Productivity

An (un)interesting thing happened to me today. I woke up at about 8.45, showered, got on my bike and went to the library (after buying something for breakfast). There I sat at a computer and wrote my Money Markets report for Financial Markets from roughly 10 till 12. I went out and had lunch and was back at 12:45 where I continued to work on the report. I finished it (to first draft standard) just before the library closing time and emailed it off to the other group members with some suggestions of tweaking well before the due date.

I think as it stands it should be at least a 7 out of 10.

Now here's the funny thing, I walked out of the library and thought 'what a complete fucking waste of a day.' this seemed very natural to me. Then I had an epiphany, almost none of my friends (who mostly graduated from university) would not agree with me. They would typically describe a day where you sat at home not doing your assignment a complete waste of a day.

Most people would consider my efforts productive and thus the very anti-thesis of a complete fucking waste of a day.

Why does everybody else have this weird fucking mindset?

I can vaguely pin-point the moment I became obsessed with productivity. Sam (my older brother) got home in year 7 and Janice (eternal worrier, highly risk averse) questioned him as to whether he had any homework. He said he didn't, Janice didn't believe him.

A shouting match ensued, where no doubt Janice pointed out how much she was paying for Sam's shmancy (supposedly) education at his smarmy school that wear shit-coloured uniforms. Now whilst I'm fairly certain that Sam was lying, and just wanted to play computer games I weighed into the argument and said something like 'Janice, as if there's ever going to be a time where kids have no free-time, the world wouldn't work if that was the case.' and I don't remember if it panned out.

After that though, I became obsessed with homework. Not actually doing it, just whether it was necessary. I remain convinced it isn't. At the very least, not to the extent to which it is promoted.

Stress is a Fashion Accessory

Growing up in Ballarat I associated coffee with douchebags, back then we called them tryhards or yuppies. I hear my old school now has a cafe for students, so I expect it's douchebag population has increased, and it's chief export are douchebags.

Because I associated coffee drinking with being a nob, I set out to avoid aquiring a taste or getting the habit. Apparantly year 12 was stressful, maybe it was, I only ever found eustress never distress. It was stressful and time intensive. It ate up so much time that year 12 students were provided with complementary 'International Roast' instant coffee and an urn in their common room from which to drink shitty coffee to stay up all hours studying for.

Instead of opting for 'no-doze' or whatever I simply wanted to concieve of a way to avoid having to stay up all hours studying. Was their anyway I could reduce my workload?

Well the first point of call was to assess whether all the study was actually necessary. There had to be some give or take here, because our school had many extra curricular activities that were participated in by year 12 students (eg. sports) that generally outperformed the non-extra-curricular participating students. So obviously there was at least some quantity of study time that could be safely sacrificed to no great detriment. (Plus an argument to be made that opting to play a sport instead of increased study time actually improved your results).

But if that was the case, why was the perception that staying up late studying so necessary so prevelant? If people could determine the study was superfluous why did they all take up drinking coffee? Was coffee a fashion accessory?

One can roughly divide Ballarat's classes into two categories - 'social climbers' and 'bogans', most of my peers (and myself) were raised by social climbers. I feel great affection for bogans and almost none for social climbers. But social climbers are aspirational, they want to be more than they are. They wanted in short to be Melburnians. Sophisticated, classy globe trotters that drank fancy coffee's.

My parents and by extention everyone else drank coffee, I thought my parents were pretty uncool trying to order coffees with the correct Italian pronunciation, but I think most kids actually respect their parents. So yes, drinking coffee was grown up, kids want to be older than they are, bingo bango - you have an alternative hypothesis to why so many kids took up drinking coffee between year 11 and 12, and why my old school now has a cafe on premisis.

But then, why did the kids drink the international roast crap? And furthermore act all stressed? They should have been sipping machiatto's and talking about real estate (or more likely for the time, the fallout from the tech bubble), instead they were drinking crap and acting highly strung.

Now a caveat, not every body actually cared about VCE, that's just a fact, so the douchebags I'm talking about were the ones who perpetuated the myth that VCE is stressful and one has to work hard and lose hours of sleep.

Well, maybe coffee was fashionable for another reason? Back then, a parent didn't just offer a kid a cup of coffee in the morning. This has probably changed but I feel the perception was that caffeine is a drug, coffee stains your teeth and your precious children should stay off it for as long as they can. So maybe, just maybe kids needed a pretext to get on it, a legitimate excuse, an apology for taking it up. That excuse was VCE. Plus it's still aspirational/fashionable. Important people are stressed (in theory) and they lose sleep because they are fretting over decisions (in theory). If I'm stressed I'm obviously doing something important, something so important I have to drink copious amounts of shite instant coffe just to keep me awake. I am hardcore important.

This was my alternative thesis, the stress of VCE was overstated because it was fashionable to overstate it, it made a kid look and feel important. In just the same way that their can be a benefit to having a long term illness, it absolves you of responsibility. In the same way, being able to sit in your room reading a sci-fi book under the pretext of doing homework may also get a kid out of unpleasant chores.

Homework is Bullshit

Obviously somebody else had been looking at the VCE workload and asking whether it was necessary. Because as I commenced it we transitioned from 'CATs' to 'SACs' who cares what the acronyms stand for, CATs used to be a legitimate source of stress. They were what you would call 'projects' or 'assignments' tasks you had to complete over a period of time.

I never experienced them I'd just always hated projects. My brother told me CATs were easy because you could just hand in draft after draft until your teacher said it was worth an A.

but they got rid of CATs and replaced them with SACs, by comparison SACs had to be completed in class time. They were then cross assessed and rated to ensure no schools were setting too hard or too easy SAC tasks.

CATs were bad because they measured/rewarded the wrong thing - effort. I would have been at an inherant disadvantage because to my eternal gratitude my parents had never fostered a 'good' work ethic in me. Thus I just wasn't an 'effort' kind of guy.

Now my own personal inclinations does not, a good basis for education systems make. But when you have something that a student can take home and be rewarded for going to more effort than others creates problems. Namely, escalation, because scores are normally distributed and then adjusted statistically the harder people work (to try and gain an advantage) the harder everybody else has to work to maintain the same relative position.

Then you have the poverty gap, parents were not beyond paying tutors to give their kids an unfair advantage, or even pay tutors to do CATs for them. The system could be gamed. Secondly if you entertain the thought that education policy is primarily economic/vocationally motivated future employers have an interest in finding the students who produce results above and beyond people of the same resources. That is in a knowledge based economy, you want efficient minds. Fundamentally, resources are limited (relative to wants) thus employers may say, but they don't literally mean, people who do 'more' what they want are people that produce 'more' with 'less', this infact is the very definition of productivity.

Worst Counter-argument Ever

Every time I say that effort is overrated, people invariably tell me I'm different. 'It's different for you tohm, you're clever, you don't have to work as hard.' Not my words, just almost everybody else who figure it's easier to blow smoke up my arse than to admit they have wasted much of their lives trying to look busy and/or important.

I don't feel clever. In highschool I was not very good at maths. Admittedly my scores swung all over the place, A-D. English was my forte, but that's because its a bullshit subject assessed on a relatively arbitrary basis. Even Art had a better assessment model than English. I wasn't very good at languages (worst in my Japanese class). Was average at physics, and can't even remember the other classes I took (except of course Studio Art, but Art alas is actually 99% effort, 1% talent and I was a B in effort).

I feel I am possessed of average intelligence, due to my surroundings growing up and onwards I suppose what I consider average may be a bit above average, the point being I knew and know plenty of people smarter than I am.

I am not for example somebody who can answer this question in two seconds:

If I have 64 contestants in a Tennis match, how many matches do I need to schedule?

SO I think round one, you need 32 matches to pair everyone off. After round one you have 32 contestants knocked out, 32 contestants left in, round 2 you get 16 matches... aha! the number of matches halves each round, there must be some magic number it is asymptotic too, that it is going to approach somewhere a bit above the 3/4 mark... If I can just figure out the rule... okay so we have 32 plus 16... then the next round is going to be 8, 32 plus 16 plus 8. It's like that tiger paradox, where it can only walk half the distance home each day, except that's impossible because tennis tornaments end, I've seen them end...

The answer is 63 and somebody who is actually clever comes up with that answer in 2 seconds. They similarly will tell you in two seconds that if you have 4 contestants you need 3 matches, if you have 27 contestants you need 26 matches, if you have 36,842 contestants you need 36,841 matches.

They know this because their mind naturally sees the approach to the problem. I was thinking 'how many losers do we need to produce' a clever person relises instantly that a tournament produces 1 winner, and a match produces 1 loser. You need to end up with 1 winner so you need 1 match per contestant to make them a loser minus the winner. Hence you simply subtract 1 from the number of contestants, the one match where the eventual tournament winner is produced.

This story is illustrative in two ways - 1. It demonstrates the principle of 'work smart not hard' and 2. It demonstrates the benifits of inversion.

Employees and students can never hear 'work smart not hard' enough. If for no other reason than that the world doesn't need more hardworking arseholes depleting its scarce resources producing waste.

I'm not clever enough to apply inversion with mathematical models, but I was able to apply it cleverly to education itself. This is worthy of another subheading...

My Epiphany on Educational Productivity

I don't know what the a-ha moment was. But I can try and reverse engineer the thought process.

Imagine a student that wants to become a doctor or a lawyer. These university courses require high entrance scores (your second preference university may only accept you at 98, the score not the age). Such a student is going to be very averse to risks, they cannot afford an academic disastor or their dreams are dashed (or so they believe [or so they are taught/trained to believe]).

I was not such a student, but such a student with a risk averse mind set, a fear of failure is likely to adopt this approach 'what do I have to learn.' and given that they are risk averse and can't afford to fail, the answer is probably 'everything'.

As a teacher of mine used to say, 'if you do a million [maths] problems, you probably won't come across a problem you haven't seen before' which is good advice... if you are risk averse.

Here's how I came to my epiphany. My school was hellbent on achieving good results, it generally did. But this being a private school was its business. Our principal (a bit of a douchebag himself) had been known to show our VCE results in a presentation to parents considering enrolling their children in prep. (why not, helps pass the time).

I was no doubt helped by the fact that one hardly had to squint ones eyes at all to see my school was some dubious sort of business. The teachers were the employees, the students were some kind of raw material they turned into results that were sold to new customers.

The crucial thing was though, the teachers were employees. They had jobs, they had a job to do. Their job was take students and produce results. Their jobs literally depended not just on our passing, but achieving above average results, even if you will better results than our competition, my brothers school with the shit coloured uniforms.

My epiphany was literally this:

The teachers have to teach us, so they can only test us on what we have been taught. If they teach us stuff that doesn't help us pass the test its their failure not mine. The only thing I have to learn is what the teacher taut us.

I think it sounds brilliantly like a truism. Reading it one might question whether this was an epiphany at all. It seems so obvious. I didn't learn about inversion for about 6 years after graduating though, so whilst I appreciated the significance of this revelation, I didn't appreciate what a departure my reasoning was.

Remeber wannabe lawyer/doctor. They thought 'what do I have to learn?' I had inverted this and asked 'what do they have to teach?'. My answer, they can't teach us any less than is sufficient to get full marks on the exams. Now most teachers may fall short of full marks, but this was their aim their target. They couldn't go for just a pass, this was VCE they had aspiring doctors and lawyers to worry about and more relevant parents who wanted their kids to be doctors and lawyers and needed to pick a primary school to worry about.

A risk averse student is going to become fearful of nasty surprises, it is difficult to trust your teacher, after all the teacher doesn't have to live with your results, you do. Right? Wrong. It's much harder for a teacher to trust a student to teach themselves, this is why homework is fundamentally bullshit. A teacher is never going to delegate learning responsibility to a student. What if they teach themselves incorrectly? Everything of any import has to be taught in class time.

All I had to do was A) pay attention and B) check whether I was confident I understood what I'd been taught. If the answer was yes, (it usually was because I paid attention) I just went home played some computer looked at pornography via dial-up internet and went to bed. If not, I'd ask the teacher or maybe try some homework exercises but more likely just looked at the answers.

I was able to take a risk on my hypothesis because my brother had gotten either a 93 or 90.3 without much effort. Thus I figured worst case I was looking at a high 80's mark if my theory fell through. I was less scared of a lower ENTER score than I was of a higher one. Which brings me to my next big revalation of productivity.

Diminishing Returns

I studied economics in high school and this gave me my second great insight. 'The Law of Diminishing Returns' it's a microeconomic theory thaat states 'Profit is maximised when Marginal Revenue = Marginal Cost' I hate the word 'Marginal' because I associate it with obscure electoral seats. I prefer incremental.

Basically it means, you want to get a bunch of t-shirts printed. You figure 50 should be enough, so you call up a t-shirt factory tell them you want 50 shirts printed and you'll send them a high-res pic of the design you want on them. They say 'sure buddy, for a run of 50 we will charge you $80 a pop.'

You balk, because you figured you'd only be able to sell them for $80 a pop. So you ask 'how much for 100?' he says '$60' keeping the price steady, you make $20 per shirt instead of zero. 'How many shirts till the next price bracket?' and he will say 'I'll charge you $50 a shirt for 200'.

Now you see what just happened. You doubled the quantity once and saved $20 per shirt. You double it again you only save $10. You could extrapolate out the pattern and guess that doubling the quantity again would only save you $5 a unit. By then your supply has grown so large it would be questionable whether you could sell them all for $80 and may have to look at lowering your price.

Anyway, the cost side is the interesting part, it shows a diminishing saving relative to the quantities you are ordering. At some point increasing the quantity will result in no saving.

Sorry if this seems like a sidetrack, but I'm going to dredge up lawyer/doctor coffee drinking aspirant again. Let's say this turd is smart, with relatively little effort they can get an enter score of 90, this aint good enough though. By doubling their efforts (from 3 hours homework a week to 6 hours) they achieve a score of 94. By doubling their effort again they (12 hours a week, or a casual job) they go from 94 to 96. Now assume they double their efforts again, (24 hours a week, or a weekend in waking hours) 97.5. Still not good enough, well maybe for full-fee paying places, but they have their pride, they want hecs. Now they have to double their efforts again - (48 hours a full time job, pretty much every waking hour not spent at school plus some, costing them in sleep). They get 98.25!

Obviously I've fudged the numbers, just pulled them out of my arse. However, like Keynes anecdotes and observations are sufficient to satisfy me, I'm fairly certain the laws of diminshing returns would empirically bear out if somebody looked into study habits. They may even find an alarming number of students that apply no effort whatsoever and cruise into the mid 90's.

For me, there was no compelling reason to get a 98 or 99 beyond bragging rights. It was obvious to me to hedge against an enter score of 80 some effort was required. But it was also obvious to me that the difference in effort to go from 80 to 90 was much smaller than the difference in effort to go from 95 to 99.95.

One can develop from this a bullshit law of student productivity - a students utility (a fairly loose term for wellbeing) is maximised when the incremental return on effort = the incremental expenditure of time. I would say arbitrarily that my ENTER score was optimal (95.5) I went to some effort, but lost no sleep enjoyed year 12 immensely and never studied during lunchtime. It will vary from person to person, and if you want to be a doctor or lawyer it seems you have no choice but an unpleasant guantlet run through year 12, otherwise you have to bet on yourself being brilliant. If you want to be a lawyer and to a lesser extent doctor, how brilliant can you be? (face!)

I'm tired of school though, I've moved on, question is: why hasn't everybody else?

Know Thy Time

I find almost anything interesting, and in defence of my own stupidity most of my energy is expended running thought experiments in my head that go nowhere. But as such I'm thinking all the time, apparantly I should meditate more, as much of my thinking is unproductive but anyway...

I work currently in a market research call center. This is a bit of a regression for me but so is being back at uni. This time round though I noticed something odd about my job. My employers know exactly how productive I am being.

If you work in a market research call center you will know what I mean when I say management if anything tend to overthink the job. A computer dials numbers for us so our dial rate doesn't really factor into our productivity. People answer, we solicit them for a survey, some proportion say 'yes', some proportion say 'not right now' and some small proportion say 'never'.

All this gets measured, thus, my supervisors, employers and customers all can see clearly how much work I am actually doing.

Unremarkable you say? It may interest you that before I took this job I was self employed as a management consultant of dubious qualifications. I was a bit of an unpolished diamond but overconfident in myself because I was of the Drucker school. Most managers in Australia are not of the drucker school. Infact they are of no school whatsoever most people are promoted into management by being 'good' at something else (eg. sales).

Drucker's first direction to managers is to 'know thy time.' Note hoe similar this is to my education problem? Leaders do the right things, managers do things right.

But the first thing a manager should do is know what they are spending their time on. Or if you like a nice passive tense 'where their time goes.' Basically, managers and any employee makes decisions constantly about how to allocate their time.

Drucker felt it was important to audit a managers time as first point of the consulting business because managers don't know what they are spending their time on. They don't know because they aren't conscious of the decisions they are making. They allocate their time reflexively, to routine and also things barking for their attention.

Most people can't distinguish between urgent and important, thus they equate the two and do things that are 'urgent' without actually assessing whether they are 'important'.

Most managers are alarmed to find they spend about 30% of their time responding to emails and 60% of their time in meetings and only 10% of their time actually doing their core responsibilities. They fail to delegate, attend pointless meetings and respond to emails their admin could answer for them.

Good managers do delegate and spend their time devising structural solutions that prevent all the spot fires bad managers constantly run around putting out.

What makes my shitty casual job so fascinating is that whilst many managers can't actually percieve how productive they are, here a job of little significance can constantly and reliably measure my productivity.

My job is one of the few jobs where I am being productive the entire time I am paid for. This is rare.

Don't believe me? Here's where I get insulting...

Presenteeism

I have a friend who is a manager and is relatively new to the role. He started out as sort of a self directed jack of all trades but built up a volunteer base which gradually expanded into an actual small employee base.

I had repeated frustrations with him because he kept asking me for strategic advice. He had repeated frustrations with me because I kept advising him to actually devise a strategy.

I feel justified in my frustration because he always told me 'I don't have time for all this planning!' and even to paraphrase 'we don't have the resources to plan, this isn't a big company.'

Someone who has many resources has less reason to plan than somebody with very few. If you will, a soldier with a machine gun can spend less time aiming than somebody with only one bullet left.

What really frustrated me though was that I suggested this friend actually analyse his own productivity. His excuse not to do it 'I'm too busy.'

The point of analysing one's own productivity is to know what you are spending time on or alternatively wasting time on. It is discriminating between the total time you spend on productive activities and the total time you spend pissing up the wall.

Somebody who hasn't done this has no right to claim they are busy. Somebody who has no idea what they spend their time doing cannot say they are too busy to figure out what they are spending all their time on.

I suspect though, that 'too busy' was just an excuse to avoid confronting an unsettling truth: They aren't really busy at all.

Like a kid drinking coffee to appear stressed, and appearing stressed in order to appear important, presenteeism is appearing busy to look like you are productive.

This is where you come to work sick so everybody knows you are so important you can't even lie in bed for a day to recover. It is taking a 2 hour lunchbreak then working till 8pm. It is ludicrously common.

Sadly, appearing to be sick is not actual evidence that you are important. Sadder still, few managers call employees out on this. They rarely walk up in the morning and say 'you look terrible Babar, why'd you come in?' and Babar tells them 'I really have to get this report done today sir!' and sir says 'Good on you!' then walks off and walks back at 5pm and says 'lets see this important report then Babar!' wherein Babar breaks into a cold sweat and prints it off and the manager says 'well this report isn't actually important at all, thanks for coming to work and spreading your desease amongst employees that are actually doing some work.'

At Honda I had a trick, another trick of inversion. I employed it because I was a cunt. It basically went like this - I'd tell some junior employee to make sure they got their work done by 5pm and were out of here. Otherwise 'you'll look bad, the managers will walk past see you still here and think, Jojo can't handle his workload.' Managers of course would overhear this advice, and they never called me out. Of course they were suckers for presenteeism, I don't think I'm particularly brilliant for this trick, perhaps just brilliantly lazy plus a recipient of a marketing degree.

but nevertheless, I walked out of that office at 5pm every day and managers thought I was switched on, not undedicated and lazy. The trick to my trick though is that workplaces are remarkably inefficient. Again I'm being Keynesian and not doing any empirical statistical research, but I have never, ever, EVER met a counterexample in an office that suggested employees need put in more than 3 productive hours a day.

I would even suggest that 3 hours of actual productive work a day is quite high. There are of course counterexamples outside of the conventional office - call centers and artists. These are time consuming activities where one is productive for every hour one is paid (or in an artists case, not paid). Then there's manufacturing jobs and so fourth.

My trick worked because my actual output never contradicted the impression I cultivated. Many tried and none succeeded to consistently fill my day with productive activity. More and more was delegated to me in my three years. In the crazy times where my department experienced near to complete turnover in the period of 3 months I got up to about 5 hours a day.

I kept racking up responsibilities, automating them and becoming bored again. I maintain I'm not very smart. I didn't even concieve of the '3 hour' rule, arbitrary though it is. My brother had a friend that devised it and applied it. He'd show up for 3 hours a day and work hard and then go home and his employers loved him for it.

All I did was adopt a different theory than most of my colleagues.

Workaholia

Workaholia is the prevelant theory, and really it's just VCE all over again. People equate effort with productivity, urgency with importance and have no real natural grasp of the law of diminishing returns. Even then though, if you actually apply effort to your job, provided it is in some way productive in most office roles you will simply run out of things to do.

Most people get scared at this point hence the old 'work expands to fill the time available'. Furthermore people don't actually generally want more work to do. So at this point they don't get up and ask the manager for more work to do. Some do, but many don't. Many managers if you do ask scratch their head and tell you they don't really have anything to do.

Odds are you are going to learn one thing from exerting effort. You will become bored and learn then and there to take your time tomorrow. But if you take it easy, you may look lazy. So just like in VCE you drink coffee and bitch about losing sleep to cultivate the impression you are busy.

Instead though, you stay back after 5pm and rush around to meetings to cultivate this image.

I have met people that honestly believe they are as busy as the image they cultivate. I have met nobody who can prove it. Why can't they prove it? They are too busy to prove it.

It's a one or two step process, ask to look at the calander/schedule/organiser. It will either be A) empty. or B) full of meetings. that's step one. If it's empty you got yourself a presentee, they have no idea where their time goes, what their actual priorities are and what of their efforts are actually productive.

If it's B - full of meetings, then step 2 is to ask to see the minutes from the meetings. You will find their is either C) no minutes or D) minutes. If their are no minutes then nothing of any importance was discussed and no decisions of consequence were made. The only reason to have a meeting is to make decisions. You don't need to have a meeting to get information, the only reason to bring minds together is to problem solve/make decisions and productive meetings those minds have done their research first. If there are minutes you look for the decisions and the action items and or recommendations. 80% of the time, their are none. That means you can tell your presentee to cancel 80% of the meetings (they'll know which ones).

In practice a meeting pretty much is waste of time. They should never take longer than 10-15 minutes at the most and adjourn as soon as their purpose has been achieved (a decision has been made) so if a meeting lasts more than 15 minutes it better have 30 decisions in it.

Sadly, presenteeism pays off and many organisations reward effort and not output. This is hardly surprising since often seniority is also rewarded just like loyalty.

I think though and this is pure conjecture that people don't succumb to 'workaholia' because they want the promotions, just as students don't drink International roast for its robust flavor. They primarily do it to cultivate an image of importance, significance.

Warren Buffett tells this joke about an Oil prospector at the pearly gates. He arrives and St Peter (or whoever) informs him 'sorry we already have too many Oil Prospectors but you are free to join the queue.' and points to a long queue of oil prospectors. The wily prospector says 'I'm not waiting that long, watch this...' and turns to the long line of prospectors and says 'News just in! Oil found in Hell!' immediately the oil prospectors clamour over eachother jumping off the clouds and start heading downwards towards hell. Soon there is nobody left but St Peter and the wily oil prospector. St Peter says 'that's a neat trick, you're welcome in right now.' and the Oil prospector says 'nah, I think I'm going to head to hell, there may be some truth to those rumours.'

Whilst a witty illustration of how speculation creates self fulfilling prophecies, it also indicates how people can believe their own bullshit. People pretend to busy to convince themselves they are busy and generally succeed. This is why it's so hard for somebody obsessed with productivity to convince others they aren't nor that they need to exert so much effort to achieve their results.

Generally there are so many cases of people that could achieve more by doing less my mind boggles at how much waste this must be producing. Keynes argued that if we maintained 1950's living standards by now we would be working 4 hour days given the improvement in technology. I would argue that by now we could work 3 hour days and maintain a 21st century lifestyle (at least until mother nature exterminates us).

The reality is we all work 3 hour days, it just takes most people 10 hours to do it.

lastly...

Whilst a key insight to my education strategy was to realise my school was a business, it is much easier to see that a business is a business. This is why it is perplexing that such inefficiencies exist as presenteeism/workaholia. As Drucker says 'there's only one reason for a firm to exist - to create a customer' somebody becomes a customer because they are purchasing value, thus productivity is simple it is any activity that actually contributes value.
Thus the answer to the question 'what do employees have to do?' is simple 'create value' because their employer (the firm) has to create value, anything that isn't valuable the customer doesn't pay for. (if they do they feel ripped off and complain to 10 times the number of people they would tell if they were pleased)

Now lastly, and I mean it this time I should conclude where I began. I think my day was wasted writing a report, because fundamentally it is a project and it rewards effort. All the teacher has to do is make sure I know what I need to know, that is I understand what they taught me. This could be sufficiently demonstrated in a test or better yet the results of the simulation my report is actually on. As reports go it was one of the better ones because it made me pick through all the transactions with a fine tooth comb. But it could have just as easily been a short questionnaire.