“I think there’s sort of a linguistic thing going on.”
Hearing the above remark by Clay Collins in a talk with Duff McDuffee about the limits of the word “productivity,” a frustration I’ve harbored for weeks suddenly uncoiled.
I’m over productivity. It’s outlived its usefulness as a focal point and framework for meaningful discussion.
Through overuse and misuse, productivity has become an amoeba word, a term whose meaning can morph to any usage the speaker or writer chooses by changing its frame of expectation. Productivity joins the ranks of words like “success,” “spirituality,” and “growth” to mean whatever the person using them decides they mean in the moment.
Once people start using the word “productivity” to describe experiences, actions and accomplishments in the same breath, it means everything and nothing. It narrows and contours how we discuss and perceive experiences, and how we assign values to them. If someone argues that having an enjoyable dinner with friends is “productive,” all I can say now is “Oh, grow up!”
Linguistic overload
“I still remember a shock I had in Chicago in 1964,” Ivan Illich recounted 25 years later. “We were sitting around a seminar table; opposite me sat a young anthropologist. At the critical point of what I thought was a conversation, he said to me, ‘Illich, you can’t turn me on, you do not communicate with me.’ For the first time in my like I became aware that I was being addressed not as a person but as a transmitter. After a moment of disarray, I began to feel outrage.”
In the Sixties and Seventies, “communication” was the pet amoeba word of sociologist and pop psychologists. The exploration of dreams and reflections gave way to transactional analysis. Through a similar clinical reductionism, productivity is the knowledge worker’s socially acceptable proxy for self-development.
Personal development gurus have transplanted the term “productivity” from the corporate rubric of operations management and from human resources (the technical term for “people”). Productivity as researched by operations management is an external measure of a firm’s return on investment in its workforce.
Knowledge workers have appropriated this standard and internalized it into an ethic. Values are reified into measurable objectives, and any objective that doesn’t easily lend itself to measurement risks being overlooked.
Limiting the scope of productivity to the practical
It’s not necessary to scrap the word “productivity” altogether, but it is important to ensure that what you mean by it isn’t easily open to question. In my case, I realized that I understand productivity as maintaining clarity of mind by capturing a managing anything that consumes attention. That’s not how 99.9% of the population defines productivity.
If a word requires an explanation to distinguish its particular usage in a sentence from its common understanding, it’s probably an amoeba word. Words with no accountability have no utility.
Comments
Vered
// Jun 20, 2008 at 7:36 pm
“I understand productivity as maintaining clarity of mind by capturing [and?] managing anything that consumes attention”
I think that’s brilliant.
Duff
// Jun 20, 2008 at 11:27 pm
Great post. Very thought provoking.
Productivity is a nominalization–a noun that is derived from a verb. In this case the verb is “produce.” I think there are good reasons we don’t consider an enjoyable dinner with friends to have produced something, for producing generally means “for some other end,” not as an end in itself.
I like that David Allen has reframed what productivity means though, for he is bringing mindfulness and stress-reduction into corporate environments. It’s bringing consciousness and intentionality to producing–what are we producing, why are we producing it, how does the effect of producing it affect people, etc.
It’s almost like something about producing automatically takes one out of a mindful state, out of an awareness of the present moment, out of an awareness of why we are producing this rather than something else. Anything that can help remind us of what is important in these moments is good, in my opinion. Yet still there might be other things that are needed to, like a balance between activities that produce and activities that don’t!
Charlie Gilkey | Productive Flourishing
// Jun 21, 2008 at 1:03 pm
“I think there’s a linguistic thing going on.”
There is a linguistic thing going on - but it’s scarcely realized. There was a discussion of metaphors and words on my blog a couple of months ago in which I generally went overboard and made an ass of myself by taking a very hard line, but the line of reasoning is basically correct.
You’re absolutely right: when words get diluted, mutated, coopted, and abused, they lose the power to motivate and direct like they once did. I fear “productivity”, “passion”, “happiness”, and such are now too impotent for some of us, but we’re a bit stuck because language is used for the transmission of ideas and we must use the words other people use to communicate effectively.
I still love your one liners. “Words with no accountability have no utility.” Great line, great thought, and great article.
Charlie Gilkey | Productive Flourishing
// Jun 21, 2008 at 6:33 pm
Actually, I gave the wrong link for the one in which I made an ass of myself. The correct link is here: Don’t We Get to Choose What Words Mean?
The answer: not as much as most people think we do.
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