WHY PRODUCTIVITY IS BOOMING BUSINESS
Getting stuff done has become an industry. Endless tools and apps are there to help us to be more productive and on the other hand, millennials have to be careful to avoid ending up in a burnout. Where does the drive to be extremely productive come from and why has it become such an industry? Productivity comes in two types: the economic context and the modern context. The economic context defines productivity as “the fact of being able to generate, create or bring forth goods and services”. Nowadays we tend to look at productivity in a different way. It’s still about getting things done, but it’s going way too far. It’s about getting more things done in fewer amounts of time: the modern context of productivity. Everybody is trying to get the best out of their days and they’re focusing on what to do to boost their productivity at work.
The evolution of productivity goes way back. But in the early 2000s, once digital productivity tools became available, it accelerated really fast. In 2006, when Google Calendar was unveiled, people were able to reduce time to schedule their meetings with others. Present-day we can’t get enough of tools helping us to make our life efficient. People are busier than ever, living the life in a stress society. Not only digital companies are involved in this evolution. Even the food industry is taking total life optimization damn serious and is engineering ways to let people live their life to the fullest. Because, why spent too much time on preparing food when the only thing you need to do is taking personalized pills to be sure you’ll stay healthy or remain focused for 18 hours a day. Do you remember the movie ‘Limitless’? It seemed to be surrealistic, but this is really happening. In my opinion, being as productive as possible can be achieved by rearranging the way you work. Reading up on books like ‘Rework’ or ‘The 4-hour workweek’shows you that doing things the other way around can save you tons of time. Consider reading some of these stories, before driving yourself to the abyss. Even when the industry is providing you products to expand your productivity, our human body is still not made for this type of (work) load. Someday you’ll bump into a man with a hammer that smashes you back to reality.
