WORK
Counterproductive
Gregg's 2018 genealogy of productivity culture — tracing how efficiency tools, from early twentieth-century domestic science through contemporary self-optimization, consistently generate more work rather than the leisure they promise.
Counterproductive: Time Management in the Knowledge Economy traces a century of productivity ideology from Frederick Winslow Taylor's scientific management through the Getting Things Done methodology of the early twenty-first century. Each iteration, Gregg argues, promised the same liberation — mastery over time, alignment of effort with result — and delivered the same paradox: greater efficiency produced more work, not more leisure, because the cultural apparatus within which efficiency was pursued treated leisure as waste and productivity as the primary measure of human worth. The book's central insight, carried directly into the AI era, is that productivity tools do not resolve the conflicts that generate overwork; they intensify those conflicts while providing new vocabulary for experiencing intensification as personal growth.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Gregg's historical method reveals that productivity culture is not a neutral set of techniques but a moral order in which the worker learns to treat her own time, attention, creativity, and emotional energy as resources to be optimized for maximum output. The