This is Optimal Living Daily. Welcome to the Post Productivity World by Cal Newport of Cal Newport.com and I'm Justin Mollick. Welcome to the old podcast, the OLD podcast that stands for Optimal Living Daily. Right read to you, simple as that.
So let's continue the tradition and continue optimizing your life. Welcome to the Post Productivity World by Cal Newport of Cal Newport.com. The Age of Productivity. September 8, 2008 was an important date in the world of self-improvement writing.
It almost no one knows this. To understand what happened on this date, we should return briefly to 2004, the early days of blogging. It was then that a web programmer named Merlin Mann stumbled onto a powerful formula, blogging about becoming more productive. He called his site 43 folders, a tribute to the tickler file from David Allen's Getting Things Done System.
43 folders timing was good. A new generation of tech-savvy knowledge workers needed help navigating a work environment defined by information overflow, and Mann offered them a tantalizing promise. With the right combination of high-tech productivity tools, you can find your way into a utopian state where work becomes effortless, especially if you use a Mac. In 2005, when Clive Thompson wrote his famous Meet the Lifehackers feature for the New York Times magazine, he quoted Mann as a spokesperson of the new tech-driven self-improvement movement.
43 folders, subscriber count, shot past the 100,000 mark, and Mann was able to quit his programming job and support himself full-time with his writing. This was to use my own terminology, the birth of the Age of Productivity. Mann paved the way to a powerful ecosystem of blogs that focused on how to become more efficient. Galker Media's Lifehacker blog became its most popular site, eventually cracking Technerati's top 10 lists.
The fact.org became a major force. Leo Babouta paid off his credit card debt with an e-book that merged getting things done with Zen philosophy. This was a good time to be telling the world how to become more productive. But then, we get to September of 2008.
The post-productivity world. It was on the 8th day of this month that Mann posted an odd little essay on his personal blog. He titled it, Better. It was the tantrum of a talented writer whose pursuit of readers had led him astray.
He expressed frustration with the superficiality of online writing, calling it, quote, a diet to compromise mostly of fake connectedness and make-believe insight. All I know right now is that I want to do all of it better. Everything better, better, better, and quote. The impact of 43 folders was immediate.
That same day Mann posted a short note on 43 folders saying that the site was no longer a blog about productivity. He would instead help people embrace the hard work of making something that you love and making it better. I rarely hear people mention the 43 folders transformation, which may have to do with the fact that soon after Mann had his first child, which turned his attentions understandably elsewhere. His impact, I argue, was profound.
Survey the current landscape of self-improvement blogs. It's no longer popular to post about productivity. The idea that all that stands between you and workplace bliss is the right omnifocus configuration no longer holds its allure. The each of productivity begins to climb around the time Mann is promisius, turned his back on it.
We are now in a new age, one in which the big picture trumps to small. What matters in this new age is your work philosophy, not your systems. Mann's new work philosophy, for example, focuses on creating excellent things that you care about. The current career craftsman philosophy to name another example focuses on becoming excellent to provide the capital needed to shape a compelling career.
Tim Ferriss, by contrast, rethought what currencies matter moving emphasis from money to time was profound effect. And while Leo Baba has quietly and effectively molded Zen habits in the spearhead of the minimalist movement, perhaps the most successful of the recent reimagining of work. Productivity, of course, is still important. Most mature work philosophies require that you can organize what's on your plate.
But when you're guided by a philosophy, this organization becomes the easy part. You drive to accomplish what you believe needs to be accomplished as a way of sweeping away the ineffective. It's hard to judge an era while still in the middle of it, but from all accounts, I think this age of workplace philosopher represents an exciting shift in our thinking about work and happiness. The more seriously we struggle with the question of what defines a good working life, the better off we are.
And I mean seriously struggle, falling back to a vague, unverified cliche like fall your passion and no longer holds water in this new age. I miss 43 folders, and I'm still hoping that Mann will soon return to more regular updates on how his new philosophical outlook is taking shape. In the meantime, I'll continue to struggle away with the growing number of other writers who have taken up Mann's call to move our online conversation, dare I say it, productively forward. You just listened to the post titled Welcome to the Post Productivity World by Cal Newport of Cal Newport dot com, and I'll be right back with my commentary.
They get a call. I still read some articles about productivity, but you've probably noticed that most are meant to be inspirational or motivational, bringing about some happiness, some are about minimalism. And that's because it can feel like continuously seeking more and more productivity is counterproductive. It's like we're looking for a magical formula to make work easy, but we end up spending more time trying to be productive than actually doing the work that'll make us better or add value.
I think this gets to the why of it all. Why are we trying to become more productive? Why are we doing certain things in the first place? Is it necessary?
I think we'd all benefit from seriously considering the question of what defines a good working life. So maybe today we can take a step back and think about our own work philosophy. What really matters in our work and what are we trying to accomplish? And why?
Maybe you'll lead to some revelations. And with that, thank you for being here and listening every day. Have a great rest of your day, and I'll see you tomorrow, where you're optimal life. Oh, wait.