productivity - Word and Value

There is a productivity vocabulary that has spread, in the last two decades, from the corporate meeting room into everyday speech. It arrives in emails between friends, in conversations about creative work, in the language people use to describe their own lives to themselves. Optimise. Leverage. Bandwidth. Deliverable. Actionable. Scalable. Move the needle.

This productivity vocabulary is not new — versions of it have existed as long as management culture has. But it has expanded significantly, and its expansion into domains where it was not previously present — personal life, creative practice, relationships, rest — is worth examining. Language shapes thought. When the vocabulary of productivity becomes the default vocabulary for describing human activity, something changes in how that activity is understood.

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Productivity has become one of the dominant frames through which work — including writing — is discussed and understood. The language of productivity is everywhere: output, throughput, optimisation, systems, workflows, batching, time-blocking, deep work, shallow work. These terms do not just describe how work is done. They shape how work is understood — what counts as progress, what counts as waste, and what the purpose of working is.

For writers, this language presents a particular problem. Writing is not well-described by productivity vocabulary, and the attempt to describe it that way tends to produce a distorted picture of what writing is and how it happens. Understanding what the language of productivity does to the way writing is understood is the first step to resisting it.

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The Language of Productivity

The Language of Productivity