Productivity in the 21st century and why you need to shower more often.

This week we’re talking about Productivity and Your Shower.

Productivity is “results achieved per unit of time.” Productivity involves ACHIEVING. It doesn’t mean doing many tasks. It means FINISHING THEM AND adding VALUE.

Being productive means doing more in the same amount of time. Working more hours doesn’t make you more productive; it makes you less productive.

We often think that working more (putting in more hours to finish on time) makes us more productive, but in reality, it makes us less so. You’ve worked more hours to do the same thing. And probably the last hours have been the least useful since you were already tired.

How do we increase productivity?

1. Be better. Learn typing to write more in the same time.
2. Duplicate yourself. Hire people cheaper than you who, together, write the same in the same time.
3. Automate. Replace typists with photocopiers.
4. Innovate. Send faxes instead of letters. Send emails instead of faxes.
5. Find better things to work on (change business, market, client, activity…).

So, five ways to increase productivity. Four to “do more things”: do it better, scale with people, automate, or innovate.

The fifth one… “find better things to do!”

Which of them generates more profit?

How do we measure productivity in the 21st century? Let’s not use 20th-century stopwatches.

The first half of the 20th century (Industry 1.0 and 2.0) belongs to Taylor and Ford.

“We have a steam engine driving an assembly line,” they said. “Let’s measure every worker, optimize every position, every movement,” they said, “and we’ll make more cars in less time.”

But Drucker opened the door to knowledge work for the second half of the 20th century and the 21st century (Industry 3.0 and 4.0).

There are two types of work:

• Solid schedule jobs. Production or customer service. Most of what you’re paid for is being available. The outcome is directly linked to your hours; if you work overtime, you produce more parts and serve more customers.
• Liquid schedule jobs. Knowledge-based. Most of what you’re paid for is your ideas and decisions. The outcome is not directly tied to your hours; if you make the wrong decision today, you’ll have to delete that PowerPoint or those lines of code tomorrow when you realize it.

In solid schedule jobs, measuring productivity is easy.

1. Standardize.
2. Time.
3. Optimize.
4. Repeat from 1.

But in liquid schedule jobs, it’s not that straightforward.

• How do you standardize the work of a screenwriter? Or how do you time the work of a software developer?
• An army of mediocre writers won’t write “The Godfather” screenplay better than Puzo and Coppola.
• A capable developer, working on the right idea, will bring more value to your application than a hundred developers working on features nobody will use.

In liquid schedule jobs, you have no choice but to forget about traditional productivity metrics and measure by value, impact, and objectives.

Who contributes more?

1. The one who worked eight hours (or ten, or twelve!) all week and finally solved the problem on a Saturday morning.
2. The one who came in late on Monday but well-rested, had a brilliant idea, and resolved the problem in two focused days of work, then went home.

Who do you want on your team?

How to improve productivity in the 21st century?

There are five ways to increase productivity (do more in the same time), but if you work in knowledge-based jobs, only one helps you in the long run.

1. Improve yourself.
2. Scale with people.
3. Automate (buy machines).
4. Innovate (new machines).

The first four focus on getting more of the same. In solid schedule jobs, this means serving more people or making more parts in the same time, and that’s fine if it gets you a raise. If not, you fall into the “The more work I solve, the more work I get” trap, which is a productivity killer.

In liquid schedule jobs, what does this mean? Maybe you’ve managed to write more lines of code, but the functionality isn’t what the product needs. Perhaps you’ve written two chapters of your novel instead of one, but you don’t know if those chapters will be liked. AI lets you write more copies, but… how will you distinguish which one is more accepted among your customers?

In other words, does it make sense to run if you’re not sure where you’re going?

The fifth way is the only one that applies to liquid schedule jobs.

Working on better things. It implies stopping and thinking. Who am I doing this for? And, how will it help them? Deciding what to do next is much more important than how much effort it will cost. A productive 21st-century worker is someone who knows how to figure out what to do next.

The problem is that we are measuring 21st-century work with 20th-century stopwatches. Taylor is dead. March 21, 1915, to be exact.

The productivity of the 21st century and why the most productive moment is in the shower.

Developers used to work alone. I remember the legendary football game “Match Day” from 50 years ago, programmed by John Ritman all by himself. Nowadays, games are made by hundreds of developers, illustrators, writers… working together.

Therefore, it’s not easy to measure the productivity of a single individual. It’s a creative team effort, and the only thing that matters is the overall result. Frameworks like OKRs are born to help focus and align people, allowing measurement of the path to success.

On the other hand, working in a team fills your day with hundreds (count them!) of interruptions. Three or four meetings, twenty or thirty emails, a hundred or two hundred chat messages… Communication is important and necessary, but it kills 20th-century productivity:

it makes it difficult for us to choose “what to do next.” By taking on so many things at once, we become ineffective. it prevents us from getting “in the zone,” which is when a worker is truly efficient. And then comes the shower. When you’re in the shower, you’re in a relaxed and quiet environment, just thinking about your stuff. Your colleagues aren’t asking you to join a call. Your kids aren’t asking where their kimono is, ki-aaaaaa! And that’s when you come up with a brilliant idea. Why not change the sorting algorithm? What if I introduce this new character into the plot? Why not merge the marketing and product teams?

And those ideas are related to “Working on better things.” You’ve spent the whole week trying to make a basket when what you really needed to do was kick the ball into the goal.

How many moments like the one in the shower do you allow yourself/have in your workday? I bet they’re few, and you use the excuse that “the day-to-day consumes me.” How often do you question if what you’re doing is what you should be doing? I bet it’s fewer times than you wonder if “I’m doing it right.”

What’s the point of running faster if you’re going in the wrong direction? What are you doing to allow yourself to change direction?

Education and the 21st Century. Where the system is about to burst and how it will affect your children.

How and why does school exist?

At the beginning, every worker uses one brain and two hands. One person tends to the garden. A craftsman makes shoes. A blacksmith shoes horses.

1 brain. 2 hands.

When the assembly line arrives, the proportion changes. Workers specialize in defined and repetitive tasks. The boss provides the brain.

1 brain. 6 hands. Or 60 hands. Or 600 hands.

But getting millions of people to give up using their brains and blindly follow instructions on strict schedules is complicated. That’s where school comes in.

The school, as we know it now, turns children into efficient workers.

Memory: Learn the procedure and show your supervisor that you know it. Discipline: From 9 to 10, math; from 10 to 11, language. At 11, a break for lunch. And so on.

And why is this a problem? Because jobs from the 19th and 20th centuries are rapidly being taken over by machines. In the 21st century, work is already different.

Why does 21st-century work make school irrelevant (at least) or harmful (probably) for everyone?

During the second half of the 20th century, automation replaced plant workers (specialized, little to think about) with office workers (accountants, salespeople, programmers).

At the beginning of the 20th century, everything worked well with one brain and six arms. “Do what the boss tells you, when the boss tells you, and go home satisfied with a job well done.”

But by the end of the 20th century, the ratio had changed. All those jobs require initiative and proactivity. “The boss doesn’t know what you have to do. He knows why you have to do it. But the rest is up to you.”

So, we have a bunch of people who, from ages 4 to 24, have trained to:

Memorize. Follow a schedule. And now we need:

Creative thinking. High improvisational ability. It’s no surprise that companies struggle to find talent. It’s no surprise that workers struggle to be satisfied with a job.

Companies try to fix this with student programs or corporate universities, where they try to bridge the gap between what young people learned in school and what 21st-century work demands.

But this is very difficult due to two problems:

1. The skills needed are tough to teach. They have to be learned.
2. The relationship between worker and company is NO LONGER like the relationship between student and school.

What has changed in the worker-company relationship, and why must skills be learned?

Most of us spent 10 years in the same school, 4 years in the same high school, or 5 years in the same university.

How many of us have stayed in the same job for 10 years? How many times have we changed jobs every two or three years? The relationship between the worker and the employer used to be for life (or almost). This allowed:

A company culture, just as you knew that the Escolapios were different (much better :P) than the Maristas. Elders maintained the school/company’s identity. Time for newcomers to acquire that culture. The learning process that in school lasts the same (or longer) as 50 years ago, in the company has accelerated by three.

Okay, this all sounds good. But how do we fix it?

What needs to change in education, or are we doomed?

First: we have to agree that we want to educate people who can work in increasingly creative and uncertain environments.

Second: we have to understand that discipline and memorization won’t help anymore.

Third: we have to take advantage of the fact that there are millions of hours of quality and free training available, 24×7, for all ages, from 3 to 193 years old.

The skills we need in the 21st century cannot be taught. They can only be learned.

Creativity: learned by creating. Improvisation: learned by improvising. School must be:

A safe environment for creating and improvising, where failure is not punished but encouraged as a learning tool. There’s no choice but to trust children. They have to learn themselves. We can’t teach them the important things for the job market. But my grandmother would say, “How will children learn math if you don’t make them?”

Teaching methods that emphasize allowing the child to decide when to study what exist and work.

When people ask, “How will children learn math if you don’t make them?” they don’t realize that most adults who maintain a reading habit do so IN SPITE OF mandatory readings in school. They maintain it because they liked comics or Sandokan novels. And from there, they moved on to other topics and authors. Not because they read Zalacaín el Aventurero and did a worksheet with the plot, summary, and analysis of the main characters by Friday.

We complain that children are always watching YouTube, glued to their phones.

But it turns out the problem isn’t that they watch YouTube or are glued to their phones. The problem is what they watch on YouTube and how they use their phones.

And if we build a curriculum of free video courses, suitable for each stage of learning? What if children watch these videos at home and then do homework in school with the help of their peers and the teacher?

We all hit the Like button when someone posts, “Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is madness.” But none of us dare to change.

It’s necessary.