Productination

Most people don’t know the myth of Sisyphus and have heard only of his punishment.

When Sisyphus heard that Esopus’s daughter was kidnapped by Jupiter, he offered to give Esopus this information, in exchange for a gift of water to his Citadel. He knew that withholding this information for a ransom would earn him grief in the underworld, but willingly traded punishment in the afterlife for earthly pleasures.

He managed to trick Thanatos, the god of death, to chain himself up, thus preventing any human from dying. When Thanatos was eventually released, his first victim was Sisyphus, but before dying, Sisyphus had told his wife to pitch his body into the town square. Once in the underworld, he pleaded to Persephone that he was not afforded proper burial rites, begging for a chance to correct this. Persephone kindly sent him back to the realm of the living.

It was not until he had reached a ripe old age that he was dragged back to the underworld and sentenced to serve his eternal penance.

According to some, Sisyphus was an evil, cunning, trickster and troublemaker. According to Camus, though, he was an absurdist hero, punished because he scorned the gods and cherished life. In his interpretation, Sisyphus is conscious of the futility of his eternal toil, and upon fully accepting it, actually appreciates it.

He imagines Sisyphus happy.

I had spent the entire day working furiously, but making no progress. Every time I put out one fire, newer, more interesting fires sprang up all around me.

It had been weeks since I saw the bottom of my inbox; the mountain on top seemingly pullulating. I knew it was possible to conquer the pile and get ahead, I had done it in the past, but I inevitably let myself slip.

It didn’t take much slippage before I found myself plummeting down the spiral of nega-productivity.

Alas, such is the curse of the eternally urgent. When constantly tasked with putting out fires instead of working on secondary goals or structural changes that make life easier in the long run, those things never get done, and I set myself up for more disasters down the line.

Even so, at the moment there were fires to put out, so I accepted my fate and zestfully charged forward.

I woke up invigorated and enthusiastic. I had only been working at my new job for a week or two and was still incredibly excited (even after 3 months, I’m still pretty excited about my job). I walked into my office and popped open my email. My boss had forwaded me a request to update our company’s career page. Attached to the email were two word documents, each with a job description in it.

I opened up the page in my browser, it looked very straightforward. It would be a pretty simple job to simply take the word document, format it as HTML, and publish it to the web. In the past, that’s exactly what I would have done.

“But wait,” I thought to myself, “am I going to have to do this again in the future?” My gut and wisdom culled from years of software engineering told me that I probably would.

So, instead of succumbing to my code monkey instincts, I took a step back and thought about it for a minute. This is a job that could get very tedious if I’d have to make frequent updates to this page. I realized, I have a friend who will do repetitive tasks all day without complaint: my computer!

And so, instead of just plowing through, I spent a little time writing a script for my favorite text editor that would do almost all of the work for me. Fortunately, the word documents I received all followed a strict semantic format, so this task was easily automated.

I have since then received similar assignments many times, and I completed each one in minutes. The initial investment in writing the macro has already paid for itself several fold.

I started thinking: how can I measure productivity? Is it in the sheer volume of tasks completed? Is it the quality of work produced?

Click here for to find out!