A New Look at Productivity, or What's Wrong with Our Work

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Thiago Forte is a productivity and movement consultant Quantified Self ("measuring yourself", the desire to record and analyze all your parameters - performance, health, sports, etc.). Whenever he sees another sensational headline like "The Productivity Magic Trick," he gets angry. In this article, he will list seven reasons why productivity as an industry has nothing to do with real-world efficiency.

Productivity content goes viral

The main purpose of the thousands of daily productivity articles is “food” for office workers. They allow them to procrastinate without guilt. After all, reading about work is also work, isn't it?

The internet is littered with productivity hacks: blog posts, list articles, tweets, content marketing. All of this lives on from the clicks of millions of people who are led to hyperbole headlines and who piously believe that right now they are discovering five incredible productivity tricks that will magically change the routine they hate. Thanks to this, productivity content has excellent traffic and allows resources to make good money on advertising.

This behavior is so reflexive that productivity media never tire of using it.

Industry relegates productivity to "tips and tricks"

Just as tips on saving money alone do not lead to wealth, so collecting recommendations on productivity will not make you better performing.

Productivity is simplistic and linear in the spirit of "tips and tricks". Tips and tricks taken separately can add half a percent to the effectiveness, but will not drastically change the situation. Attaching one or the other hack to work is like slightly adjusting the sails when the boat is already banked and is at the edge of the waterfall.

Productivity is a multifaceted phenomenon. This is the system! Therefore, it is characterized by such things as a systemic effect, system integration, praxeology (the doctrine of human activity) and others. In terms of CTR, the individual productivity hacks work. But they are useless from the point of view of a systems approach.

Of course, all these tips and tricks are true (at least in part). The problem is that they are interpreted subjectively and used without context. But it’s not really our fault. We cannot go beyond "tips and tricks" for this reason.

We perceive productivity subjectively

One of the things we've discovered through the revolution in the ability to collect and analyze data from websites and apps is that intuitive assumptions about human behavior patterns tend to be wrong. Our predictions are saturated with conscious and unconscious biases. When we choose, try, and apply a productivity tool for ourselves, we ignore the systematic definition of results.

It seems that employers and workers have entered into an unspoken collective agreement, according to the terms of which it is not customary to ask questions about measuring productivity parameters. We do not want to define objective indicators of success, because our daily activities, as a rule, do not correspond to what is written in our job descriptions. We do not want to accurately measure the time spent on work, since you will have to really work, and not just sit your pants in the office. But most of all, we are afraid to find out the factors that really affect productivity. Because it will reveal how dysfunctional the modern workplace has become.

Until an objective system is developed in the productivity industry that will work at the individual level of each employee, it will remain a realm of speculation and guesswork.

We measure productivity authoritarianly and top-down

Recently, the Web has been flooded with an avalanche of releases from companies offering products and services for measuring employee productivity. So, the Workday company offers a set of tools for tracking everything at once: from the average email length and social media activity to the time spent on the toilet.

At the same time, all services that seem to be aimed at improving labor efficiency have one common alarming feature. They are designed for management as personnel control mechanisms. A kind of tools for microanalysis and micromanagement of the workforce.

Therefore, the essence of the services of all such services ranges from the dubious ability to track the online activity of employees to the utopian idea - to determine which of the employees eats bread in vain, who does not fulfill the plan, and so on.

The constant surveillance of employees and their overarching "metric" goes against everything we know about motivation and job satisfaction. In my opinion, workers' dissatisfaction with this “measurement of productivity” will soon become vociferous. What's the alternative? Evaluate productivity not from top to bottom, but from bottom to top. Moreover, this process should be based on the education and training of employees, their mutual support for each other. In other words, workers must measure and measure their own progress.

Productivity is seen as a privilege

Why is productivity based on a top-down model? In my opinion, historically, the roots go back to. An entire generation of senior executives have developed their productivity based on one-on-one interaction with a personal trainer.

Take a look at the cost of the services of modern productivity coaches: the average rate is $ 150-300 per hour, the services of corporate trainers start at $ 5,000 per day (from $ 10,000 if the coach has published a book). It is no wonder that the development of a personal model of efficiency is not available to ordinary employees.

But this is not the only reason why many workers are unproductive. Among others:

• Lack of alternative ways of teaching productivity (there is a model in which knowledge is transferred directly from the coach to the client).
• Lack of alternative methods of reporting and motivation (the coach both encourages and controls the client, after all, the more time he spends with him, the higher the salary).
• Lack of a certification system (where is it taught to be a productivity coach?).
• Proprietary methods of increasing labor productivity (typical career line of a productivity coach: consulting → book → corporate coaching; at the same time, a zealous struggle for their methodology, their intellectual property).

In the past, productivity was the prerogative of senior management. But times have changed. We live in a world of alternative employment, more and more people start their own business, become freelancers and become independent contractors. And all these people want to work better (their profit directly depends on this), they want to be more productive.

This is why behavior-changing applications like. They can solve the four aforementioned problems:

• become an alternative learning environment;
• become a new platform for receiving content;
• become a network for mutual accountability and peer support;
• become your own coach, controlling and spurring yourself with the help of progress metrics.

The productivity industry ignores technology

In one of my courses, I teach people step by step how to set up a computer so that they finally get the GTD methodology working. Last year, 10 thousand people took this course. The most popular positive feedback was this:

I finally figured out how to apply GTD in the real world.

Many of these people have tried to improve their personal performance in the past using the David Allen method. The problem is that most of the GTD-specific tools are not so intuitive and easy to use to be applied in large quantities. They are typically developed by techies for techies. And, unfortunately, in Silicon Valley it is often forgotten that even the slightest inconvenience, an insignificant barrier can turn people away not only from using a specific application, but also from the technique in general. People tend to equate an individual program and the entire system.

In large corporations, the problem gets worse. They hire professional coaches who present their ideas as the quintessence of productivity, while not caring about the details of its implementation. These details fall on the shoulders of the IT department, which, in turn, is very far from the "great idea of productivity" that they are trying to implement in their companies.

All this prevents many from using really useful gadgets and programs to increase productivity.

Productivity is inhuman

Many people see productivity as an end in itself. "What's wrong with being better, faster, more efficient?" - you ask. Nothing. But this is where the biggest problem with productivity lies.

Focusing too much on improving your performance can be dangerous. Continuous optimization of life, paradoxically, makes it impossible to enjoy it. Today it is one of the underestimated factors that increase the risk of suicide. Increasingly, there are stories of how a person "" depleted physical and mental resources.

The time will come when humanity will reconsider the meaning of productivity. We will have to move from impersonal statistics to more holistic ideas of well-being, satisfaction and happiness. The shift from a focus on “increasing sales” to a simpler life and social entrepreneurship is already visible. I hope that understanding the importance of the diversity of life and work will eventually enter the “productivity ecosystem”.

Einstein is credited with the phrase:

You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created. / It is impossible to solve the problem at the same level at which it arose.

It seems to me that many of the problems that we face in stagnating productivity can be solved not by increasing the number of technologies or modernizing work processes, but by deep reassessment of the philosophy of human striving for success.