A warning upfront: the last few post were rather pragmatic and goal oriented. They provided you with practical tips to become more productive and hopefully you found them helpful. Today’s post featured in the productivity week is very different, because it’s rather philosophical. It tries to give a little insight on a meta-level of productivity and how you can use this meta-level analysis for your own approach to productivity. The question that I’m trying to answer is: What exactly is productivity?
In the actual meaning of the word productivity literally means success in producing something. Do we actually mean that though, when we’re struggling for productivity?
Intuitively I’d say no, because a lot of people claim to be productive who actually never produced anything. As a matter of fact the productivity we value the most is productivity which produces abstract values rather than actual objects. We actually pay manual workers, who produce the mere objects of our consumption considerably less than people who only deal with immaterial values, like money or ideas. The production of objects might still seem more worthwhile than just doing recurring tasks like cleaning or preparing food though. Hannah Arendt, who wrote the highly recommendable book “The Human Condition”, therefore has a distinction between three kinds of human activity: labor, work and action. Labor includes recurring tasks like cleaning, child care, cooking etc., while work is the production of things. It leaves behind actual objects that we can touch. Labor is not given a lot of value in our society and nowadays the actual production of objects is of similarly low value to us, because nowadays any item can be mass produced in a factory for little money. Actual creation of products is rarely a matter of “productivity”, it’s a matter of machine efficiency!
On another level we tend to have respect for a craftsman, because he has skills that we lack. A craftsman can build and shape the material objects that stay in our world for quite some time. Contributing to a building that will keep for a century or two is something that is valued in our society. It is more of an immaterial value though: We are nostalgic, we like hand crafted products, because they remind us of a better time, when there was a unique living quality and everyone could still make an adequate contribution to a society.
Back in the day a bakery made everyones’ lives easier. The baker could make a unique contribution and was valued, as was the blacksmith or any craftsman. Due to their skills people didn’t have to do everything anymore, but could concentrate on their immediate work. If a farmer wasn’t any good at shaping wood to objects, it didn’t matter, because there was already someone in the community, who had that skill. This division of labour (Hannah Arendt wouldn’t call it that, that’s why I stick to my British spelling here) made it possible for everyone to contribute to the society according to their skills. It gave people more freedom and freed the bakers and blacksmiths from working on the fields.
Nowadays bread is produced in factories and blacksmiths are almost obsolete. In fact I’ve once seen the country vet shoe a horse in a village in North Germany, because there was no blacksmith in a hundred kilometers. Nowadays we just need much less manual workers, because of automation. In fact automation replaced skilled bakers with people operating machines that they don’t understand. There is a very insightful book by Richard Sennett with the title “The Corrosion of Character, The Personal Consequences Of Work In the New Capitalism“, in which he describes a nice case study of a fully automated bakery and the consequences this automation has for the self-image of the workers in this bakery.
A manual worker today is reduced to production line work and only contributes what could not be automated yet. He becomes a part of the machine that he is operating and the machine doesn’t stop for human needs – we introduced work in shifts, which makes the manual workers slaves of the machinery, who often only contribute a few steps of the whole production process of a product. Marx called this loss of sight for the final product “Entfremdung” – alienation. Alienation makes us alien to our own work, we lose sight of what we’re actually doing and what the bigger picture of our being-in-the-world means to us. I myself don’t agree with Marxism at all, which mainly deals with the implications of this alienation rather than the alienation itself, but the concept of alienation itself is a pretty straight forward fact in itself. Building even only one whole car by ourselves would have a much higher value than contributing a few bolts to a 1000 cars. In the end it only needs a monkey to contribute a few moves, right?
Automation is not all bad though – after all, this is not the industrial revolution and everyone can decide whether he wants to be a factory worker or not. Mostly we even outsource our manual work to factories in the East and don’t have to deal with all that alienation at all in Europe or the US. Automation has freed a lot of us from manual work. We can go about creative immaterial work, because the material world was already taken care of by automation. Machines produce the clothes we wear and the food we eat. Sadly even the slaughtering of our meat providing animals works automated nowadays. Automation is supposed to create a Utopia where mankind can free its mind to work creatively and intellectually instead of labouring away on the fields to sustain its children.
In the future machines are supposed to work independently to provide for us and to fulfil all our wishes. As a Computing and AI student I can assure you though that we are far far away from autonomous machines that do unguided decision making. We don’t even know how to teach computers about the real world yet! There is no need for Utopia fantasies or Dystopia fears, because technically both are out of our reach – at least for now.
Well, what does all this mean for us as intelligent people with access to state-of-the-art computers, the world wide web and the knowledge of the world? Or, to put this question differently: What the heck has that to do with you and me?!
The de-valuation of labour and production has of course a great impact on what you, me and especially the society out there regards as “productivity”. What society values likewise has an impact on what your activities are worth in the real world. Let’s start with some simple implications:
- Your own impression what is “productive” and what not, surely depends on what society values as “productive”.
- Therefore the value you attribute to your own activities and your own self-image depends on what society values as “productive”.
- Society itself rewards greater “productivity” with greater compensation, i.e. if you do something society values you’ll earn a lot of money or respect.
- Your own self-image and the judgement of society feed back into your impression what kind of actions are worthwhile.
If you grew up under the impression that production is for workers and labour for untrained human robots (the word “robot” stems from the russian word for work – a robot is therefore just a worker), you give low value to these kinds of activity and therefore will see both as a waste of your time. You will seek intellectual or at least immaterial work that deals with abstract values rather than things you can touch. You will judge people who do or even enjoy this kind of work and you will judge your children if they fail to see the worth of higher education and therefore “end up” in “manual slave work”. Never forget that your beliefs shape your reality and that mostly you didn’t come up with these beliefs. These beliefs were indoctrinated or – to use a more positive word – taught to you by your parents, teachers and by all sorts of media. They are not your own as long as you didn’t consciously choose them to be your beliefs.
This can have some rather interesting impacts on yourself. Did you ever have the feeling that society might be wrong about the worth that it assigns to some work or another? Did you ever feel nostalgic about good old traditional bakeries or did you play role play games or read fantasy novels to dive back into “a better time” when life was easier and closer to “what really matters”? Did you ever want to learn a traditional craft, but disregarded it, because you thought that you couldn’t make a living out of it? If you answer one of these questions with yes, it is very likely that your values differ from the values that society attaches to different forms of activity. In this case it could be worthwhile to explore how you really feel about the crafts or for jobs that just care for other people. Might there be a hidden desire to do something that is more meaningful to you rather than doing something that is valued by society? Never be afraid to question your beliefs!
If you now think that this idea is rather insane, then that’s fair enough, I myself do intellectual immaterial work and I have no desire whatsoever to go and produce something – apart from maybe a piece of art. I’m socialized like that, I enjoy knowledge and books and I love analysing abstract concepts. For me this line of thought doesn’t apply to myself, but rather to the people in my environment. A few of them are not interested in doing a job that society values at all. They are sculptors (mostly in the gravestone sculptor sense), plumbers or builders, chefs, kindergarten teachers or nurses and they love it! They won’t be rich, mostly they won’t even earn a decent salary to ever buy a house from, but they do enjoy their role in life, because their values are different from ours. We sometimes admire them for being so unselfish – especially in the case of the nurses and kindergarten teachers – or we think that they’re naïve, maybe we assume that they’re uneducated, but we definitely rarely want to switch with them.
The nurse I know lives across and has 5 A’s in A-Levels. She was accepted by Cambridge and rather became a nurse. My friend the sculptor has a decent German Abitur as well and chose to be a sculptor after finishing another apprenticeship as a draftsman, because he wanted to do something with his hands. The chef I know holds a first class degree in philosophy. They all decided that society’s values won’t make them happy. They’re not after the money or even after respect. They just do what they like, because they prefer it to immaterial intellectual work.
What are your reasons for doing what you do and how do you measure how productive a day was? Do you say things like: “Oh, I did nothing really, just a lot of household chores …” or “I was fixing my car … it’s just a hobby really …”? Do you judge people by the work they do? Well, that’s fair enough, if you know why you’re using the set of criteria you’re using! Consciously think about your values and also about what you want for yourself in life. Is it all about the money or the fame? Do you have a yearning for a more quiet, more grounded pace of life?
It is never too late to change your perspective or start something new. If you always wanted to know how to build your own furniture, why not go to a bookshop now and look for a book about the topic? You can always start something as a hobby and see whether you like it better than your well-paid intellectual job!
At the same time: thinking about what productivity actually means to you personally can be a first step to feeling more productive. Maybe your daytime job will always make you feel unproductive and unimportant, because your values are just all wrong (or right, but then your job is wrong). Consciously thinking about productivity and what kind of work/achievements would make you feel more productive is in fact the only way to become really productive. You can tick off item after item on your to-do list and still feel unproductive, if it’s really something else you want to be ticking off!
What is productivity for you? Find it out today!
Check out the other articles featured in the productivity week:
- Why being busy isn’t necessarily being productive
- How to make your procrastination productive –
Part 2 - How to make your procrastination productive –
Part 1 - Productivity tips from a busy bee
Amazing! Not clear for me, how offen you updating your http://www.selfdev.org.
Charlie
Hi Charlie, I update quite regularly at least 3 times a week, sometimes even 5 times like this week! If you want to keep updated, please subscribe to my RSS feed or my twitter-account: http://www.twitter.com/selfdevOrg !
Verena