Productivity And “Thinking” Are Somehow Viewed As Enemies At Work

We did have a brief flirtation with the “thought leader,” although that seems to have fallen off. Now they’re back to pugilists.

At work, or at least within white-collar work, there is typically a strong fascination with “productivity,” because there is some belief — somewhere — that said productivity will result in “output” or “growth” or even “bonuses,” and henceforth and heretofore anything in opposition of “productivity” must inherently be in some way bad.

In reality, if you’ve ever worked in an office environment for 17 minutes and 35 seconds, you know that virtually no bosses know how to even define “productivity” outside of an easily-observable number (i.e. a sales target or an operations target) or whether you’re sitting in a place they can see you and appear to have a computer in front of you. That’s it. I’ve worked on probably 90 marketing teams, full-time and freelance. I think I’ve literally seen one marketing manager out of those 90 who had any idea how to track productivity other than, “Oh, I see Susan is green on Slack. She must be working hard.”