Personal-productivity systems like Getting Things Done don’t address the insidiously haphazard way that work unfolds at the organizational level; they only help individuals cope with its effects.
Not long afterward, Mann posted a self-reflective essay on 43 Folders, in which he revealed a growing dissatisfaction with the world of personal productivity. Productivity pr0n, he suggested, was becoming a bewildering, complexifying end in itself—list-making as a “cargo cult,” system-tweaking as an addiction. “On more than a few days, I wondered what, precisely, I was trying to accomplish,” he wrote. Part of the problem was the recursive quality of his work.
The knowledge sector’s insistence that productivity is a personal issue seems to have created a so-called “tragedy of the commons” scenario, in which individuals making reasonable decisions for themselves insure a negative group outcome. An office worker’s life is dramatically easier, in the moment, if she can send messages that demand immediate responses from her colleagues, or disseminate requests and tasks to others in an ad-hoc manner.
One of the few academics who has seriously explored knowledge-work productivity in recent years is Tom Davenport, a professor of information technology and management at Babson College. Many organizations claim to be interested in productivity, he told me, but they almost always pursue it by introducing new technology tools—spreadsheets, network applications, Web-based collaboration software—in piecemeal fashion.
Fittingly, we can derive a clear vision of a more productive future by returning to Merlin Mann. In the final years of 43 Folders, Mann began dabbling in podcasting. After shuttering his Web site, he turned his attention more fully toward this emerging medium. Mann now hosts four regular podcasts. One show, “Roderick on the Line,” consists of “unfiltered” conversations with Mann’s friend John Roderick, the lead singer of the band the Long Winters.
Up until now, there has been little will to instigate this shift in responsibility for productivity from the person to the organization. As Davenport discovered, most knowledge-work companies have been more focussed on keeping up with technological breakthroughs that might open up new markets. To get more done, it’s been sufficient to simply exhort employees to work harder.
Consider instead a system that externalizes work. Following the lead of software developers, we might use virtual task boards, where every task is represented by a card that specifies who is doing the work, and is pinned under a column indicating its status. With a quick glance, you can now ascertain everything going on within your team and ask meaningful questions aboutwork any one person should tackle at a time. With this setup, optimization becomes possible.
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