Productivity tools promise efficiency and organization, but can they sometimes do more harm than good? Let's delve into the paradox of productivity tools and explore how over-reliance on them might inadvertently hamper our effectiveness.
The pandemic has reignited interest in productivity apps
The last few years have ushered in a boom in apps promising to help us organize our time better and maximize our output
- In a world in which everything seems trackable, and workplace ideas about time-management have comprehensively crossed over into our personal lives, these tools can seem irresistible
- Yet the technologies we use to optimize our days can also start to control them
- Since the pandemic hit and time has taken on a new meaning, it may be time to rethink our buy-in, and question whether logging, tracking and uploading tasks into various apps is really the path to success
Back to discipline
Productivity app enthusiast Donohue still tracks everything from his calorie intake to his workload
- It is important to be realistic about what technology offers
- While it can help motivate us to stay organized and on track, productivity also relies on our innate drive and built-in toolkit
- For now, he’s started to block out time to work on tasks based on deadlines that he’s set for himself
Our obsession with personal productivity has been a relatively recent phenomenon
In the 1990s and early 2000s, technology was promoted as a time-saving tool
- Shared calendars could eliminate complicated discussions to line up meetings
- Search engines could save us hours digging up information
- With the opportunity to produce more with potentially less work, it’s no wonder so many embraced a lifestyle that beckons more output through optimization
- High-profile individuals attracted attention for their personal productivity habits
- The digital productivity industry boomed, making its way into our offices, our leisure time and our homes
- Despite the deluge of apps and tools, productivity is in decline in most highly industrialised countries, while burnout is on the rise
Since lockdown, Rob Weatherhead has been using new measures to assess his output – his own instincts
He has found himself discarding most of these technologies and “reverting back to a good old-fashioned task list”, using pen and paper
- Sandra Bond Chapman, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Center for BrainHealth at the University of Texas, Dallas, believes that the fundamental shifts caused by the pandemic could permanently change the way people like Weatherhead view productivity
