Philosophy

“THE most important contribution of management in the 20th century was the 50-fold increase in the productivity of the manual worker in manufacturing,” wrote the management guru Peter Drucker. “The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of the knowledge worker.”

But how? While manual workers toiling on assembly lines can be reorganised in a top-down way to improve efficiency, information workers are more self-directed, and must find efficient routines to process a constant flow of information on their own. The problem is akin to rewriting a piece of software to make it run more reliably. And just as programmers like to exploit tricks or “hacks” to get results quickly, a new “life hacking” movement is now applying the same approach to reorganising life off the screen too.