Sunday, October 17, 2010

Productivity treadmills

Nice The Setup interview with sociologist, Kieran Healy. I particularly like that he shares my frustration over the fact that modern computing hardware and software can still leave us less productive than people in the past who had little more than two sticks to rub together. Healy says:
"On the hardware side, there's that absurd productivity counterpart to the hedonic treadmill, where for some reason it's hard to get through the to-do list even though the café you're at contains more computing power than was available to the Pentagon in 1965. ... One of the smartest people I've ever known spent half of his career writing on a typewriter and the other half on an IBM Displaywriter. His backup solution for having hopelessly outdated hardware was to keep a spare Displaywriter in a nearby closet, in case the first one broke. It never did."

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