Blog: The never-ending race for productivity

Performance Management

The never-ending race for productivity

For an individual, it becomes highly important to analyse why is it that we are striving to be more productive
The never-ending race for productivity

The ultimate purpose of life is to be more productive – professionally and personally. While it might be understandable as to why organizations are constantly trying to push productivity levels within its population, when I look at the top rung of the companies, the race is unbelievable. It is no longer enough to be smart or hard working or even both; one also needs to be able to do 48 hours of work within 24 hours to stay at the top and sometimes even that isn’t enough. 

I see innumerable applications and offerings available in the market to improve productivity and professionals who are into employee-productivity enhancements are in demand. 

Organizations want to know just how much time their employees spend at their desk, how they spend it and even which websites get most visibility. Companies like Culture Amp and Round Pegg are helping to organize surveys, assign a company culture score and measure ‘culture fit’. Offerings like Niko Niko and Aon Mood Ring go a step further and help organizations measure moods of their employees on a scale of 1 to 5. You can now measure when in the day your team is the happiest, and if Friday is truly the happiest day of the week. It shouldn’t surprise you when data shows people are happiest when working. There is very little left unmeasured these days. The HR department and managers now have an endless stream of data and unsure about what to do with those.

Individuals themselves are grappling with the many time tracking devices that exist. Most of my colleagues and friends have either a RescueTime, Toggl or ATracker installed on their devices. When the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge came up with Emotion Sense, it didn’t take a lot of time for users to adopt it. Articles on the best time tracking, mood tracking and productivity apps are most popular among all of us. 

Tracking is indeed a wonderful way to start to influence change. 

For an individual, it becomes highly important to analyse why is it that we are striving to be more productive. Is it because we want to give ourselves more leisure time or is it because we want to be able to fit in more work? Unless we have an answer to that, this mindless ploughing towards higher productivity isn’t sustainable. We wouldn’t know which of these endless offerings in the market suit our need. What might begin as a quest for a more fulfilling life might just end up taking us down the wrong path.

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Topics: Performance Management

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