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
What's suitable for each unique condition What of machines and prefabrication? How do they compare? Well, the machine has its limits. We, using handcrafted methods, do things that machines cannot do. Of course, it's not fast like a machine. And in complicated areas like here, things wouldn't go the same using a machine as it would by hand. We use numerous variations of all these connecting and splicing joints. Using a machine, [the wood joints] can all be made uniform, but really, we need to consider whether that's a good thing. It's better to make each mechanism and joint by considering what's suitable for each unique condition. Akinori Abo, Kigumi House Chopped and disfigured contextmachinesconsistency