Work. Busyness. Use of English B1+

There are a lot of things difficult about being a professor at a research-oriented university. But one benefit that this profession … is clarity.

How well or how poorly you're doing as an academic researcher can be … to a simple question: Are you publishing important papers?

The answer to this question can even …. as a single number, such as the h-index: a formula, named for its inventor, Jorge Hirsch, that processes your publication and citation counts into a single value that approximates your impact on your field.

In computer science, for example, an h-index score above 40 is difficult to achieve and once reached … the mark of a strong long-term career.

On the other hand, if your h-index is in single digits when your case goes up for tenure review, you're probably in trouble.

Google Scholar, a tool popular among academics for finding research papers, even … your h-index automatically so you can be reminded, multiple times per week, precisely where you stand. (In case you're wondering, as of the morning when I'm writing this chapter, I'm a 21.)

This clarity simplifies decisions about what work habits a professor adopts or abandons. Here, for example, is the late Nobel Prize- … physicist Richard Feynman says:

To do real good physics work, you do need absolute solid lengths of time.... it needs a lot of concentration... if you have a job administrating anything, you don't have the time. So I have invented another myth for myself: that I'm irresponsible. I'm actively irresponsible.

I tell everyone I don't do anything. If anyone asks me to be on a committee for admissions, "no," I tell them: I'm … .

He was adamant in avoiding administrative duties because he knew they would only decrease his ability to do the one thing that mattered most in his professional life:

"to do real good physics work." Feynman, we can assume, was probably bad at responding to e-mails and would likely switch universities if you had tried to move him into an open office or demand that he tweet. Clarity about what matters … clarity about what does not.

I mention the example of professors because they're somewhat exceptional among knowledge workers, most of whom don't share this transparency regarding how well they're doing their job. Here's the social critic Matthew Crawford's description of this uncertainty: "Managers themselves inhabit a bewildering psychic landscape, and … anxious by the vague imperatives they must answer to."

Though Crawford was speaking specifically to the plight of the knowledge work middle manager, the "bewildering psychic landscape" he references applies to many positions in this sector. As Crawford describes in his 2009 ode to the trades, Shop Class as Soulcraft, he quit his job as a Washing-ton, D.C., think tank director to open a motorcycle repair shop exactly to escape this bewilderment. The feeling of taking a broken machine, struggling with it, then eventually … a tangible indication that he had succeeded (the bike driving out of the shop under its own power) provides a concrete sense of accomplishment he struggled to replicate when his day revolved vaguely around reports and communications strategies.

To understand this claim, recall that with the rise of assembly lines came the rise of the Efficiency Movement, identified with its founder, Frederic Taylor, who would famously stand with a stopwatch monitoring the efficiency of worker movements-looking for ways to increase the speed at which they accomplished their tasks. In Taylor's era, productivity was unambiguous: widgets created per unit of time. It seems that in today's business landscape, many knowledge workers, bereft of other ideas, are turning toward this old definition of productivity in trying to solidify their value in the otherwise bewildering landscape of their professional lives. (David Allen, for example, even uses the specifc phrase "cranking widgets" to describe a productive work How.) Knowledge workers, I'm arguing, are tending toward increasingly visible busyness because they … a better way to demonstrate their value. Let's give this tendency a name.

Busyness as Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: … lots of stuff in a visible manner.