Exactly what I thought of reading this. The idea of "productivity" doesn't even make sense. People don't want to be productive, people want to be happy.
Happiness is a metric for which you can optimize, which then would be productivity. But in the first place people don't want to be happy, they want to survive, need to move and grow, happiness comes just after the important foundation is secured.
And optimizing the necessary and boring parts, to have more time for happiness makes totally sense. For example, the less time I waste on necessary household chores which are eating my free time, the more time I will have with actual free time which I then can use for things which will make me happy.
I see that you get to that point towards the end of the article. Kudos for writing that insight, but the beginning and history of productivity seem a bit irrelevant. If I had a magic wand, I would reduce the article to 1/4 its length.
why not talk more about the labor theory of value? imo the future of "productivity" should be the realization that the fetishizing of hustle culture is a byproduct of excessive orientation towards captialism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmMJbwE8j98
