The Productivity Fallacy

I’m a big fan of Thomas Oppong’s writing on Medium. He has a lot of wonderful insights. I think he does a really good job of articulating his message in an engaging way with good word economy. It’s no wonder the number of people who read his work increases by hundreds each week.

In a March 30th article, The Daily Highlight Method, Thomas asserts:

Getting better work done demands singleness of purpose.

I agree with Thomas. But. . .

157 million people in the U.S. workforce. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that roughly 9.5 million people are self-employed. That means 147.5 million work for someone else. (I produced a sea of numbers that I realized will not be interesting to most people so I moved it all to the footnotes.¹)

Stats. . .blah. . .blah. . .blah. . .stats.

Approximately 90 million people work under a boss who exercises some degree of control over how they spend their time at work. 90 million people also work alongside other people, perhaps in small teams of people.

And this is where productivity takes a major hit.

In my job, there are very few of us in the company. That means you fill a lot of roles. And, there is only one manager: the owner. So, you can imagine that he’s pretty close to the action.

And that means I have very little control over my time at work. I don’t often get to work for hours on end without interruption. I don’t even get to ignore email or #Slack which means the interruptions are almost endless.

So, the norm becomes operating in seams of opportunity: 15 minutes here or 30 minutes there. The goal, of course, is to be as productive as possible during those times — but rarely do they extend to triple-digit spans of time being able to focus on just one thing. And rarely does my top priority align with my boss’s. (Of course, that just highlights our communication issues.)

And, I know I’m not alone in my experience. In fact, team size often has a direct correlation to lost productivity. That is, the bigger the team, the less effective the work. But, if you give enough monkeys a typewriter. . .²

That said, it’s okay to chase the ideal. All self-improvement happens outside the ideal. Just don’t let yourself get too discouraged when the pursuit of “singleness of purpose” is as far out of reach for you as a trip to the moon or Hamlet for a group of Gibbons.

Thanks for reading!

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¹The BLS also tells us that around 90% of businesses employ 20 or fewer people. In those businesses, let’s assume that 1 person owns the business and 2 different people fill management roles in the company. If they all employed exactly 20 people, 17 would be regular employees with 3 people in ownership or managerial roles.

Extend that rough ratio across the 133 million or so people that work in that size category and you’ve got roughly 100 million people who work for someone else.

For fun, let’s now assume that 10% of employees have complete discretion over their work. Now, back to the main article.

²The infinite monkey theorem basically says that if you give enough monkeys typewriters, eventually they would manage to reproduce — at random — Shakespeare’s entire works. Turns out, it would take a sum of monkeys that would fill the entire known universe thousands of times the age of the universe to reproduce just Hamlet. But, in the words of Lloyd Christmas, “so you’re telling me there’s a chance.”