Friday, January 25, 2008

Which is BS? Productivity or John Dvorak

On ZDNet John Dvorak tells us productivity gains are BS.

John's point seems to be that fact the receptionist is filing her nails it means her productivity can't be improved.

Doris on reception or Bruce in Accounts may only do four hours productive work a day, the idea is we make those four hours more productive.

Today's office is far more productive than the office of twenty years ago; computers, broadband Internet, colour printers and mobile phones mean today's office worker can do in ten minutes that would have taken weeks in even the biggest corporation.

I love it when people tell us the days of the abacus, slide rule or carbon paper were easier. My advice to them is to try it.

1 comment:

pjpw said...

You can't compare productivity today against productivity 20 years ago in absolute terms. There is no question that we can get far more done today than we could in the same time 20 years ago thanks to technology.

However in relative terms I question whether we are more productive today for the simple reason that technological advances have brought far more diversions and distratcions into the workplace what with the Internet, emails, personal online presence accounts such as myspace, pure profile etc, sms to name but a few.

There were far fewer distractions in the workplace 20 years ago. I would be interseted in comments from any time and motion experts out there, if they still exist.