The dark history of our obsession with productivity

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From Fast Company:

You know it’s bad when you start typing “obsession with” in the Google search bar and the first auto-completion prompt is “productivity.”
As workers, we are obsessed with getting stuff done. No wonder there seems to be a bottomless well of advice, filled with evangelists, gurus, and thought leaders proferring hacks, tools, tricks, and secrets to help us pack more output into the waking hours of our workdays. Productivity software alone accounts for an $82 billion market, according to IBISWorld research.

But where, exactly, did this lust for wringing greater efficiency from every possible second originate?

. . . .

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.

There is one sort of labor which adds to the value of the subject upon which it is bestowed; there is another which has no such effect. The former, as it produces a value, may be called productive; the latter, unproductive labor. Thus the labor of a manufacturer adds, generally, to the value of the materials which he works upon, that of his own maintenance, and of his master’s profit. The labor of a menial servant, on the contrary, adds to the value of nothing . . . A man grows rich by employing a multitude of manufacturers; he grows poor by maintaining a multitude of menial servants. The labor of the latter, however, has its value, and deserves its reward as well.

Benjamin Franklin, a contemporary of the Scottish economist with plenty of productivity theories of his own, put forth what might be considered the first “to-do” list in 1791. The productivity measure in Franklin’s list of tasks (wash, work, read, work, put things in their places) was less likely to be measured in hard numbers like Smith’s. Franklin’s assessment was simple: Start the day asking what good shall be done, and at the end of the day evaluate based on what was accomplished. Lofty, to be sure, but an interesting measure nevertheless.

. . . .

The notion of planning’s role in increasing productivity was enjoying a moment during the rumblings of the Industrial Revolution. A Boston Globe report reveals that by 1850, day planners were not only proliferating, their makers were making bank. An 1844 list of wealthy taxpayers shows that among the two Boston businessmen with $100,000 or more was a blank book manufacturer. Productivity became inexorably linked to the virtue of working hard at this time, too. Etiquette manuals of the era suggested that the daily planner was a means to self-improvement.

Although the 20th century was rocked by two World Wars and the Great Depression, productivity was a focal point for manufacturing of goods needed to support military efforts and later, to satisfy the demands of the U.S.’s growing middle class.

. . . .

So it was ripe for the rise of the earliest efficiency expert, an industrial engineer from Philadelphia named Frederick Winslow Taylor. Nicknamed Speedy Taylor, he would get himself a consulting gig with a company, observe its workers, and calculate how they could do their jobs faster (and then charge a hefty sum for the report).

. . . .

Let’s not forget Bill Smith, an engineer at Motorola who introduced Six Sigma in 1986 as “a disciplined, data-driven approach and methodology for eliminating defects (driving toward six standard deviations between the mean and the nearest specification limit) in any process–from manufacturing to transactional, and from product to service.”

According to Six Sigma, “Productivity is much more important than revenues and profits of the organization because profits only reflect the end result, whereas productivity reflects the increased efficiency as well as effectiveness of business policies and processes. Moreover, it enables a business to find out its strengths and weaknesses. It also lets the business easily identify threats as well as opportunities that prevail in the market as a result of competition and changes in business environment.”

. . . .

The thing is that in the frenzy to be more productive, we as a nation have become a little less so. Economist Robert Gordon of Northwestern University chalks this up to the fact that we are using methods and procedures that are over a decade old. He told the Atlantic, “We had a great revolution in the 1980s and ’90s as businesses transitioned from paper, typewriters, file cabinets to personal computers with spreadsheets, word-processing software. And then that revolution was accompanied in the 1990s by the internet, by free information through search engines, through e-commerce, and doing away with paper.”

. . . .

As Leila Hock points out: “It’s not hard work–work is work, and yes, some work requires more brain power, but most of us smart people like that and want more of it, so let’s stop calling it hard. Let’s call it productive. Effective. Valuable. Anything that speaks to nature over quantity, because that’s what we need more of.”

Link to the rest at Fast Company

8 thoughts on “The dark history of our obsession with productivity”

  1. It started zillions of years ago when the first of the species had to get enough food to survive, feed the kids, and keep from being eaten by something else. (Sharp sticks, stone tools, reed baskets, fire…)

    The more efficiently and effectively they did this, the better the family ate, and the longer they lived. We are descended from the folks who were obsessed by efficiency and productivity. The folks who were more nuanced and sophisticated don’t have any descendants.

  2. September always messes up my “productivity”, I don’t know why.

    I suddenly find every reason in the world to get sidetracked, and when I look at my five year plan, always go, Glug!

  3. Let’s see now, a $21Trillion economy spends $82B looking for ways to create more wealth to spread around? (A bit over a third of 1% of annual GDP.)
    Yeah, it must be wrong.

    Of course, if somebody isn’t creating ever more wealth the economy won’t grow to accommodate the growing populstion, provide a steadily-increasing standard of living, bring previously-luxury items within reach of more and more people, pay for ever-increasing “entitlements”…

    The US with maybe 5% of the global population produces over 22% of the wealth created every year. And its obsession with productivity has made its economy the world’s largest for five generations.

    What an awful thing, right?

    Of course, if you only worry about distributing wealth and not creating it you end up where? Venezuela 2018?

  4. I hate to tell the OP but the number of companies that should have forgotten Bill Smith and Six Sigma is more than most people realize.

    On the cusp of the online revolution, company after company took labor cutting steps (thinly veiled as ‘productivity enhancements’) and set themselves up with “lean” workforces.

    The whole “lean” labor model was made for manufacturing – organize yourself to minimize wasted time.

    Retailers all around the US adopted it to mean you fire every third employee and let the other 2 do their job too.

    It made for a steady decline in customer service for the companies that fell for it and ruined morale at businesses.

    The one advantage brick and mortar had in the marketplace was out of ammo before the war began.

  5. In my day job all we hear is how our productivity is down. I’m really tired of it. I work in healthcare and my particular area always has a downturn in the summer because people aren’t as sick. But they want us to keep a minimum # of people working due to needed to be available to cover emergencies so can’t cut staffing. The kicker is that our supervisor is counted as a regular employee in the productivity thing even though she does office work at least 80% of the time, so no matter what, we’re always starting in a hole.

  6. One of the worst myths of productivity is “make do with less.” It’s often put on the employee to become more efficient to get more done, not on the managers or the company to review what they are doing and see if everything actually needs to be done. Instead, my job cut most of the admin…and the jobs they used to do went to the most junior people. No one reassessed anything to see if they need to do something or if we could find ways to consolidate some of it. They just passed the jobs around as if we could go could everything assigned. Madness.

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