In the blue-collar days, productivity was very easy to understand. I could see that I was helping someone, "How much did I make?" or "How much did I carry?" I could measure my work for the day by "how much I made" or "how much I carried".
Installing machines will increase efficiency. If you add one more person, you increase production. Everything was visibly connected.
But after becoming white-collar, the term 'productivity' has become increasingly vague. Because - **it's unclear what you're producing**.
For example, Even if you have perfected your presentation, If the project itself does not pass, there is nothing left for the company. Even if you write the minutes of a meeting, if no one reads them, they are meaningless. Even engineers, if they create a service that no one uses, That is essentially **zero productivity**.
This is the difficulty of white-collar work. The design of why you do what you do and what you do, because you don't move your body, The starting point for everything is the design of why we do what we do and what we do. If you make a mistake here, no matter how much you improve efficiency, you will only increase waste. Even if AI is introduced, it will only speed up meaningless processes.
In the end, the essence of measuring productivity is, It's not speed, it's not quantity, it's **direction**.
If blue-collar workers had to think about 'how fast to make it', white-collar workers have to think about what to make. The moment we forget that, The moment we forget that, we become people who just pretend to be working.
In the pursuit of productivity, Have we lost sight of what is really useful? It's time to rethink that, In the age of white-collar workers, **The most important "production "** in the age of white-collar workers may be to question this.