Peace is a Lie, there is only Productivity

When do you feel most productive?

Productivity. That delightful metric by which everyone lives.

A loathsome word.

Necessary.

But loathsome, nonetheless.

I feel the most productive at days end. Having buried myself in a good book or some hard earned music at the end of a long days efforts.

You see, one cannot properly evaluate his own productivity in the moment. It is antithetical to the effort, both to contemplate your productivity while simultaneously being productive.

After all, productivity is a measure of one’s planning, commitment, focus, and skill. And to divide yourself from the task at hand to measure those qualities, one must sacrifice a measure of commitment and focus.

This would, according to reason, inhibit the productivity by way of measuring the productivity.

This is the key to feeling productive properly. At the end of your task, you can then evaluate it, measure it, improve upon it, and then implement the next iteration of the desired task.

Now, you might say that one could become increasingly efficient at both the task and the measurement, and thereby achieve both simultaneously. While this could be true, I would argue that the technique is not scalable, as at some point the complexity of tasks simply becomes too much for one person to both attend to and measure.

Thus, it is better to train the skills separately, practice them together only on tasks of little importance, and never apply both on tasks of great importance (at the same time).

Productivity, unfortunately, has become the byword of the taskmaster. Rather than allowing the worker to pursue greatness, he is instead harassed by his corporate superiors. This driving force is rarely implemented by way of encouragement, but rather by smothering the workers good labors under the blanket of perpetual critique.

And thus, I reach the crux of the matter. At work, there can be no peace, for the laborer must strive for newer and more profound heights of productivity, of which the taskmaster himself is thoroughly incapable of achieving.

By this, your workforce is crushed. Joy is sapped from the doing of one’s calling, one’s commission. This translates poorly, in both his work, and in the experience of the customers that drive productivity in reality.

Peace has become a lie, for everyone involved in the process. There is only productivity. And productivity is declining.