Where Did the Productivity Gains Go?

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There is a machine called Productivity, and on this machine there is a knob and a button. The knob increases productivity, and the button is labeled "reset."

My job was data entry at a non-profit. It was my first job in the US where I didn't have to lift heavy objects. My main task was entering collected donations into a database. The data source was email attachments, which came in various formats. Excel files, Word files, and some directly embedded in the email body. The database itself was FileMaker Pro.

Every part of the process was wasteful. To receive the emails in the first place, I had to call the person who collected the donation, argue with them, and guide them through the process of emailing me the information. The donations were collected at events, and the data was often just handwritten on a note. Once I got the email, I would extract the content from the attachment and organize it into an Excel file. Then I would manually enter it into the FileMaker database, one row at a time.

In a full workday, I could process no more than a dozen entries. So I decided to improve the process.

I started from the end. Entering data into the database was error-prone. I had to enter the name, address, donation amount, and a plethora of other information into a single row of a database viewer, and I often put the wrong data in the wrong column. So instead, I created a form with validation.

I built a standardized Excel file where the people collecting donations could enter data directly into the correct columns and send it to me. This turned out to be too much to ask. Several people didn't know how to use Excel, and it became a nightmare of technical support. Eventually, I switched to a formatted Word document. Annoying, but it worked.

Lastly, I created a process. Every Monday, I would email everyone to remind them to send me their donations by Wednesday, so I would have plenty of time to enter them on schedule. The deadline was arbitrary, but it slowly hardened into policy.

My system was a success. I was entering hundreds of donations every day. In terms of productivity, I had more than 10x'd my output, which I thought was a good thing, until I started getting noticed.

What have you done for me lately?

My productivity machine's knob had been dialed to 11. But I had also set the new standard for how much needed to get done in a day. So my manager hit the reset button. The dial went back to zero, but the expectation stayed exactly where it was.

It's funny how that always happens. Increased output never turns into more free time. Instead, it becomes the new normal. Anything less looks like a drop in productivity.

These days, with AI common in the workplace, every semi-technical manager has started building apps themselves instead of taking requests to the dev team. They get a rush from how much code they can produce, and they enjoy that high for a while. But they fail to see that the productivity gain only exists at the very beginning, before the app is actually in use. Once people start using it, you don't get to regenerate the app from scratch every time you want to add a feature. Instead, you have to add things slowly and carefully, without breaking what already works. All fields start green, but they brown eventually.

When you get an extremely productive teammate, you start looking at the rest of the team as time-wasters. In fact, once you get used to what that teammate produces, you start treating it as the baseline and eventually you ask, "What have you done for me lately?"

I was let go from that job in a little celebration, right after I'd trained my replacement. One morning, my manager simply announced that it had only ever been a summer job, and summer was ending. So my last day was set. I was too green to point out that this had never come up during hiring, and that I'd actually started well before summer began. They brought cake on my last day.

What they failed to see was that my process was still very much manual. My replacement was let go when she couldn't manage more than a dozen entries a day. So much for productivity gains.

Did you like this article?<br>You can buy me a coffee.

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Ibrahim is a software engineer and writer who explores the intersection of human psychology and<br>technical systems. He builds tools that respect human attention and writes about the internal<br>life<br>of the modern developer.

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