Productivity isn’t getting things done. It’s getting the right things done.
The push from so many management books since the rise of Taylorism, and now accelerated by AI, is that productivity is doing. It’s that productivity is not thinking. Productivity is not creativity. Productivity is not connection. Because we can’t measure thinking, or creativity or connection. And in most cases, it’s not even a second-order effect; it’s third order. The connection helps you build the next team which builds the product.
We can measure lines of code; we can measure velocity; we can count closed PRs and track how long a card was stuck in a status. We can build workflows in Jira that ensure the process is followed and every minute is accounted for. And users still want Trello.
The unmeasured work is what gives rise to experiments, or better relationships, or spotting the underlying problem. It makes the doing easier; it helps us find the best thing to do. It builds foundations for learning and for novel approaches to make the doing better. It’s the glue work that makes great managers great, and it is often the work us straight white men overlook because it’s the work that doesn’t show up on the timesheet or the dashboard, and when the people doing that work leave, everything they impact is a lagging metric; it’s the things that fall apart 3 months or 2 years from now because it’s no longer on the horizon.
The meta work is planning, learning, connecting, making space for mistakes; it’s resilience and duplication because we never want to rely on one person for everything. It’s stepping back to make connections, to consider a better way of doing this, to consider if this is still the right team culture for the current work, or the right structure. It’s recruiting now for the work you don’t know you’re going to need yet because by the time you know it’s too late to onboard someone. It’s building the safety nets and the monitoring and the maintenance. And it’s the work you always have to fight to justify because it doesn’t fit neatly into things that can be measured, automated and controlled.
And we’ve never been trained for it, at school or elsewhere. It’s daydreaming, it’s being lazy, it’s a waste of my time. It’s a walk in the woods, a long shower; it’s not moving your mouse despite your manager tracking you on that.
It’s not just slow work; it’s slow meta work.
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