Productivity

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about productivity, especially in the context of our business environment. General questions and issues such as:

+ How important is the role of tools (such as task managers) in the achievement of productivity?

+ How important is the role of techniques and methodologies in the achievement of productivity?

+ How detrimental is the inevitable mix of personal– and professional contexts in the desktop computing environment to productivity?

+ How detrimental is persistent network connectivity (web browsers, instant messaging, email, etc.) to productivity? (Can it be thought of, to any degree, as trying to work with a telephone permanently against one’s ear?)

+ How detrimental is today’s flood of email to productivity?

+ How dominant is the role of personal characteristics, and to what extent can such characteristics reasonably be conditioned or changed to achieve better productivity? (For example, in certain sports, such as cycling, if you don’t have the genetics, there really is only so far you can go…)

I certainly don’t have answers to these questions, and this post is really more a note-to-self placeholder for later thought/writing. If you have any comments, though, please feel free to express your thoughts/opinions.