Reimagining Time in the Age of Productivity Apps
How our obsession with digital efficiency creates new burdens, and why reimagining time as ecology might be the true path to productivity.
Fred was just about done for the day. All he had left was to update his kan ban boards, review tomorrow’s meeting schedule, confirm agendas, check the company messaging app, get in his meditation, do a bit of stretching and relax a bit before bed. Should be a short time. Until it wasn’t and he’d spent another hour getting all his productivity apps and systems synced and updated. More tasks had been added by his team.
We’ve created all these digital architectures designed to maximise our efficiency, measuring our societal worth with checkboxes, Kan Ban and Pomodoro sprints and cycles. Yet with all this, we find ourselves with less time than ever before.
But perhaps the path to productivity lies not in better and more systems, but in a fundamental reimagining of our relationship to time itself?
To get to changing that relationship though, we need to understand how many, not all, productivity systems and tools can end up making us less productive.
Productivity tools, not necessarily systems, often end up leaving us in “productivity debt.” We create email filters that result in forgotten inboxes. Many feature tagging systems, which at first are simple, but can become unwieldy quite quickly. Then there’s productivity app overlap, with many doing the same things, just in different steps. Automations may work at first, but API keys get changed or break and then you’ve got to debug them.
German sociologist Hartmut Rosa has backed this tendency of ours to fill up knowledge work on a constant cycle that means we can’t quite get ahead and we will fill time with new work.
Many people end up with creeping and increasing complexity, but without any corresponding capabilities. Over time, the cognitive overload in maintaining these systems exceeds their benefits. We are left endlessly chasing new productivity apps and systems. This can lead people to a form of productivity bankruptcy.
W might even apply an economic theory, Jevons Paradox, where improvements in efficiency result in increased consumption of whatever resource is being economised. With productivity tools and some systems, they promote saved time. Never happens. The paradox is that the supposed saved time is filled with new tasks and jobs. We end up with less free time.
There’s a sort of hidden entropy in many productivity tools and systems as well. It’s the hidden cost, or sunk cost fallacy, of managing these systems. You spend 30 minutes a day organising your task manager, another 15 logging activities and another 20 looking at various dashboards. We know this increases complexity and thus entropy.
Then there’s the uneasy relationship of productivity systems to capitalism. It is a sort of contradiction. Productivity tools and systems promise to help the person escape the mundanity of the rat race, while giving them the tools to excel within it. It becomes a problem which cannot be solved, only continuously addressed through new products and methodologies.
Many of these systems and tools claim greater peace will be found. Time for mindfulness anyone? A walk in the woods? Reaching “flow state” or “mind like water” states that are so often proclaimed. It is a rather odd perspective of appearing both optimised and spiritualised at the same time. Bit of an oxymoron. Doing nothing becomes commodified with “strategic rest.”
Reimagining Our Relationship With Time
Perhaps we might look at time ecologically rather than economically. If we look back at pre-industrialised societies, much of their productivity was based on the environment within which they lived.
In this sense, we might design productivity tools and systems around the natural rhythms of our energy states during the day (some do suggest this), rather than maximise every minute. We might create “digital microseasons” that are based on different modes throughout the year. Rather than designing interfaces that impose industrial time frames, we might consider ones that respond to biological cycles.
Many productivity apps today promote collaboration, helping teams be more productive. They’re on the right track, but these tools today tend to enforce an industrialist approach and conformity rather than what Ivan Illich calls “convivial tools”. They would measure the quality of engagement rather than the quantity of output. Systems that create meaningful work rather than just efficient work.
Rather than today’s linear productivity approach, we might take lessons from cultures that work in cyclical time. Tools that respect fallow periods are a necessary aspect of creativity. Interfaces that distinguish between qualities of time rather than total uniformity.
Perhaps we might borrow a metaphor from agriculture, we might imagine productivity as cultivation rather than extraction. Time as something we participate in as opposed to exploiting.
All the technologies exist to make this happen. We’re just missing the cultural frameworks to get there. This isn’t insignificant an undertaking, it means a shift in the narratives about productivity. As we know, technology doesn’t solve problems, humans do. So this becomes a perceptual innovation that leverages existing technologies.
Interesting post! Are you familiar with Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman? A lot of his work explores this topic and our relationship to time.