You’re not losing your mind.
A constant stream of social media posts on the internet right now promise to pull back the curtain on the next great advancement in usefulness, productivity, or shiny automation engines.
The cult of productivity is always knocking on our doors because it’s a part of a $10 billion institution that never sleeps, and our hyperconnectedness amplifies it.
“Howtoism” (aka self-improvement) has been a large part of traditional publishing, and there are more than 45,000 titles in print to prove it. It’s built on planned obsolescence, each new title having the average shelf-life of about six months.
“Beware of technology that claims to solve your problems with more technology.” – Manoush Zomorodi, author of ‘Bored and Brilliant’
The more connected we become, the more our brains get addicted to that sweet hit of clicking on solutions to the problems we didn’t know we had, finding shortcuts to hyper-proficiency, and the answers to our FOMO.
It never lasts long, though. You find yourself clicking around the next day for the very same thing: the latest hack, the freshest app, webinar, or podcast that seems promising.
Is your “busyness” amounting to anything useful?
Tech addiction is real. There are whole movements rising against it and holidays dedicated to unplugging.
With 5G, fiber, the Internet of Things, and the “smartification” of entire cities, digital overwhelm can swallow us, and our time simultaneously seeps away searching for new ways to manage our time.
“Most of us have experienced this creeping sense of being overwhelmed: the feeling not merely that our lives are full of activity — that can be exhilarating — but that time is slipping out of our control.” – Oliver Burkeman, “Why time management is ruining our lives”
Productivity wasn’t a part of our vernacular until the late 1800s, right around the birth of the telephone, transcontinental travel by rail, and the arrival of the first time management guru (hired by a steel company in 1898 to improve industrial efficiency).
The cult of productivity has you
In the economic sense of the word, productivity is now defined as “… the effectiveness of productive effort … as measured in terms of the rate of output (of goods, products, etc.) per unit of input (of labour, materials, equipment, etc.) ….” (O.E.D.).
But the origins of the word are from the post-classical Latin, productivitas. Translation: creative power.
Maybe it’s time…
