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The dark history of our obsession with productivity
The Birth of Consultants
- Frederick Winslow Taylor, an industrial engineer and efficiency expert, would get himself a consulting gig with a company, observe the workers, and calculate how they could do their jobs faster.
- Best known as the parents of Cheaper by the Dozen, Peers Frank and Lillian Gilbreth were mining productivity by dividing human action into 17 motions and then determining which was the most efficient and effective way to do any task.
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SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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Key Ideas
A shift in measuring well-being
People in societies such as ancient Greece, imperial China, Medieval Europe, and colonial America did not measure people's well-being in terms of monetary earnings or economic output.
Measuring well-being: people vs money
The turn toward financial statistics means that instead of considering how economic developments could meet our needs, it instead is to determine whether individuals are meeting the demand of the economy.
Until the 1850s, social measurement in 19th-century America was a collection of social indicators known as "moral statistics," which focused on the physical, social, spiritual, and mental conditions of the people. Human beings were at the center, not dollars and cents.
Measuring progress and prosperity
What led to the pricing of progress in the mid-19th century was capitalism.
Capitalism is not just the existence of markets. It is also capitalised investment, where elements of society and life - including natural resources, technological discoveries, works of art, urban spaces, educational institutions, and people - are changed or "capitalised" into income-generating assets that are valued by their ability to make money and yield future returns.
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Key Ideas
The concept of Inbox Zero
'Inbox Zero' is a concept introduced by Merlin Mann, a way to handle your email by processing them to zero.
This is achieved by taking appropriate actions like filing, noting or replying, to ...
The Quest for Personal Productivity
The never-ending quest for personal productivity has spawned countless apps on the Smartphone App stores, and many bestseller books.
Personal Productivity has branched out in the field of dating, hotel stays, parenting and even eating.
Problems With 'Inbox Zero'
The people who implemented the 'Inbox Zero; method ended up getting more emails as they were replying to all their emails, with increased activity.
They also paradoxically started checking the inbox more often.
The anxiety levels increased by applying hyper-productivity.
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Key Ideas
Measuring Employee Productivity
Fixing employee productivity in the industrial age, when most workers were handling machinery and it’s parts, was a tedious but doable process. The managers had to fix the people who were making mi...
The Old Productivity Formula
The basic productivity formula(productivity= output divided by input) worked well in the industrial age as the output and input were clearly defined and measurable.
Today’s leaders need innovative solutions to measure and improve productivity in a knowledge-based workplace, as the measurement of output and input is not what it was.
Quality And Quantity
While assigning value to the output of knowledge workers, we cannot simply measure the output like before.
Coders and doctors cannot be measured by the hour, as their output is not uniform or consistent every hour.