This text was written in an Italian farmhouse. While the crickets chirp in the evening and the child sleeps, tired from the sun, you don’t look at the twinkling stars, instead your face is once again illuminated by the sallow light of the laptop screen. A text as a symptom.
After more than two years of pandemic living with all its effects on the world of work the boundaries between work and private life are more permeable than ever. Somehow there is always work somewhere, the appropriate apps for availability are installed on mobile devices and absence notices are generously ignored by bosses and colleagues. Private conversations degenerate into brainstorming sessions and new work is just a fancy catchphrase to make the workers feel at least modern and fit for the future during the permanent self-exploitation. Because above all this there is a constant threat of being replaced by intelligent machines in the near future. So it’s no wonder that people work on themselves almost neurotically in order to achieve even more.
Software that blocks distraction abounds. Because people don’t trust themselves these days, they install productivity apps that block access to the internet or certain websites. Some programs irritate the thought completely – and provide mechanisms that ensure that users with little self-control do not simply close the app. For example, if input is not given permanently in the appropriately named “Most dangerous Writing App”, what has already been written begins to disappear again after a few seconds. No chance to save work progress. The postmodern creative worker castigates himself for his lack of ideas.
The SelfControl program goes a little further. Once a time has been set in which you want to work in a focused manner, this can no longer be reversed. Restarting the computer does not help, nor does uninstalling the program. If you want to escape the blockade early, you have to install a completely new version of the operating system.
The productivity blocker serves up bizarre links that are guaranteed to be unrelated to work
Evidence of society’s productivity fetish is everywhere. Even the spam messages and ads that precede YouTube videos these days aren’t just about Viagra and penis extenders anymore, but about how to work as hard and successfully as possible and to the “best version” with as little effort as possible of himself”.
Kory Brocious and Steven Nass thought it was high time to call it quits. Both of them work as art directors and copywriters themselves. It can therefore be assumed that they are quite familiar with the bone mill of the creative industry. The Productivity Blocker they released as a browser extension simply turns the tables. Instead of blocking sites like Youtube or Instagram, the ban is cast here on Outlook, Slack or Linkedin. Learning languages on Duolingo is prohibited, as is watching TED conference videos. If you can’t control yourself and try to navigate to one of the blocked sites, the productivity blocker will serve up bizarre links that are guaranteed to have nothing to do with work. These include, for example, trampoline web shops or a Wikipedia listing of animals that have official professional qualifications.
What was initially intended as a joke turns out to be a pinpoint punch in the stomach of the zeitgeist. In the evaluation comments for the software, users write that thanks to the productivity blocker they can finally draw clear boundaries between private life and professional life again.
After all, it is the work itself that is the most distracting. Anyone who has spent a day attending a half-dozen conferences on a wide range of topics while simultaneously being bombarded with a barrage of Slack message pings and Teams channel updates knows that in such an environment productivity can no longer be thought of at all. deep work is the recipe with which companies want to give their employees more focus. From the looks of it, deep leisure is at least as important.