Why Personal Productivity may be Hard and 'The Corporation' has the answer

Eli has drawn my attention to 'The Corporation'. Shame on me for not knowing and having seen this documentary before (1). One word struck me when I heard it, because it is a topic I wanted to discuss already for quite some time in a different context: Accountability.

What does it have to do with personal productivity then?

I'm involved in quite some thinking about IT and business processes lately. Defining the process is generally easy, the measurement of their performance both from a process as well as a quality/content point of view is much more difficult (2). One thing, though, that is a core component of every step in the process is defining the person who is accountable, which is usually different from the person who is responsible for doing the work. Usually, people use a so-called RACI diagram to define the respective roles for every step in a process or task.

Personal Productivity is all about processes (think GTD, for instance) and personal work flow. Similarly, it's not easy to measure the quality of the process or deliverable. But what really makes personal productivity hard is the fact that one person is both accountable and responsible, or in other words: we have to 'control' our own work.

Maybe that is why we need a personal assistent?


(1) No, I'm not going into the details of the documentary, and I am not commenting on the reasoning of Eli at this time.
(2) No, that is also not what I wanted to talk about now (but will do in the future).