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While you are sleeping, some people are grinding. Or so LinkedIn would have you believe. The social-media platform is flooded with “productivity porn” exhorting you to squeeze more out of every 24 hours. Self-anointed gurus flog online courses on living a life of “maximum utility”. The pressure to optimise your working hours and hack your routine can sometimes feel relentless.
People have long tried to make the best use of their time, yet the word “productivity” emerged only in the 19th century, during the Industrial Revolution. The term provided a way to quantify the number of goods each worker, division or company produced, judged in relation to the time or other resources it took to make the goods. Bosses began to focus on extracting ever more from those manning the machines. Later people started applying this idea to other facets of their lives to get more done in less time.