Knowledge work is not "work" in the traditional sense. If your job is to stamp forms, you can probably be productive the entire day. Not so much when your job is cognitively demanding, then the job is "thinking deeply", and the human species simply cannot sustain that for so long.
As you get more experienced, you may require less deep thinking to do your job, which boost productivity. However in our current world all fields are changing so rapidly that this is mostly wishful thinking.
The other factor is of course whether you're allowed to be productive. Even a day with "just" 3 or 4 meetings is practically destroyed from a productivity point of view, and this doesn't even account for email and chat. So even if willing to be more productive, you just can't. This particular problem never seems addressed, quite the opposite: "we need to collaborate more".
No, we don't. When you have 5 tasks and each task depends on others and requires a lot of collaboration then it's a crappy task, from a productivity point of view.
Aside from the distractions of professional communication, we should be honest about the additional distractions from personal devices. When I started work, nobody had a smartphone. Just a workstation with restricted internet. So there were few temptations.
Now it's unstoppable. It's right there in your pocket, begging for attention. Add in email, which the average person checks once every 6 minutes, and the conclusion is that we have near-zero concentration time.
It's a sad thing. If we would control distractions and carve out very clean packages of work, knowledge workers could probably switch to 4 hour workdays, 6 as a transition. The rest is fluff anyway. Why not double the work packages then, to meet 8 hours? Because our species simply can't.
But anyway, it won't happen. Let's just keep telling ourselves we work 10-12 hours whilst we piss our life away to a collective illusion.
As you get more experienced, you may require less deep thinking to do your job, which boost productivity. However in our current world all fields are changing so rapidly that this is mostly wishful thinking.
The other factor is of course whether you're allowed to be productive. Even a day with "just" 3 or 4 meetings is practically destroyed from a productivity point of view, and this doesn't even account for email and chat. So even if willing to be more productive, you just can't. This particular problem never seems addressed, quite the opposite: "we need to collaborate more".
No, we don't. When you have 5 tasks and each task depends on others and requires a lot of collaboration then it's a crappy task, from a productivity point of view.
Aside from the distractions of professional communication, we should be honest about the additional distractions from personal devices. When I started work, nobody had a smartphone. Just a workstation with restricted internet. So there were few temptations.
Now it's unstoppable. It's right there in your pocket, begging for attention. Add in email, which the average person checks once every 6 minutes, and the conclusion is that we have near-zero concentration time.
It's a sad thing. If we would control distractions and carve out very clean packages of work, knowledge workers could probably switch to 4 hour workdays, 6 as a transition. The rest is fluff anyway. Why not double the work packages then, to meet 8 hours? Because our species simply can't.
But anyway, it won't happen. Let's just keep telling ourselves we work 10-12 hours whilst we piss our life away to a collective illusion.