Mobile phones are a distraction and impedes productivity. By having them locked up in a centralized place, we can produce more and perhaps even reduce the working hours from 9 to 6.

Although not exactly depicted word to word, this is the gist of a post that I stumbled upon on LinkedIn from a business owner. To be honest, I don't really know what was going through my head when I read this. Alarms and bells were ringing. It would partially make sense if we're in a manufacturing or factory setting. Other than that, it sounds more like archaic and status quo thinking.

Interestingly enough, I wasn't bothered by the idea of locking phones away. What triggered me is this idea that the number of hours you put in is in direct correlation to productivity. It's like a badge of honor where people glorify how much hours they clocked. If you're not working 18 hours a day, then you should rethink about life and success. Hustle is the codeword. Sleep is for the weak. Seriously?

And yet, we are missing the point here. Productivity isn't measured by time. This is not the industrial revolution era. Back in those days, people work in factories. Given that you can produce 10 widgets per hour, putting in more hours would directly result in a higher output production. Simple and predictable calculation.

Fast forward to the modern world, we are no longer dealing with dummy routines (I hope) where we can easily measure output per hour. Knowledge based workers function differently. Problem solving, creativity, dealing with ambiguity and complexity are just part of the stack. It's nice and all to think that everyone can be productive for X hours straight without factoring in the fact that we are human, not machines.

Ever heard of Parkinson's law? Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. When a company set fixed working hours, rest assured that the majority of people would just try to fill it up. Work that could have been done in 2 hours gets dragged. This is like the antithesis of productivity. There's no incentive for finishing up work quickly while those who take their own sweet time by putting in more hours are considered hardworking eventhough in reality, they're just ineffecient. And yet we still perpetuate and romanticize this idea.

Productivity should be measured by output / results instead. How many important tasks gets done? Does it produce desired outcomes? Time and hours should be removed from the equation unless you want to track bottlenecks. You'll be surprised by how effective this is. At least this is what's being practiced by modern day and forward thinking companies because they do understand this notion.

If you're still worrying about increasing or decreasing hours in the name of productivity, your're doing it wrong and it's time to sit down and rethink.

Learn to focus on what matters.