For decades, productivity was presented as the solution.
- More tools promised efficiency.
- Better processes promised control.
- Faster execution promised relief.
The implicit assumption was simple: if work became more efficient, work would become better.
That never happened.
Instead, work didn’t disappear, it didn’t become lighter and it certainly didn’t become more meaningful.
Over time, it fragmented.
Efficiency without coherence
Modern work is not inefficient. On the contrary, it is aggressively optimized.
- Teams track tasks.
- Systems measure time.
- Dashboards monitor performance.
- Metrics quantify output.
However, something fundamental broke along the way.
Work lost coherence.
People stopped being responsible for outcomes. Instead, they became responsible for fragments: steps, tickets, handoffs, isolated tasks.
As a result, efficiency increased, meaning did not.
From professions to task streams
Work once revolved around roles and professions. Today, it revolves around streams of tasks.
You no longer “do a job”, instead, you move tickets, you answer messages, you switch contexts.
Meanwhile, systems reward speed, responsiveness, and constant availability.
- They rarely reward judgment.
- They rarely reward ownership.
- They almost never reward long-term thinking.
Productivity tools didn’t remove friction from work. Rather, they redistributed it across human attention.
The attention tax
Each layer of optimization added a small cost:
- another dashboard
- another notification
- another workflow
- another metric
Individually, each addition made sense. Collectively, they created an attention tax that no one owns.
As a consequence, work turned into a continuous negotiation between tools, priorities, and interruptions.
This is not laziness, it is not disengagement.
It is cognitive overload disguised as productivity.
Fragmentation hides responsibility
Fragmented systems rarely fail loudly. Instead, they dissolve accountability.
When something goes wrong:
- the process was followed
- the task was completed
- the metric was met
Yet the outcome remains poor.
Fragmentation allows everyone to act efficiently, while no one remains responsible for the whole.
This is not a human flaw, it is a structural design failure.
Productivity as a substitute for direction
Many organizations optimize work because they cannot answer a simpler question: What is this work actually for?
When direction is unclear, productivity becomes a proxy for progress.
More activity feels like movement.
More output feels like value.
Consequently, systems that lack purpose tend to over-optimize execution.
They move faster, but in directions no one consciously chose.
Work didn’t need saving. It needed structure.
The core problem was never insufficient productivity, the real problem is structural decay.
Healthy work systems:
- preserve responsibility
- make outcomes legible
- align effort with purpose
- limit fragmentation by design
Efficiency itself is not the enemy. However, efficiency without structure steadily erodes meaning.
Reconstructing work, not optimizing it
The future of work will not be decided by better tools alone.
Instead, it will depend on whether systems are redesigned to:
- reduce fragmentation
- restore ownership
- respect human cognitive limits
- reintroduce coherence between effort and outcome
Until then, productivity will keep improving, while work itself continues to deteriorate.
Why this matters
Fragmented work does more than exhaust people.
It reshapes how they relate to responsibility, value, and identity.
Eventually, systems that quietly erode these foundations fail in ways that are no longer quiet.