Thoughts Unlocked – The Invisible Trophy of Productivity

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Chapters:
00:00 – Introduction
03:18 – The Stopwatch That Changed How We Think About Productivity
05:43 – Why Invisible Work Gets Misunderstood
06:38 – When Thinking Doesn’t Look Like Work
07:43 – Why So Many People Feel Pressure to Look Busy
10:34 – The Productivity Mentality We Still Carry

Skot Waldron (00:05)
I’m Skot Waldron, and when I’m not hosting Unlocked, I’m speaking at events all over the globe, helping leaders and teams communicate better, build trust faster, and actually enjoy working together. I know, who would have thought? I’ve spoken for companies like The Home Depot, I’ve spoken at national architectural firms, at their sales trainings, off sites for major pharmaceutical companies, and industry associations.

A thousand of attendees who have read my sessions. With 99% of them saying they found the sessions valuable. 97% saying they’d actually attend again. I’ve had caterers come up to me afterwards and thank me because they actually got something they could use when they went home or when they went back to their own jobs. I mean, if every keynote delivered those types of numbers, nobody would secretly be refreshing their email under the table. And let’s be honest, that’s a little bit of my nightmare, maybe a little bit of yours. Yeah, something that keeps me up at night.

If you’re an event planner, looking for a speaker who’s easy to work with and delivers actual value that people can take away and use on Monday. Let’s make your event unforgettable.

Welcome to another episode of Thoughts Unlocked. And you know, today I’m going to read a little bit more from my new book idea. Again, this is all rough draft stuff. I did this last time too, for my Thoughts Unlocked episode. I wrote a little bit of chapter one. Actually, I read the whole thing in chapter one, preliminary version. This is very unorthodox. I think it is anyway. I don’t know how many other authors do this but read sections of your book before it’s even finished and put it out there into the world. I don’t know if that’s legit or not. And I don’t have a publisher yet. So, you know, we’ll see what they say after I get done doing some of this stuff.

Anyway, I’m just kind of testing content, put it out there, and I would love your feedback. Got some good responses on chapter one. And I’m going to read a little bit of chapter two. I don’t know if I’m going to get through the whole thing, let’s see where it goes. Okay.

Chapter two. Sorry, let me back up for a second. My book. It’s called Misdiagnosed. It’s really about this idea, and it started off with procrastination and the labels that we use around procrastination, but it kind of bled over into micromanagement. I’m still debating whether I keep the micromanagement piece in there. I think I’m going to, but it’s this idea about the also the stories we tell ourselves. It’s the stories that we have in our heads about other people’s behavior that may or may not be correct.

Chapter two is a little bit of historical reference about why we let’s say, why we celebrate, why we celebrate early, in early visible work. Okay. It’s all about that premise of early visible work and the people that tend to incubate or process things in their heads, why sometimes they get dinged in the minds of others.

So, let’s start off here. Chapter 2: The invisible trophy for starting early.

In 1909, a man named Frederick Winslow. Sorry, let me back up. Woo! How now brown cow? You ready?

In 1909, a man named Frederick Winslow Taylor stood on the floor of Bethlehem Steel works with a stopwatch in his hand and watched a man named Henry Noll shovel pig iron, which is a crude high-carbon iron product made from smelting iron ore into a blast furnace. Watched Henry Noll shovel pig iron onto a rail car.

Taylor was an engineer and he thought like an engineer. He believed that almost anything wrong with modern manufacturing could be solved with a clock, a clipboard, and some precision if you just measured it correctly. He spent years trying to optimize human labor the same way you could optimize a machine. He even had a cool name for it, sarcastically said, called scientific management. Even going so far as to time individual motions. Calculating rest time intervals, when to walk, when to stop, when to load pig iron, when to bend, all became part of the experiment.

Henry Noll was going to be the most efficient productive worker ever. By the end of the experiment, Noll was moving 47 tons of pig iron a day up from just 12.5 tons previously. Victory.

Taylor built an entire career out of this philosophy. Some historians have argued that this was the moment the trophy for visible work was invented. The glorious price for being the most visible productive worker, the person whose effort could be seen, measured, and counted with a stopwatch.

He even wrote a book, his book, The Principles of Scientific Management, catchy title, came out in 1911 and became one of the most influential business books in the 20th century. The godfather of automobile manufacturing himself, Henry Ford, built his assembly line on the ideas of Taylor. Some Soviet planners adopted the ideas. Peter Drucker, the man attributed to inventing management, called Taylor the Isaac Newton of the Science of Work. His ideas went mainstream. The stopwatch idea, the time study, the whole thinking that visual motion equals productivity, all of it. Watching people become the official way to elevate them.

Hence, why so many people who started and built their career inside the stopwatch bubble have a hard time with remote work. What you can’t see, you can’t track. What you can’t see, you can’t validate. What you can’t see, you can’t trust. The problem is Taylor was measuring men carrying iron. The work was physical; it was repetitive and observable. Everything was visible. Everything that was created was countable. You could literally see if someone was earning their paycheck. Then we took that entire system and applied it to people who design campaigns, build strategies, think about hard problems, and write books like this one. We never updated what that trophy rewarded. It’s just the same old dusty trophy Taylor created for all of us.

For some people, most of their actual work happens inside their heads. Their work is invisible. That is, until it isn’t. They can’t show you 17 failed approaches they discarded this morning before deciding the 18th one would work. They can’t necessarily point to the hour they spent reading something that turned out to be related and change the position they took on the last point someone made in a meeting. They can’t put a number on the conversation they had at lunch that solved the problem they had been stuck on for weeks. We’re stuck inside of a system built for evaluating these people the same way we evaluated iron shovelers with the stopwatch. So, that’s what we do? We measure things we can see, the hours at the desk and the early arrival, the visible stuff, the volume of output rather than the quality of it. And of course, the chat message sent at 8:47 a.m., proving to everyone I’m on the clock, but says nothing else about it.

In my own research, more than two-thirds of working professionals I surveyed said they feel pressure to look busy at work. Even when looking busy doesn’t improve the quality of their work. Two-thirds, people, two-thirds. They’ve learned what the trophy rewards and they have learned to perform because of it.

The structured get or done worker doesn’t escape this damaging trophy thinking either. Sure, they get rewarded for the visible work they do, which is not the same thing as being rewarded for what they’re actually good at. Maybe it’s their reliability, their ability to stick to a plan, or the confidence in knowing they will complete something. But no, all of this gets compressed into just being a real go getter. The trophy thinking tells them they’re winning. But it tells them they’re winning for the wrong reasons. What happens? Subconsciously, they start to get worried that if they ever stop performing the visible early work, the recognition will disappear. This trophy follows us around outside of work as well. We started training ourselves for it long before the first day on the job.

The American school system was designed around the same time Taylor was timing the iron shovelers. Some historians call it the factory model school. Think about it. Those bells that ring and move our children from class to class every 50 minutes were designed with the same factory bell pattern that tells a worker when a shift is over. Those rows of desks were designed to resemble assembly lines. The age-based grades, the set schedules, and the follow-the-line leader single file, no running commands, all reinforced. The synchronized, systematized movements that will be expected to perform as they get older. By the time you were 8 years old, you had been trained to start when a bell rang, stop when it rang again, and produce visible output in between. Then you got your first job. The funny thing is you didn’t even notice it anymore. It’s just the way work is.

You might be reading this, thinking your workplace is pass all that. You don’t use timesheets, or maybe you’re fully remote. You don’t stick to the normal nine to five grind. And even grace your people with what we call flex time. And to your company’s credit, a lot of those things, a lot of those changes, are moving in the right direction. But the trophy didn’t go away. We’ve started to modify it a bit. And I’m going to stop there, y’all. I’m going to stop there. Because I don’t want to spoil how we’ve modified. Cliffhanger, cliffhanger, y’all.

This is interesting. I hope you’re hearing this. And maybe this is some Skot philosophy. And maybe not all of it is completely true. But based on my research and based on what I’ve looked at, this is a mentality that I think is not serving us well. It’s not. It’s been stuck in our heads for a long time. And the industrial age way of thinking is doing a lot of damage. Not only to the people whom we lead or whom we work with, but to the people we live with and the structure that we live in our environment. It creates stress, it creates mental cognitive fatigue, it creates all types of pressures that we then bring home. And these mentalities, when we live them at work, we’ve been trained in them. Okay. I’m a Gen Xer. I lived it. My kids, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, they are still living this. And they’re bucking it, right? They’re pushing against it. And I don’t know if your kids are, but my kids are. I don’t know if that’s because we’ve created too much of a free-thinking type of child. And dang it. And I’m sorry we did that, everybody.

But that mentality is what they’re bucking, is this whole structured live and die by the bell, live and die by the day, live and die by the grade. That mentality is not serving us in the corporate world. And when they get there, it’s still there. This structured mentality of, this is how we do things, of live and die by the quarter, live and die by the number, live and die by the clock in, clock out. I can trust you if I can see you. All that it’s not doing us any good.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this. If you have any comments, please email them to me. You can even text them to me. You want my phone number? 630-267-7098. Text me. Call me. Whatever you want. Okay? I do have filtering on my calls because I get like 15,000 people trying to loan me money that are spamming me. So, leave me a message. Okay.

But I think this is important to talk about. Again, this is setting up the idea of how we judge each other in the workplace and how we need to probably be just a little bit better at what we do and how we interpret the work other people are performing.

If you want to find out more information about me or check out the show notes where there’s going to be more information and links to the things referenced in this episode, visit skotwaldron.com. And lastly, I’m asking for a little bit of love, just a little bit. So please take a moment, follow, rate the show. The algorithm is like that; it helps me get the word out. I really appreciate it.

Thank you. And until next time, stay on Unlocked.