Key Points
The historical changes to the employment landscape / workers’ economy were pushed by things like:
- the rise of email (and later team messaging and video conferencing)
- the shift from manual labor (factory assembly lines) to knowledge-work (Peter Drucker, 1959)
- major current events, most notably coronavirus and the global shift towards remote work
Productivity pr0n (Mann) is a hunger for mastering personal productivity, an obsession and a desperation to find the perfect system for achieving result. It’s a direct child of:
- the overload culture created by work trends. Daily demands are multiplied thanks to emails and instant/constant workplace communication, that then need to be acted upon - with an added step of deciding what kind of action it entails.
- the pervasiveness of knowledge work (which cannot be broken down into an assembly line and therefore micromanaged) thus pushing the responsibility of output on the individual contributor
The author subtly proposes that the responsibility of productivity management should fall on the organization—via the culture they create, not via micromanagement.
- As a writer, for example, I wouldn’t want my manager dictating which tasks I should be working on today and for how long. But I do want the manager structuring my job description and working environment to filter or limit the type and quantity of communication I should be receiving and acting upon.
Personal productivity systems may, with varying mileage, manage and resolve all the tasks being demanded of an individual. But it never solves the sheer amount of tasks coming in, which is part of the problem.