Workers of the world, unite!

Have you read the previous post? What nonsense: “measurement of productivity gets produced by measuring achievement of hierarchies of specific objectives and by measuring connectedness to them, both in action as through time”.

Or is it? Remember that we applied it to the context of comparing productivity systems. Matthew Cornell’s implicit reasoning is basically this: you can compare the performance of productivity systems by quantifying the output they produce. More is better (or less of course, depending on your metric).

It holds nicely on first sight. The productivity system I used prior to engaging in GTD for instance, weekly produced half a dozen of conflicts in my agenda and at least as much forgotten commitments. After implementing the basic GTD process both never ever happened again. Likewise, by working in contexts, there were always next actions available to plug up some free time. Net result was more things done. More is better.

After a while I took this quite literally and started to count the amount of tasks I completed. Results were impressive. While I completed 50 to 70 tasks during the first weeks, after a couple of months of counting I completed 50 to 70 tasks a day. Consistently. There’s a lot more to tell about this, but suffice to say that I actually made a lot of real progress during this period.

So then, did I discover a better system? It was producing more of the goodies at the various levels and I felt very well connected with this output. So indeed, by all measures, this new system had to be superior. But today I’m suffering deep procrastination. The system crashed one and half months ago and since then, I refuse to start it up again. My basic systems are still running (in terms of collecting and processing and reviewing), but I’ve literally shut down the system that produced the extra.

What is going on? At first I thought I no longer felt connected to the targets I’ve been aiming for, and to some extend this will hold on. Yet on the other hand, the refusal – as this is how I feel it – is more on an action level. I literally refuse to start it up again. This is a wildcat strike. This is insubordination.

This is a worker who is saying: this is enough. It is a worker talking to a thinker. The worker or the doer is supposed to get the things done. The thinker or planner is preparing it all. Most of the attention in the theories goes to this thinker and to his communication of ‘actions to be done’ to the doers. Even a fairly practical book as Getting Things Done almost exclusively addresses this thinker (with one small and rather funny exception – the two minute rule). Even worse, things that are difficult for the thinker (detail planning) are left to the doer. We’ll dive deeper into this in our next post.

In this post, we simply conclude that maximizing production is not enough. Productivity systems are not merely about efficiency and effectivity. They’re about sustainability as well.