The Obvious “Productivity” Problem You’re Missing: Part 1
If you watch YouTube or read Medium, you may have noticed a trend: personal productivity. It seems like everyone is talking about which app they use to manage their to-do list, note-taking, or PKM system. Notion and Obsidian tutorials abound and everyone has a method for their Zettlekasten. But in all the hubbub, very few people seem to be asking the most obvious questions. Why do I need a personal productivity system? What am I saving all these notes for? Will all the time I invest in picking and populating the right to-do app actually make me any more productive? Why be productive in the first place?
Efficiency Births Productivity
Productivity is the golden calf of the industrial revolution. People still had things to do before factories littered the landscape, but the things were not measured in hours. Food needed to be sourced and prepared, shelter needed to be built, clothing needed to be made and mended. If you didn’t do these in time, you went hungry, naked, or cold. There was a simple give-and-take to existence. But then we humans began creating widgets.
This change reordered priorities. Rather than focus on putting food on the table, the average human being had to figure out how many widgets they had to make in order to afford to put food on the table. If they were…
