It’s Time to Embrace Slow Productivity An Article by Cal Newport www.newyorker.com The central goal of Slow Productivity is to keep an individual worker’s volume at a sustainable level. A natural fear is that by reducing the amount of work each employee tackles at any given time, it might reduce the total amount of work an organization is able to complete, making it less competitive. This fear is unfounded. As argued, when an individual’s work volume increases, so does the accompanying overhead and stress, reducing both the time remaining to actually execute the tasks and the quality of the results. If you instead enable the individual to work more sequentially, focussing on a small number of things at a time, waiting until she is done before bringing on new obligations, the rate at which she completes tasks might actually increase. Efficiency is the Enemy productivity
Chopped and disfigured The details of a building cannot be made alive when they are made from modular parts If the builder wants to build the room from modular four-foot panels, he must change the size of the rooms, and change their shape, to fit his panels. In such a building system, it is impossible for a person to create a plan which reflects the larger subtleties of site or plan. Each plan will always be chopped and disfigured to make it fit the building details. To make the building live, its patterns must be generated on the site, so that each one takes its own shape according to its context. Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building What's suitable for each unique condition modularity