# Making Decisions By:: [[Ross Jackson]] 2024-04-05 Measuring productivity in an office is challenging. There have certainly been advancements that make doing some office work more efficient. The computer is a prime example. Word processing allows one to edit much more efficiently than was possible with type-written work. Rather than retype an entire page to make a change, one can open the document, make the desired change, and save the revised version. Similarly, email and shared file systems allow one to coordinate the document throughout the organization. As impressive as these advancements are, it is unclear whether they constitute productivity gains. Much depends on the purpose behind all the office work. If office work exists primarily to inform the decision-making process, then one would need to look at the quantity, quality, and timeliness of the decisions made to determine if the office is more productive. Generating increasing amounts of electronic paperwork eventually ignored by those making decisions doesn’t necessarily represent a productivity gain. Even still, maybe making more decisions isn’t necessarily a sign of being more productive. Business decisions aren’t widgets on a factory line. In the productivity game, more seems to reign supreme. It is difficult to break free of the mindset fashioned by the Industrial Revolution. Counting things is too easy and challenging to discern what is important. Assessing the quality of one’s decisions doesn’t fare much better under scrutiny. Whose valuation is to be used? Instinctively, one would likely go to profit as the metric. Whereas that might be a contender for organizations existing to make a profit, many organizations do not have that motive. Even the ones who do don’t have profit as their only purpose. Is an organization that makes the lives of its workers better in ways meaningful to those working more productive than one that doesn’t? If work is what one does to make a fulfilling life, advances in this form of productivity would matter. We could decide to focus upon this and attempt to measure it. Or we can continue to sustain a status quo that is increasingly suspect. #### Related Items [[Status Quo]] [[Decision-making]] [[Work]] [[Productivity]] [[Technology]] [[Metrics]] [[Measurement]]