It turns out Merlin Mann appears to have coined the “productivity porn” term (he called it “productivity pr0n”) and then later realized it was harmful and abandoned his site entirely.
As his influence grew, he popularized a new term for the genre that he was helping to create: “productivity pr0n,” an adaptation of the “leet speak,” or geek lingo, word for pornography. The hunger for this pr0n, he noticed, was insatiable. People were desperate to tinker with their productivity systems.
What Mann and his fellow-enthusiasts were doing felt perfectly natural: they were trying to be more productive in a knowledge-work environment that seemed increasingly frenetic and harder to control. What they didn’t realize was that they were reacting to a profound shift in the workplace that had gone largely unnoticed.
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Not long afterward, Mann posted a self-reflective essay on 43 Folders, in which he revealed a growing dissatisfaction with the world of personal productivity. Productivity pr0n, he suggested, was becoming a bewildering, complexifying end in itself—list-making as a “cargo cult,” system-tweaking as an addiction. “On more than a few days, I wondered what, precisely, I was trying to accomplish,” he wrote. Part of the problem was the recursive quality of his work. Refining his productivity system so that he could blog more efficiently about productivity made him feel as if he were being “tossed around by a menacing Rube Goldberg device” of his own design; at times, he said, “I thought I might be losing my mind.” He also wondered whether, on a substantive level, the approach that he’d been following was really capable of addressing his frustrations. It seemed to him that it was possible to implement many G.T.D.-inflected life hacks without feeling “more competent, stable, and alive.”
(it’s a good article capturing how we are often trying to treat the complexity symptoms resulting from society’s shift into the Information Age without understanding the shift itself)
As Andy Matuschak wrote more succinctly:
People who blog about note-taking systems don’t produce them. … I don’t think it’s an accident that Luhmann wrote “Communicating with slip boxes” near the end of his career.
https://twitter.com/andy_matuschak/status/1247604704013512705
So the question then is: to what extent are we engaging in productivity masturbation/pornography by spending time online writing about our systems and swapping system ideas and tinkering with our systems and then reporting back to others so they can cheer us on and tinker with their own systems so they can report back to others so they can be cheered on and …?