Productivity is overrated. Yes, I just said that. It might come as a shock to you, but the way we currently view productivity is severely warped and causes us to overvalue it.
To start off, when I say “productivity” what comes to mind? My guess is that it’s a person hunched over a laptop for hours finishing a realllllllllly long document while their desk is littered with coffee mugs. While this person is able to get a significant amount of work done, how effectively are they using their time? I’d argue that they are actually worse than the average human.
To explain myself, let’s start with a definition of productivity: “the quality, state, or fact of being able to generate, create, enhance, or bring forth goods and services” according to Dictionary.com. This means that the person has to be able to come up with their own ideas or improve on that of others. While the person is getting a lot of stuff done, how likely is it that they’re making something of their own?
It is possible, authors would be a great example, but the vast majority of what we do is not for our own sake. Even if we take an alternate definition of productivity: “the rate at which a company or country makes goods, usually judged in connection with the number of people and the amount of materials necessary to produce the goods” from the Cambridge Dictionary, we must take into account the time spent (time can be considered a resource). From this alternate definition, the person is not productive as they have been working for hours.
I argue that we confuse productivity with focus, with obedience, with efficiency – actually the efficiency part makes sense. Anyway, to be truly productive, we must have our own ideas that we work upon. It will be quite difficult to start viewing productivity in this way and actually apply this viewpoint. Partially because of the problem with the education system and how it discourages creativity but that’s a topic for another time.