So What, Who Cares (vol 1, issue 5) Why you shouldn't confuse activity with productivity

Happy Monday night/Tuesday morning! Let's kick off the last week of August by reading about how we're working all wrong.

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Meetings are pretty much the worst and call-in meetings even more useless. Or so says a new survey from conference-calling company Intercall, which found that 65% of people on conference calls are doing other work while listening to the Miss Othmar-like squawking coming over the line. Why the multitasking? (Especially when much multitasking is proven to be a waste of time anyway?) Because people are spending too much time in meetings and it's killing their productivity. How do meetings do this? As this now-classic essay points out, meetings blow holes through the large chunks of uninterrupted time that people in cognition-heavy jobs require in order to slip into their most productive states.

So what? Meetings as they are now aren't working. They're wasting people's time.

Who cares? Anyone who wants to shuck the usual trend of Americans working far more hours for meh results.

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Americans' tendency to overwork is actually making the quality of their work worse. It was reported last year that the expectation of constant connectivity, coupled with a culture of "meetings, always meetings," had a lot of American workers flailing through the make-work of inbox management and digital housekeeping before getting to the real work they were actually supposed to be doing. Earlier this year, reporters reminded us that the reason we have a 40-hour work week is because that's the utter limit before people's mistakes began cutting into the volume of quality work they produced. And now the Harvard Business Review is piling on, contending that an "always on" work culture with its frequent interruptions and expectations of multitasking, creates an attention deficit that ultimately makes us less creative and less productive.

So what? The evidence is piling up: Putting hard limits on how much we work and what we do there may make workers more productive in less time.

Who cares? Companies that want to retain good workers. They'll want to create a working environment that engages high producers with comparatively low overhead. Altering workplace culture can do that -- and reduce turnover, which is ultimately good for a company's bottom line. Know who else cares? Workers. If they can make the case to their boss that they should/can adopt specific habits at the office, they can begin to push for corporate culture change from the bottom up.

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Get used to the idea that bug farming is a legit concern, not just some darkling prediction of life in the afterscape. Anyone who watches Shark Tank knows that entrepreneurs are already thinking ahead to the period when farming mammals for meat will be too resource-intense for anyone but the very wealthy. That's how we get pitches for bug flour and bug energy bars. (And Ivy Leaguers are already trying to get in on the ground floor of this forecasted food trend.) But as Modern Farmer likes to remind us, we're already farming bugs for plenty of other uses. It's but a hop, skip and a jump until cricket is the new calamari.

So what? Just as we're now eating junk fish that used to be considered good for only bait, so might the Earth's population get to the point where bug-munching is our cheapest option for animal protein.

Who cares? Anyone who is not already vegetarian.

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And on a final pop culture note: Grantland's breaking out the bracketology for SNL, and while I greatly disagree with their seeding (in what world is Ana Gasteyer not ranked above Cheri Oteri?), I love anything that is basically fantasy football for comedy nerds. My better half & I have often assembled our own dream SNL cast, freed from the fetters of time, space or current events. Who would be in your ensemble? Phil Hartman and Ana Gasteyer? Eddie Murphy and Gilda Radner? Tell me at @lschmeiser.