A recent article by Cal Newport, author of Deep Work, in The New Yorker, titled “The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done,” pinpointed the discomfort I’ve always felt with one of the main skills required of the “knowledge worker”: personal productivity. Google it and you’ll find hundreds of thousands of articles and blog posts that promote, for example, “37 habits to enhance your productivity” and similar “hacks.” If productivity — the measure of efficiency of a person (or robot) completing a task — is the lowest common denominator of the economy, personal productivity is the lowest common denominator of the knowledge economy.
Getting Things Done, a methodology created by the consultant David Allen, is widely seen as the vanguard of the personal productivity movement, and in his piece, Newport takes it down as a proxy to question the entire concept. He points out that the focus on personal productivity allows organizations to delegate the responsibility and pressure of productivity down to the individual under the guise of autonomy:
“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.”
Newport takes aim at Peter Drucker’s pioneering “Managing by Objectives” (and you may add its more recent twin, OKR, as in Objectives and Key Results). In his view, the problem is that all these frameworks “don’t directly address the fundamental problem: the insidiously haphazard way that work unfolds at the organizational level. They only help individuals cope with its effects.” Even more concerning, “The knowledge sector’s insistence that productivity is a personal issue seems to have created a so-called ‘tragedy of the commons’ scenario, in which individuals making reasonable decisions for themselves ensure a negative group outcome,” he contends.
Newport is not the first to point out the misalignment between personal productivity and organizational productivity. In a 2017 article for Harvard Business Review, titled “The Paradox of Productivity,” Ryan Fuller posited:
“To really improve productivity — and to be honest about what it means — you first have to gain a level of organizational self-awareness to understand what work actually drives value at your company, and then direct employees towards these tasks. This is pretty straightforward for manual work (e.g. assembly lines), but extremely complex when it comes to knowledge work.”
Others, like the organizational psychologist Adam Grant, have exposed the shortcomings of our understanding of personal productivity itself, pointing out that the underlying idea of time management is misleading and that we should instead become better at attention management: “the art of focusing on getting things done for the right reasons, in the right places, and at the right moments.”
Newport has written the most incisive and enlightened critique of personal productivity to date, but his conclusions are too incremental. When he proposes more “intentional assignments of effort” and to “work on one feature at a time,” then it smells like shoehorning knowledge work into the containers of micro-industrial processes on digital steroids. Instead of the “total freedom” of personal productivity, he calls for better tools to optimize collective work, borrowing from the best practices of software developers and their morning stand-ups and task boards, touting qualities such as transparency and agility, the darlings of the digital economy. Trello boards, Slack, or Guild to the rescue? That is a bit, well, un-imaginative perhaps? And doesn’t it entrust the fox with protecting the chicken farm?
Digital technology, with its behavioral change apps and myriad collaboration suites, has turned task-based personal productivity at the workplace into 24/7 self-optimization. Today’s knowledge workers do not suffer from total freedom, they suffer from the total lack of freedom. The tools of productivity have colonialized our most personal sphere: our selves.
A few years ago, a writing app called Don’t Worry, Be Happy made the rounds on media. The app surveyed a worker’s facial expressions, and if that person stopped smiling while performing their computer work, it would delete everything they had produced in the previous hour. Don’t Worry, Be Happy was a not-so-subtle example of a social conditioning tool that combined productivity with wellbeing, enabling “emotion enforcement” as the pinnacle of Digital Taylorism. Now, that app did indeed exist, but it remains unclear whether it was meant as a satire or a real product (you know something is creepy when you can’t tell the difference), residing in the same uncanny place that also led to the HBO series Silicon Valley.
It turns out Don’t Worry, Be Happy was a precursor of things to come. As Jacob Silverman observes in The New Republic, the COVID-19 pandemic has fueled the rise of social productivity monitoring tools with Orwellian names like DeskTime, SPYERA, Time Doctor, and Hubstaff that, for example, track students’ eye movements or ensure that employees aren’t playing games during work hours. The workplace panopticon has come home, as Silverman notes.
The most recent, and arguably most consequential, example of this trend is the Productivity Score, a new feature that Microsoft recently introduced **as part of its 365’s Workplace Analytics suite, used by millions of people every day. The Productivity Score comprises of a Technology Experience and a People Experience score, both based on data collected from workers’ usage of Microsoft’s 365 office productivity suite (the People Experience score, for example, is built across five categories: content collaboration, meetings, communication, teamwork, and mobility). It is essentially a new dashboard view designed to, quoting Microsoft, **“help everyone in your organization build the habits that harness the true power of those tools” and “harmonize productivity and wellbeing.”
It sounds like a satire as well: too banal and too obvious to be taken seriously. But it is real. What may be even worse than firms like Microsoft maliciously betraying all the talk of “humanizing the workplace” is them actually believing that their tools contribute to bringing it to life.
When Microsoft proclaims that its Productivity Score “illuminates the essential insights to move your transformation from art to science,” it lays bare the myopic philosophy at the heart of all productivity tools. Ever since Frederick Taylor pioneered it, the idea of scientific management has proven to be detrimental to both productivity and wellbeing.
First of all, as the management thinker and author Margaret Heffernan points out, efficiency is good for the complicated but not for the complex, and it falls short of addressing a world that is increasingly unpredictable.
“Trying to standardize and measure all work may instill the illusion of control, but it too often demotivates people whose skill sets can meet unpredictable demands. It also robs people of their capacity to adapt and respond with creativity and commitment,” she writes.