Based on our current understanding, productivity is up to you. It is in your hands, and your hands alone, to manage your time and effort to do more and faster. Buy an agenda, hire a secretary, stay until late at work, make more calls and meetings, and write emails faster. It doesn’t matter; whatever it takes.
So how can my own productivity have to do with anyone other than me?
Before we answer this question, first we need to reconstruct what we understand by productivity. In this piece, I will explore how productivity grew from a clever industrial solution to a business management mantra -and why we must urgently change its meaning.
“Before there was personal productivity,” explains Cal Newport, “there was just productivity: a measure of how much a factory worker could produce in a fixed interval of time.” In other words, productivity was confined to factory floor operations.
Famously known for his accomplishments, Henry Ford was one of the industrial productivity pioneers. His improvements to the assembly line were the kick-off for the productivity fever. He was able to reduce the worker hours required to produce a Model T by nearly a factor of ten.
Basically, what Ford did was to bring the car to the worker instead of the worker to the car. “Be ready to revise any system, scrap any method, abandon any theory, if the success of the job requires it,” Ford explained. It may sound like an easy or obvious thing to do now, but it took a lot of money, time, and effort for Ford’s team to be able to make it.
It was only at the turn of the twentieth century that became obvious how the productivity concept could be adapted from the assembly line to the office. Peter Drucker, the influential business scholar who is widely regarded as the creator of modern management theory, was the major figure in this translation.
He not only coined the term knowledge work but also argued in his book that this new kind of work will demand autonomy to function properly. For him, in opposition to manual labor, which can be more easily controlled and monitored, knowledge workers’ skills are less prone to be supervised closely, leaving it to the individual to decide how to best apply their expertise and, therefore, their own productivity.
But what Drucker may have missed is the fact that humans are not wired to maximize activity in a machine-like fashion. In her book, Celeste Headlee argued that it was due to social and cultural influences that we ended up being pushed into this unnatural and unhealthy state that isn’t aligned with our best interests, citing “a combination of capitalist propaganda with religious propaganda that makes us feel guilty if we’re not feeling productive.”
Yes, industrial automation and productivity indeed brought the rise of knowledge work. But instead of continuing to focus on optimizing systems like in the factories, office workers, for various complicated reasons, were now entirely responsible for their own productivity. As Newport argued,
“We should not underestimate the radical nature of this shift. Historically, optimizing systems to increase productivity was exceedingly difficult. The assembly line didn’t arrive in a flash of self-evident insight. Ford suffered through numerous false starts and incremental experiments. Now we casually ask individual knowledge workers to undertake similarly complex optimizations of their own proverbial factories, and to do it concurrently with actually executing all the work they’re attempting to streamline.
Even more troubling is the psychological impact of individualizing these improvements. In classic productivity, there’s no upper limit to the amount of output you seek to produce: more is always better. When you ask individuals to optimize productivity, this more-is-more reality pits the professional part of their life against the personal. (…) It’s hard enough to optimize a factory, and a factory doesn’t have to worry about getting home in time for school pickups.“
Tasks will never end
If you work in an office, for example, it doesn’t matter if you want to be more productive if your boss keeps assigning you tasks, and your co-workers keep interrupting you with “urgent” solicitations.
Or even if you are a kind of independent/freelancer worker -like an artist, writer, journalist, or entrepreneur-, you also need some free-of-interruptions time for yourself to concentrate and do your work. In other words, you need people to leave you alone to be able to mind your own business.
In the past two decades or so, productivity growth has suffered a sustained slowdown. We gained access to an armada of supercharged workplace tools, especially for team communication, and yet we’re not getting much more done (there is another explanation for this, but technology misuse is definitively in the top 3).
The key point is that keeping productivity as an individual obligation, and focusing only on offering increasingly powerful tools, didn’t lead to a more efficient and relaxing workday, but instead enabled us to take on even more tasks, pursued with even more frenetic intensity.
Productivity is not being busy
It is not rare to encounter people who get carried away by the whirlwind of tasks and commitments, but still firmly believe that they are just being productive. Honestly, they are not completely wrong; after all, this is what the modern productivity mantra of “do more and faster” tells us to do.
The problem with modern productivity resides in how we seek to increase it. Beside our obsession with quantity (doing more) and productivity apps and software (faster), we are also more distracted -what may be buying us a one-way ticket to burnout land.
In his 1975 project-management classic, Fred Brooks famously wrote that throwing more people at projects didn’t speed up their completion. To gain more efficiency, better systems were needed -which eventually led to the development of the so-called agile methodologies, such as scrum and kanban.
More structured processes can definitively lead us to better and higher-quality results. But just making the system and/or processes more efficient isn’t enough. It’s not just about how fast we can accomplish the work or tasks at hand, or just about having an organized workflow (one of the most well-known websites of productivity ended for this precise reason).
If you don’t know what work really matters doing, you might easily just be doing busy work -but faster.
More important than speed is a direction
Following Drucker’s footsteps, productivity is still divided into assembly-line-style sequences of optimized steps. As Cal Newport explained,
“Drucker introduced the idea of management by objectives, a process in which managers focus on setting out clear targets, but the details of how they’re accomplished are left to individuals. This idea is both extremely consequential and rarely debated. It’s why the modern office worker is inundated with quantified quarterly goals and motivating mission statements, but receives almost no guidance on how to actually organize and manage these efforts. It was thus largely owing to Drucker that [most knowledge workers today] found themselves overwhelmed by their work, they took it for granted that the solution to their woes would be found in the optimization of their personal habits.”
So, what could be an alternative for the so-needed “new” productivity definition?
Despite the increasingly accelerated technological developments, Guilford drew attention, as early as 1970, to a certain naivety and lack of effort in solving social problems. “Our forefathers have paid off handsomely in terms of hardware to make living easier and more effective in a material sense,” Guilford said, but “there are no comparable rewards for success in solving social problems.” Bear in mind that, when he said this, it had only been a few months since humankind had invested billions of dollars in being on the moon.
Well, it’s time to catch up. Burnout cases have gone through the roof, and the recent pandemic only made it more obvious how fragile we are socially, especially at work. It is time for us to develop systems that reward innovative solutions to these social issues and that lead to the satisfaction of other values such as professional fulfillment. We not only need positive, realistic suggestions on what to do about these pressing issues but also on how to promote the sharing and proliferation of ideas in more productive ways.
Also, rethinking our systems not only requires us to understand their interconnectivity but also which roles we play within them. “For a living being to be autonomous,” Edgar Morin explained, “it is necessary that it depends on its environment on matter and energy, and also in knowledge and information. The more autonomy will develop, the more multiple dependencies will develop.”
To create more efficient and productive systems, people need to learn how to navigate their environment, so it allows them to be autonomous, in a cycle of autonomy-dependence. In other words, one has to analyze where one is within their sociocultural contexts (person > society) for later understanding of how one can participate efficiently and effectively in their contexts (society > person).
This movement from the person to society and back is related to what psychologist Howard Gruber called Network of Enterprise. In his words:
[People] rarely consider the general architecture of a person’s ideas; implicitly, they often write as though its structural form is a set of problems, perhaps organized in a hierarchy of importance, or even just one central problem. Another way of conceiving this structure is to imagine a network of enterprises. Each enterprise is far more inclusive than a problem; it is, rather, one domain within which the person works. If the recognizable problems within that domain were ever solved, the thinker might well invent new ones in order to keep the enterprise alive. The enterprises composing the network are mutually supportive, yet in some ways they have an existence independent of each other, very much as the strands of a net. And since it is a living network, new relationships are constantly appearing.”
For example, many LinkedIn profiles will show how Gruber’s network of enterprise works. A professional may have different fronts: one can be an Economist, but also a math teacher, accountant consultant, host a personal finance podcast, and so on. The network of enterprise is how all these roles come together and influence each other.
Another important aspect of Gruber’s network of enterprises is that meaningful work is a complex human activity where during the process the individual faces tradeoffs between depth and breadth. In other words, one’s work is not a straightforward set of steps with clear goals, as Drucker suggested, but an intertwined body of knowledge that evolves continuously and may lead to serendipitous encounters. This way, the network of enterprise helps the person to define his or her own uniqueness.
So, in this new perspective, being productive took a different meaning: it is the capacity to deliver high-quality work over time -or simply, Productivity = Quality x Consistency. It is not doing more in less time, but being continuously capable of doing meaningful work despite how long it might take. This doesn’t mean that we all should strive to become one-hit wonders; on the opposite, we should aim for what Management Professor Dashun Wang called hot streaks and Gruber called continuance: meaningful work takes time because it is the result of continuously engaging with hard projects.
The current generation is guided by doing more and faster. But with new techs and AI on the horizon, we are fighting a battle that is already lost. We will die out before reaping any reward from it -if there is any reward at all. We must, as Newport put it, acknowledge the futility of trying to tame our frenzied work lives all on our own, and instead ask, collectively, whether there’s a better way of doing it.
As I argued before, the “new” productivity must be both an individual and collective effort. Not only the person but also the entire ecosystem in which he or she is a part must be considered if we want to make significant changes in how we work.
Instead of doing more and faster, focus on getting meaningful work done.
(P.S.: If you are curious, in the next newsletter I will address what it takes to do meaningful work, so hang in there!)