Productivity Paradox
An exposé on the chaos of the modern workplace and how the very tools designed to make us more productive are doing the exact opposite.
Episode summary
For thousands of years, the workplace was very much a physical space. In agrarian societies, farmers tilled land, sowed crops, and reared and kept animals. Artisans crafted clothing, footwear and tools.
Then, in the 18th century, the industrial revolution came along and threw out the rulebook. Over the space of about 80 years, we went from subsistence-based work to mass production. We ditched our farms for factories, the outdoors for offices. It was an irrevocable shift in how we work – and the way we think about it.
Today, we’re going through another seismic shift, powered by the internet. Our colleagues no longer occupy the same physical space, office, country, or time zone. To meet this challenge, we turned to tools to help us, just like we did in the pre-information age, but this time we built apps. And not just one or two. We built thousands.
Although these apps were developed like tools, they’ve been problematic at best, often designed with very little consideration for how they might be used by other organizations with different structures. The result is a productivity paradox.