Cognitive Ergonomics for the Pain of Productivity Anxiety - DBR 099

Are you struggling with productivity anxiety—that feeling of drowning or running on a treadmill? You are not alone; 80% of workers report this struggle. This episode shifts the rhetoric away from self-blame, analyzing the underlying causes and symptoms of this pervasive problem. The solution is not treatment, but technique: a concept called Cognitive Ergonomics, which builds systems to support your attention and strengthen your cognition.

The Pervasive Problem: Productivity Anxiety

• Symptoms and Impact: Productivity anxiety often feels like drowning, being on a hamster wheel, or a treadmill where you are constantly speeding but not feeling like you are speeding up. The root word for anxiety means "choking". Under stress, we often respond emotionally rather than thinking things through rationally.
• Cognitive Strain: Stress causes a lack of nuanced thought, leading to problems like all-or-nothing thinking, self-judgment, and catastrophizing.
• Self-Perception: The strain leads to chronic dissatisfaction and feelings of inadequacy. This robs us of our agency because we feel incapable of dealing with the volume of information. This feeling is compounded when we perceive that other people do not appear to be suffering to the same degree, leading to guilt, shame, and comparison. This is not a personal failure, but an environmentally caused problem.

The Causes: Technology and Culture Collision

• Environmental Problem: The situation is a natural outgrowth of the technologies we have developed, married with the prevalent workplace culture. This is a collision of "convenience" technology and the prevailing "hustle culture".
• Technology Misalignment: Almost all modern technology is concerned with convenience and speed, not supporting strong cognition. Faster communication is not equivalent to better quality or better volume. Our tools may, frankly, be making us "stupid".
• Non-Actionable Information Load: The same cognitive asset we use for productive output is necessary to deal with all information. We are inundated with information that is not actionable for us, leading to claims on our attention that are simply beyond our mental ability to react effectively.
• Workplace Culture: The culture presumes that environmental stress makes us more productive, which is the opposite of the reality. There is a cultural phenomenon that discourages contentment.

The Solution: Techniques for Cognitive Ergonomics

• The Need for Technique: The fundamental problem is that nobody is teaching us how to manage in this new environment. The solution lies in finding and implementing good techniques.
• Applying Ergonomics to the Mind:Cognitive Ergonomics (or attention ergonomics) is about identifying and managing environmental factors that cause stress and inhibit our cognition. We should treat the constant, repetitive mental stress as similar to a physical Repetitive Stress Injury.
• Benefits of Attention Management: Good attention management supports and prevents the hampering of cognitive work. It sharpens both fluid intelligence (imagination, rapid thinking) and crystallized intelligence (experience, wisdom, slower thinking).

Conclusion

We must stop ignoring the mental repetitive stress injury that the modern workplace imposes. The crucial element we are missing is technique. By employing the principles of attention ergonomics or mental ergonomics, we can manage this new environment and build systems that work for us, rather than constantly struggling to cope. This approach is the foundation upon which strong cognition—and therefore high performance in work and life—is built. The pursuit of cognitive ergonomics is the way to Do Busy Right.

 

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