The dark history of our obsession with productivity
Productivity software alone accounts for an $82 billion market, according to IBISWorld research. No wonder there seems to be a bottomless well of advice, filled with evangelists, gurus, and thought leaders proferring hacks, tools, and secrets to help us pack more output into the waking hours of our workdays.
As old as America itself
There’s no definitive source, but we start to see historical mentions of productivity in that classic economics text Wealth of Nations, written by Adam Smith in 1776
- In it, Smith contended that there were two kinds of labor: productive and unproductive
- Start the day asking what good shall be done, and at the end of the day evaluate based on what was accomplished
Then came the productivity gurus
Tom Peters, Bill Smith, and others
- Productivity is much more important than revenues and profits
- Profits only reflect the end result, whereas productivity reflects the increased efficiency and effectiveness of business policies and processes
- It enables a business to find out its strengths and weaknesses, and identify threats and opportunities
The current state of productivity and what’s next
In the frenzy to be more productive, we as a nation have become a little less so
- Until we start incorporating more robots and AI to take over our rote tasks, this downward trend will continue
- The other obsession with productivity is entwined with a false belief that we need to be working all the time to be our most productive selves
- This is simply not true
- Ben Franklin’s to-do list had it right all along
The abuses of labor in the name of productivity
Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793
- Landowners got a boost to their bottom lines by implementing a machine that increased their production 25-fold
- Introduced the term “gin up”
- Slavery was thankfully abolished after the Civil War, but low-wage factory workers continued to toil in unsafe conditions for decades
The birth of the day planner and consultants
The notion of planning’s role in increasing productivity was enjoying a moment during the rumblings of the Industrial Revolution
- By 1850, day planners were proliferating and their makers were making bank
- Productivity became inexorably linked to the virtue of working hard
- Early productivity experts focused on dividing human action into 17 motions and then determining which was the most efficient and effective way to do any task