge worker if he sells his work force in exchange for a salary (proletariat) to the bourgeois that owns the capital and the means of production.

In knowledge work, by contrast, pushing employees into larger workloads can decrease both the quantity and quality of what they produce.

The exploitation is not related exclusively with workload. It is related with the surplus value extracted from the worker.

If our workloads were entirely determined by all-powerful managers looking to maximize profits, we might expect, as paradoxical as this sounds at first, to have less on our plates.

The capitalist don't care about the overall quality of what has been produced. If it is possible to extract some profit from this work it is fine for him. He can compensate the low quality paying less for the worker and keep his profit margin unchanged. You can argue that "competition" would regulate thin in the long run but this is not what the reality shows. In real world we will see the cartelization and monopoly profiting in an underperformant operation.

It is the acceptance of this fundamentally uncontrolled nature of knowledge work that provides a solution to our mystery: self-regulation.

Are you nuts? The employer ask you to work and you can choose if you do it or starve? What kind of self-regulation is that?

How do knowledge workers decide when to say no to the constant bombardment of incoming requests? In the modern office context, they tend to rely on stress as a default heuristic for moderation. If you turn down a Zoom meeting invitation, there’s a social-capital cost, as you’re causing some mild harm to a colleague and potentially signaling yourself to be uncooperative or a loafer. But, if you feel sufficiently stressed about your workload, this cost might become acceptable: you feel confident that you’re close to becoming unsustainably busy, and this provides psychological cover to skip the Zoom. You need to feel sufficient personal distress to justify the distress saying no might generate in the other party.

This kind of ideas is worse than the liberal ideology.