Good piece. One minor point I wanted to expand upon, though:
After asking themselves this, some people might realize that they don’t actually need to be more productive. Why get more things done? If you work as a certain kind of corporate drone, becoming more productive might not make you or anyone else much better off. Perhaps you are rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic, becoming better at a job or project when you should be doing something else entirely. If your goal in work is to make you and your family better off, then it might be counterproductive to employ strategies that make you less happy or take you away from your family.
Productivity need not be confined to your career. You could seek to become more productive in your hobbies or even more productive in spending time with your friends and family.
Furthermore, productivity need not be confined to doing more things. It could be doing your existing tasks more quickly and efficiently. In fact, many people cite “free more time to spend with friends and family” as their core reason for wanting to be more productive.
In other words, productivity need not be confused with busywork, and I suspect this is primarily an artifact of linguistic heuristics (similar brain procedures get lightly activated when you hear “productivity” as when you hear “workout” or “haste” or even “forward march”).
If productivity were a currency, you could say “have I acquired more productons this week than last week with respect to my current goal?” If making your family well off can be achieved by lounging around in the pool splashing each other, then that is high family welfare productivity.
Good piece. One minor point I wanted to expand upon, though:
Productivity need not be confined to your career. You could seek to become more productive in your hobbies or even more productive in spending time with your friends and family.
Furthermore, productivity need not be confined to doing more things. It could be doing your existing tasks more quickly and efficiently. In fact, many people cite “free more time to spend with friends and family” as their core reason for wanting to be more productive.
In other words, productivity need not be confused with busywork, and I suspect this is primarily an artifact of linguistic heuristics (similar brain procedures get lightly activated when you hear “productivity” as when you hear “workout” or “haste” or even “forward march”).
If productivity were a currency, you could say “have I acquired more productons this week than last week with respect to my current goal?” If making your family well off can be achieved by lounging around in the pool splashing each other, then that is high family welfare productivity.