The rush for increased productivity

In all likelyhood, unless you work as a freelance¹, you will spend most of your professional career worrying about a variety of issues, most of which are not strictly related to your core expertise. Dreaming of your career as a super-duper manager, I bet you can figure on all sorts of cool things happening to you here and there but… hey, that’s only half the story!

Get your feet on the ground

Close your eyes and try to imagine your work day without the need to communicate with other people, receive an assignment from your boss, meet the stress of a deadline for task completion, agree, laugh and cry together with collegues near you… ok, you got the idea… Welcome to the Stone Age: now take up bow and arrows and go out hunting for mammuths… ok, a dodo is probably a better choice for Mr. One-man-does-it-all. You know, hunting is a risky business.

Back to modern times, there’s no more place for soloists out there (and there’s probably no much of a point too), as generally each-man-does-his-own is more the case in complex societies. Every human form of life is exceedingly more inter-dependent and inter-connected with one another in any given group. Every single human activity produces social effects, and your working day-to-day is no exception to the rule.
Generally, I find myself busy most of the time getting and providing useful informations to coordinate each other activities, rather than doing the sort of stuff that lives up to my official resume. My personal productivity depends in large part on how well I’m able to organize my activities, apportion my resources, and exercise discipline in pursuing whatever goals I consider important for the business I work for. This leads us to the real point: the need to increase productivity per time unit.

Your road to productivity zen is paved with good intentions

Yes, I know. The general definition of productivity must be something like the relation of output to input in real (physical) terms, well… things like that. Thus, for an industrial company, we might measure the number of products produced per worker to get back an efficacy index. This is the so-called “labor productivity” measure, since the denominator of the ratio includes only the labor input. The speculation over this concept originates back in the fordist era, where it seemed appropriate for the concept of personal productivity to be related to output in a set of given activities over successive periods.
However, since we are human beings, not machines, productivity is to me more of a condition than a situation, as we are subject to a variety of factors whom we cannot take into account in any functional model. I’m aware that scholars developed a whole serie of statistic equations capable of balancing results over longer periods of time, but no one statician took into account the amount of stress generated on people’s minds by adherence to such models, and no one could calculate neither the costs for society at large nor the overall cultural impact on our lifestyle.
However, despite such an evidence, we all know about the Joneses: we try yo keep up with them but, unfortunately, every time we get close, they refinance.

Truth be told, dear manager, there will always be someone more efficient than you. There are those who are actually more productive and those who just appear to be more productive than you. Your colleagues, friends and acquaintances might all seem Stakanov’s pupils. Their new cars, maid service, vacations overseas, tailored suits and hi-tech gadgets all seem to confirm your suspicions. The more they earn, the more they value and the better professionals they are, you might think…
However, you are only seeing part of the entire picture. The missing information might change your mind. For example, the excess time spent in the office, if experienced regularly, comes to detriment to the rest of your life. Moreover, the emotional impact caused by people’s poor ability to make decisions or keeping up with responsibilities, that is task overload, will eventually impair your overall performance on time, a huge cost that is generally invisible to a casual observer. Indeed, this cost is real, and the bill needs to be paid, sooner or later.

Your productivity goals and plans need to be personal

Your aims should be tailored to your specific condition alone and no one else’s. When you stop comparing and contrasting, you effectively pull yourself out of the race to keep up with the Joneses. By the way, we all have a different set of skills, so it’s by far a better choice to improve your own set, rather than trying to mimic an ideal and unreal personality, which only leads to frustration and feelings of inadequacy. The sense of accomplishment that comes from improving your professional performance should be the ultimate prize.