In the age of AI, I wonder how humans and organizations will perceive productivity. During the onset of the Industrial Age, productivity was defined by efficiency. The more you did and faster you worked, the more productive you were perceived to be. Today, we talk about new large language models in similar terms — how fast they are at complex tasks and how much they get done. Call this the widget philosophy, rooted in the Efficiency Movement from the early 1900s.
In 2026-2030, as knowledge workers begin transitioning from doing work to orchestrating multiple AI agents to which work is delegated, will organizations measure productivity of their human employees in terms of how much they get done and how quickly?
That may be a slippery slope. We’ll need to redefine what productivity means in the context of humans. If we don’t, we’re all kind of screwed, and yes, AI will take our jobs away.
As Cal Newport writes in The New Yorker, “during the past two decades or so—a period of rapid technology innovation, which produced laptops, smartphones, ubiquitous cloud computing, and Google—American productivity growth has suffered a sustained slowdown. We gained access to an armada of supercharged workplace tools, and yet we’re not getting much more done.”
We might seem frantically busy all the time — juggling work IMs, full calendars, emails, WhatsApp group chats — but what these tools have created is a culture of work-like activities, not more efficient or relaxed days.
Stewart Butterfield, (ironically) co-founder of Slack, the ever-pinging and notoriously distracting instant messaging software for work, even goes so far as calling out fake work of this ilk as “hyperrealistic work-like activities.”
Stalling productivity is one aspect, but the deeper one is what the pursuit of Efficiency-era productivity — how fast you churn out widgets — has cost us.
The human case for rethinking productivity was taking shape well before AI’s entrance. Years before ChatGPT, “productivity culture” was deemed toxic by a stream of writing from anti-hustle authors like Jenny Odell, Devon Price and Celeste Headlee.
And rightly so. It’s no secret that knowledge workers of the twenty-first century are the most burnt out of any previous generation of office workers. Anne Helen Petersen’s pandemic-era critique of hustle culture dubbed millennials as the “Burnout Generation.”
The Gen-Z led Quiet Quitting movement also originated around the same time, with the thesis that we work to live and not the other way round — contrary to what the “broets” of LinkedIn would want you to believe.
Whether we think of productivity as toxic or not, as a species, we are united in a desire to prosper in our lives, spend time in our relationships and make time for our hobbies.
To make that easier and to prevent losing in a race with AI we can never win, an intentional definition of productivity — and individual, mindful ways to measure it — is what’s required.
I’m hopeful we’ll head steadfastly in that direction, with opinionated tools and processes, books and ideas that speak more to the human experience and less to speed and efficiency, as the latter won’t serve us much longer.