what's wrong with productivity?

What’s Wrong with

Productivity?Part I

Tiago FortePowered by Small World Socialhttps://www.smallworldsocial.com/productivitylink/

7 Reasons the productivity industry

is just begging to be

DISRUPTED

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• Thousands of productivity articles published

allow bored office workers to procrastinate

without feeling too guilty about it

• This time they believe they really will learn

the Ultimate 5 Productivity Hacks that will

instantaneously and magically transform

everything they hate about their job.

• I’m constantly berating my audience to not

think about productivity in terms of “tips and

tricks.” Ugh.

Which brings me to my second point…

1. It is driven by CLICKBAIT

productivitylink.smallworldsocial.com

It counts as work if you’re reading about work, right?

http://productivitylink.smallworldsocial.com/


• Productivity can no more be achieved by

collecting productivity tips than wealth can

be achieved by collecting money-saving tips.

2. It reduces productivity to “tips and tricks”

Productivity “tips and tricks,” by their very nature, are reductive and linear.




Productivity is many things — an emergent

phenomenon, an integrated system of

systems, a praxeology (theory of practical

action) — but it is certainly not merely a

collection of wise sayings. Reducing its

immense scope and fractal complexity to a

series of bite-sized one-liners is great for click-

through rates, but terrible for our appreciation

of how profound the topic can be. These tips

and tricks and hacks and shortcuts, even when

they contain an ounce of truth, are interpreted

subjectively, implemented without context,

measured subjectively if at all, and passed

along at the water cooler as pearls of divinely-

revealed truth. But actually, it’s not our fault.

We cannot move beyond the “tips and tricks”

mindset of productivity because…




• In the most subjective of all possible

situations, as we self-assess, self-diagnose,

and self-prescribe productivity remedies, we

neglect to follow any sort of systematic

process to measure results.

• We as a society, employers and employees

alike, have made a collective pact not to ask

too many questions when it comes to

measuring productivity.

3. It is not systematically applied or quantified

Human intuition is often very wrong when it comes to predicting human behavior




We don’t want to define objective metrics for

success, because we would realize that our

day-to-day responsibilities barely resemble the

job description we were hired for. We don’t

want to quantify the time we spend, as this

may reveal the ungodly number of hours we

work every week, at the office and on our

digital tethers. And most of all, we are afraid to

understand the real factors that affect our

productivity, lest we discover how deeply

dysfunctional the modern workplace has

become. Until the productivity industry

develops a more systematic approach that

works at the level of a single individual, it will

remain in the realm of speculation, conjecture,

urban legend, and…economists. The one way

we do measure productivity, meanwhile, is

actually a problem, because…




• Companies like Workday offer suites of

tools to track everything from average

email length to social media activity to

time spent in the bathroom.

• This may seem a direct contradiction of

my previous point, but virtually all the

services I’ve come across have one

disturbing thing in common — they are

designed to be used by management as

essentially surveillance mechanisms,

microanalyzing and micromanaging the

most minute behaviors of their workforce.

4. It is top-down and authoritarian




The rationale behind these services ranges

from questionable — tracking an employee’s

online activity to determine how likely they are

to quit — to downright dystopian — predicting

which employees are likely to exceed their

budgets, fall short of performance targets, or

do something unspeakably heinous like take

paid maternity leave. I don’t know about you,

but I’m not willing to trust that upper

management’s definition of productivity is in

line with that of individuals.

Even corporate wellness programs, which have

grown to a $6 billion business serving over

50% of large companies, are a little scary. productivitylink.smallworldsocial.com



• Subjecting your employees to surveillance and

blanket metrics goes against everything we know

about employee satisfaction and motivation, and I

predict a backlash from top-performing employees

against management-by-metric.

• The alternative is a bottom-up approach, one

relying on education, training, and peer-to-peer

support to help employees both define and

measure their own progress. But that is a subject

for another post…




Part 1... To be continued.

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