1.
What’s Wrong with
Productivity?
Part I
Tiago Forte
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2.
7 Reasons the
productivity industry
is just begging to be
DISRUPTED
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3.
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• Thousands of productivity articles published allow
bored office workers to procrastinate without
feeling too guilty about it
• This time they believe they really will learn the
Ultimate 5 Productivity Hacks that will
instantaneously and magically transform everything
they hate about their job.
• I’m constantly berating my audience to not think
about productivity in terms of “tips and tricks.” Ugh.
Which brings me to my second point…
1. It is driven by CLICKBAIT
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It counts as work if
you’re reading about
work, right?

4.
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• Productivity can no more be achieved by collecting
productivity tips than wealth can be achieved by
collecting money-saving tips.
2. It reduces productivity to
“tips and tricks”
Productivity “tips and
tricks,” by their very
nature, are reductive
and linear.
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5.
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Productivity is many things — an emergent
phenomenon, an integrated system of systems, a
praxeology (theory of practical action) — but it is
certainly not merely a collection of wise sayings.
Reducing its immense scope and fractal complexity
to a series of bite-sized one-liners is great for click-
through rates, but terrible for our appreciation of how
profound the topic can be. These tips and tricks and
hacks and shortcuts, even when they contain an
ounce of truth, are interpreted subjectively,
implemented without context, measured subjectively
if at all, and passed along at the water cooler as
pearls of divinely-revealed truth. But actually, it’s not
our fault.productivitylink.smallworldsocial.com

6.
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• In the most subjective of all possible situations, as
we self-assess, self-diagnose, and self-prescribe
productivity remedies, we neglect to follow any sort
of systematic process to measure results.
• We as a society, employers and employees alike,
have made a collective pact not to ask too many
questions when it comes to measuring productivity.
3. It is not systematically
applied or quantified
Human intuition is often
very wrong when it
comes to predicting
human behavior
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7.
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We don’t want to define objective metrics for
success, because we would realize that our day-to-
day responsibilities barely resemble the job
description we were hired for. We don’t want to
quantify the time we spend, as this may reveal the
ungodly number of hours we work every week, at the
office and on our digital tethers. And most of all, we
are afraid to understand the real factors that affect
our productivity, lest we discover how deeply
dysfunctional the modern workplace has become.
Until the productivity industry develops a more
systematic approach that works at the level of a
single individual, it will remain in the realm of
speculation, conjecture, urban legend,productivitylink.smallworldsocial.com

8.
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• Companies like Workday offer suites of tools to
track everything from average email length to
social media activity to time spent in the
bathroom.
• This may seem a direct contradiction of my
previous point, but virtually all the services I’ve
come across have one disturbing thing in
common — they are designed to be used by
management as essentially surveillance
mechanisms, microanalyzing and
micromanaging the most minute behaviors of
4. It is top-down and
authoritarian
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9.
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The rationale behind these services ranges from
questionable — tracking an employee’s online
activity to determine how likely they are to quit — to
downright dystopian — predicting which employees
are likely to exceed their budgets, fall short of
performance targets, or do something unspeakably
heinous like take paid maternity leave. I don’t know
about you, but I’m not willing to trust that upper
management’s definition of productivity is in line with
that of individuals.
Even corporate wellness programs, which have
grown to a $6 billion business serving over 50% of
large companies, are a little scary.
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10.
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• Subjecting your employees to surveillance and blanket
metrics goes against everything we know about employee
satisfaction and motivation, and I predict a backlash from
top-performing employees against management-by-metric.
• The alternative is a bottom-up approach, one relying on
education, training, and peer-to-peer support to help
employees both define and measure their own progress.
But that is a subject for another post…
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11.
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Part 1... To be continued.
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