Download - 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
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It counts as work if you’re reading about work, right?
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• 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.
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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…
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• 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
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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…
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• 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
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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
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• 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…
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Part 1... To be continued.
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