And, if you do a Google search for “how to increase productivity,” it becomes clear that pressures to be more productive are often laid at the feet of individuals. Indeed, the first page of results from the search all pretty much focus on and speak to individuals. Readers are told to track and limit the time they spend on tasks, set deadlines, eliminate distractions, listen to music that boosts productivity … the list goes on. And while those micro-level suggestions can have some value, they make productivity seem like a personal problem — or even a personal failing — rather than focusing on system-level changes at the macro level. The messages seem clear: work harder, strategize more, push yourself to become as efficient as you can be, and don’t try to blame the environment, conditions or luck if things go wrong. That pressure to project at least the appearance of productivity gets people, understandably, upset.**
One thing that the pandemic has highlighted is how hard we’ve been trying to side-step the limitations of being human. We live in a world with finite resources, both tangible and intangible, and we need to acknowledge that. We have to think carefully about where we allocate our finite resources (including our own time and energy) to make meaningful progress on complex issues. And, quite importantly, we need to acknowledge that people are not tools to be optimized or used till they’re depleted — especially since a study by the World Health Organization found that overwork killed more than 745,000 people in a single year.
*Luck can mean many things. It can mean being in the right place at the right time. It can mean being blessed with certain genetic gifts or upbringing. It can even mean having access to connections and open doors that aren’t available to all. Although dozens of articles across Forbes, Entrepreneur and Inc. regularly downplay the importance of luck, Scott Barry Kaufman highlighted in the Scientific American that while a certain number of traits — including passion, perseverance, imagination, intellectual curiosity and openness to experience — go a long way in explaining differences in success, the variance often is left unexplained (meaning that luck and opportunity may play a far greater role than first thought).
**As Cal Newport wrote in his Frustration with Productivity Culture article: “We should strive to be good at our jobs — to work deeply, to be reliable, to lead with vision. But, if our employers need more output for each unit of input they employ, we should be more comfortable in replying that, although we understand their predicament, solving it is not really our problem.”
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