What I've Been Thinking About
🔨 Individual productivity vs organizational productivity
The rise of individual productivity may be coming at the expense of organizational productivity. In the early stages, as individuals become more productive the productivity of the organization will increase. Continue on this trend and you will experience diminishing returns. Eventually, increased individual productivity gives way to a loss in organizational productivity. A maximally productive organization wouldn't be composed of maximally productive individuals.
While there's nothing inherently wrong with GTD it tends to promote individual efficiency. It prioritizes efficiency over effectiveness. It encourages you to capture everything you need to do, process it all, and begin knocking tasks out as efficiently as possible. If something would require less than 2 minutes to do, you're encouraged to do it right there and then. Otherwise, you're encouraged to match your tasks with the context you're in, essentially doing the kinds of tasks you based upon your current environment.
The harmful thing about this is that it naturally pulls you towards being highly efficient and reactive. It makes it feel like more tasks completed is better than fewer tasks completed without considering the priority and what is most important.
If we look towards manufacturing it's common knowledge that having all of your machines operate at 100% efficiency is a recipe for disaster. You operate the machines at the level of efficiency that makes sense for the productiveness of the factory as a whole. Just because some machines can produce 100 widgets/hr doesn't mean you should do it if the rest of the system can only handle 30 widgets/hr max. You'll chew through your resources and end up with piles of widgets that would lead to its own set of problems.
However, this seems to be where we're headed with our organizations where instead of machines we have knowledge workers. We expect each of our people to be as efficient as possible. Everyone needs to be operating at maximum efficiency. It may not be as obvious as extra parts piling up around a machine causing issues for the rest of the factory floor, but knowledge workers doing more because they can I think has similar knock-on effects to the rest of the organization.
Modern organizations seem to always have a million things they need to get done and are only getting a fraction of it completed. Teams that are dependent on one another barely have time for one another due to their own self-imposed workload. A maximally efficient team without slack means there is no flexibility and adaptability. Coordination issues are too difficult to deal with in real-time when it comes at the expense of promised deadlines. You end up coordinating quarterly or yearly, the brief moments throughout the year where you may come up for air to immediately resume drowning in your own work.
I'm not sure what the solution is to all of this, but it seems odd that we're so unwilling to experiment with how we work as an organization. The level of productivity in factories multiplied many orders of magnitude through novel thinking and a willingness to experiment. I would love to see what that kind of mindset and energy would look like in our work cultures.