Productivity Will Go Down This Year
But you probably won’t hear business leaders talking about it.
Productivity will go down this year, as more workers get forced back into the office and back into commutes that suck up a significant portion of their day’s attentional capacity and time. It will go down because it will have to, as workers begin having to worry about childcare and eldercare again, flitting all across the city dropping off bodies and picking up lunch. Time spent exercising, daydreaming, and doing the dishes in between work tasks will be replaced with time stuck in aimless meetings. Breaks in the sun will be supplanted by dull moments eating yogurt trapped under fluorescent light. This will not magically boost our ability to focus or execute tasks — quite the opposite.
Soon many of us will be surrounded by our coworkers and bosses for the first time in eighteen months, and the distraction of their presence and the pressure to put on a suitable performance of professionalism will hang over us, and wreck our flow. Our habits will be disrupted, our hobbies abandoned, and our carefully cultivated work-life balance will be forced to erode.
Home cooked meals will be replaced with dripping-wet fast casual salads in plastic tubs. Moments of stillness and reflection will be eclipsed by blaring speaker phones on the bus…
