Week 11: The Productivity Paradox

Week 11, an honest accounting of the hours lost, and the setup understood as the finest procrastination ever built

3 May 2027

This is the lecture the whole course has been quietly apologising for in advance. Ricing is sold as a productivity project: a faster workflow, fewer keystrokes, a machine tuned to your hand. This lecture asks whether any of that survives contact with the arithmetic. The keybinding that saves you two seconds a day, set up over an afternoon, pays for itself in roughly eight months, assuming you never touch it again, which you will, on the following Tuesday.

We make the accounting honest. The customised desktop is the most elaborate method ever devised for not doing any work, and its genius is that it feels exactly like working: there is a terminal, there is config, there is a problem being solved. It is procrastination wearing the clothes of productivity, and that is precisely why it is so effective and so hard to see. The point is not to feel guilty. It is to be able to say, clearly, what the hours bought, which is the question the Time Audit will ask you to answer in writing.

In this lecture#

• the productivity case for ricing, stated fairly
• the arithmetic of saved seconds against spent afternoons
• procrastination that feels identical to work, and why that matters
• how to value the hours honestly, including the ones that bought only pleasure

Before next week#

Reconstruct, as best you can, how many hours this semester’s setup has cost you. Bring the number, however alarming, to the lab.