I don’t care about slow productivity. I care more about FAKE productivity. Talking about people who schedule emails at odd hours or people who are there to cheerlead. That’s basically 80% of white collar workforce.
It is clearly not what the weekend HN audience wants (all good ideas fit into 140 characters!), but I had fun writing it.
I often wonder how many people I work with that have 1 or 2 additional full-time jobs that they are just faking busy at. People that are 100% dedicated to the project you are on, but for some reason are never available for meetings or ever deliver anything on time. Just show up once in a while at a meeting, give some song and dance about how busy they are and then disappear for days at a time.
One coworker just disappeared for ten days - not a peep for him - shows up on day 11 with nothing new completed, but lots of stories about how hard he is working.
Not sure this remote working is going to last for a lot of folks given the abuse I see everyday.
Fake productivity is absolutely why I will never ever work in any other white collar sector other than tech. The "butts in seats" culture of consulting and banking is so outdated and cannot end fast enough imho.