Looking at Productivity as a State of Mind
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
If I force myself to trudge through moments of low energy, it saps all my energy. Moreover if I finish my alloted time of work, and then hit upon a high energy moment, it forces me choose between working even more and having any kind of leisure.
Of course, I think this has to do with the work one does. I'm in academia and the article discusses data entry. You don't really need creativity or initiative to do data handling.
But as a matter of fact, I do from time to time, although I don't really see it as a way of improving my productivity.
But I think you're onto something in the sense that often not feeling energetic of focused comes from the presence of parasite emotions or a sense of disorder. So it actually might help.
That is what Clark meant when he used MBA-speak to describe the workers as having "hired" their employers.
This article comes across as describing a discovery while in fact so far it's merely an interesting hypothesis or even simply model, which might ultimately prove to be informative. Since the author is one of the people doing the work I don't know if this is accidental or intended.
For example, I happily game-ified tedious BS jobs/classes by introducing elements of danger triggered by poor productivity. I thought the work was utterly pointless, and cheered whenever the corporation got hurt. But I needed some twisted motivation to show up and get through the damn day. And feel that my excellence was recorded somewhere.
The Kaur/Kramer/Mullainathan paper seemed to only use a barebones "endline survey," with easily-steered responses. Not in-depth interviews led by the subjects, which might've uncovered inconvenient info. (Or did I miss them?)
I also looked at economist Greg Clark's work. It's... weird... but at least his work is refreshingly honest about its political underpinnings. In a way others try to hide. And there's some interesting bits if you squint and remove the weirdnesses. For example, workers may take over a factory. But under a market economy, they may reasonably decide to oppress themselves by hiring a manager who sits in an air-conditioned room and is immune to the worsened workplace he develops.
I need a couple of hours of peace/alone time every day to focus on the important parts of my work. I'm lucky enough that my work is ok with me going to the local coffee shop for hours at a time. Most workplaces aren't. They claim to care about results but take such a short term view.
Don't evaluate me on my daily performance or the number of story points I have completed this sprint. Look at my performance month to month and year to year.
Of course some places have such high turnover (20%+) that they can't evaluate on a year to year because people aren't around for long enough but they have bigger issues.
I don't like this idea either. Unfortunately, this kind of "motivation" is state of the art in many jobs. It kind of reminds me of Brandson's "take as much holiday as you like". That sounds positive at first but also motivates people to not take holidays at all because of the fear of being less productive than their co-workers.