https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-rise-and-fall-of-getting-things-done
This initially reads as though it might be a profile of Merlin Mann, who helped popularize David Allen’s productivity technique Getting Things Done. But it quickly goes deeper, way deeper, into our conception of productivity, its history in our culture, its implication in the current wave of burnout, and how it might evolve in the future.
This paragraph is the inflection point:
Before there was “personal productivity,” there was just productivity: a measure of how much a worker could produce in a fixed interval of time. At the turn of the twentieth century, Frederick Taylor and his acolytes had studied the physical movements of factory workers, looking for places to save time and reduce costs. It wasn’t immediately obvious how this industrial concept of productivity might be adapted from the assembly line to the office. A major figure in this translation was Peter Drucker, the influential business scholar who is widely regarded as the creator of modern management theory.
(If you’re not familiar with Frederick Winslow Taylor, I highly recommend The One Best Way and excellent and enlightening biography of Taylor.)
Newport continues to examine Drucker’s massive influence on the modern culture of work.
He then revisits Mann’s gradual disenchantment with personal productivity as a concept.