Productivity Matters, But Not as a Political Football for Remote Work

I have been toiling away on your behalf thinking about the future of work and being, if I may say so, rather productive. I mean “productive” in the driest economic sense, which is that my “inputs” have included attending two conferences on work in the US recently — “The Implications of Remote Work” conference on the West Coast hosted by The Hoover Institution at Stanford University and "Going To Work" on the East hosted by Bloomberg Beta in Baltimore — and my “outputs” include this column.

Productivity is a hot topic now. The working assumption that productivity matters has been turbocharged by a combination of recent technological and social changes at work. Much faith is being placed on how generative AI will only increase this elusive elixir.