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Under Joe Biden, Americans Could Suffer Economic Super Collapse.... [OST Main Logo mobile]( [LOGO OST]( At times, our affiliate partners reach out to the Editors at Open Source Trades with special opportunities for our readers. The message below is one we think you should take a close, serious look at. [divider] The explosion in productivity tech means we can track everything from our steps to our to-do list. But should we? E Every day, Alex Donohue wakes up and checks how well he slept using the smartwatch that his wife brought him as an anniversary present. On work calls, he paces around the car park of his office to make sure that he fits in 10,000 steps a day. He describes tracking his screen time as a “ritual”. Donohue, a 31-year-old founder of a London-based PR agency, is a self-professed productivity addict. He’s one of a growing number of people who see optimising their time using technology as an increasingly important part of their lives. And there’s certainly no shortage of tools to help him out. While we once might have scribbled our to-do list down on a Post-it or used email flags to prioritise tasks, the last few years have ushered in a boom in apps promising to help us organise our time better and maximise our output. In a world in which everything seems trackable, and workplace ideas about time-management have comprehensively crossed over into our personal lives, these tools can seem irresistible. Yet the technologies we use to optimise our days can also start to control them. Since the pandemic hit and time has taken on a new meaning, it may be time to rethink our buy-in, and question whether logging, tracking and uploading tasks into various apps is really the path to success. Despite the raft of productivity products to choose from, perhaps the old methods of assessing what you’d accomplished in a day weren’t really so inadequate after all. Why productivity boomed The desire to keep on top of your task list is hardly a new phenomenon. Leonardo da Vinci was writing to-do lists as far back as 1490, while Benjamin Franklin famously created a 13-week plan for self-improvement in the early 1700s. A few decades later, publishers were printing the first examples of daily planners, as people in industrialising nations grew interested in how to make more money. Alex Donohue is one of many using the latest tools to try and become more productive (Credit: Alex Donohue) Alex Donohue is one of many using the latest tools to try and become more productive (Credit: Alex Donohue) But our cultural obsession with personal productivity has been a relatively recent phenomenon as society digitalised and time-saving technology became a modern fixation. In the 1990s and early 2000s, technology that we now take for granted was promoted as a time-saving tool – shared calendars could eliminate complicated discussions to line up meetings, while search engines could save us hours digging up information. With the opportunity to produce more with potentially less work, it’s no wonder so many embraced a lifestyle that beckons more output through optimisation. Plus, there’s a template for why maximum productivity is so desirable: success. High-profile individuals – particularly those working for the tech companies that designed some of these tools – began to attract attention for their personal productivity habits. Who could forget Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey’s 16-hour work days (including 0500 hydrotherapy sessions), or Google employee Marissa Mayer’s 130-hour work weeks? With the routines of high-achieving individuals increasingly fetishised, the digital productivity industry boomed, making its way into our offices, our leisure time and our homes. Now, it’s estimated that global sales of wearable devices that track daily activity and allow users to get notifications on the go will reach $1bn (£730m) by 2022. Companies continue to innovate; apps such as Forest, which encourages users to plant a virtual ‘tree’ that only thrives when the user is doing a focused task, have become increasingly commonplace. Claire Wu, a neuroscientist, says that part of the attraction for users is the way many of these apps ‘reward’ users. “When you tick off an item on your to-do list, or see your step count or sleep hours go up in an app, it creates a feedback loop where you experience an immediate reward,” she says. “Without these tools, goals can also seem quite faraway and intangible. Productivity and optimisation tools help people to break down goals, and incorporate the same addictive and reward-based elements that you might find in a mobile game or social media app.” Neuroscientist Claire Wu says some productivity tools use 'rewards' to keep us engaged (Credit: Claire Wu) Neuroscientist Claire Wu says some productivity tools use 'rewards' to keep us engaged (Credit: Claire Wu) While ticking off an item on an old-fashioned to-do list might give us some level of satisfaction, technology games our desire to do more and rewards us in more overt ways. “A common theme in many apps is a representation of progress, such as badges or hitting a certain number,” explains Wu. “But these can start to become more important than the outcome itself – for example, a person might do a workout but don’t get the expected badge or points, and feel like the whole effort was a waste of time. But really, the workout is much more important than some arbitrary points.” Wu, who founded an app that helps people achieve long-term health optimisation goals, believes that some productivity tools can place pressure on users. She thinks that people may use metrics, and by extension their personal productivity, as a measure of how “good or bad they are as a person”. Working harder, not smarter? There’s also the question of whether we can really assess how much these apps are contributing to our output. “Our lives and work are increasingly digital,” says Almuth McDowall, professor of organisational psychology at Birkbeck, University of London. “But it’s a complex world, and there is an information overload. Good apps, well used, can help us to negotiate this. But there is still a question of whether we’re really interested in becoming more productive, or simply ‘doing more to seem effective’. Why are we not getting better at managing the quality of our output? - Almuth McDowall Data certainly suggests that employees are struggling with a software overload. Research conducted in 2018 showed that the average operational support worker switched among 35 different applications more than 1,100 times during their working day. Yet despite the deluge of apps and tools, productivity is in decline in most highly industrialised countries, while burnout is on the rise. “Evidence shows that working hours and the time that we spend in online meetings is increasing, so it may be that we are working harder, not smarter,” suggests McDowall. “Why are we not getting better at managing the quality of our output?” A step back, to think Into this mix, of course, has come Covid-19, disrupting our lives, working patterns and habits – and for some, it’s been an opportunity to recalibrate how they assess performance. Dear Fellow American, Joe Biden and the radical left are taking us down a path of no return. This is my third and possibly FINAL warning about the death of our economy. The pandemic has pushed many to the brink. But although we're exhausted and overwhelmed, some experts say we're not actually as burned out as we may think. O On lots of occasions, I’ve told myself – and my friends and colleagues – that I’m experiencing burnout. Making a living as a freelancer can often mean working long hours, and trying to keep a lot of very different plates spinning at once. A few times a year, I hit what feels like a creative wall: I’m fresh out of good ideas, and I just really need to nap. For a long time, I’ve been calling that burnout. But I’ve been wrong. We tend to think of burnout as an intangible – one of those things we can’t define, and we just know when we feel it. Right now, more of us may be feeling it than ever. In this stage of the pandemic, after more than a year spent trying to navigate its challenges, the general feeling is that we’ve all hit the wall. But there is a scientific definition of burnout, and standards by which to measure it. And based on that criteria, a lot of folks who think they’re burnt out – myself included – really aren’t. That doesn’t mean we aren’t on the way there, though, and understanding how to really measure burnout can help individuals and organisations change course before it’s too late. What burnout is – and isn’t In 1981, Christina Maslach, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, developed the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), to define and measure the condition. “The challenge is people use the term to mean different things,” says Maslach. “It’s a catchy term, so people apply it to all kinds of stuff. So, are we all speaking the same language?” The MBI attempts to clarify the subject by evaluating burnout based on three criteria: exhaustion or total lack of energy, feelings of cynicism or negativity toward a job and reduced efficacy or success at work. Respondents get scores in all three areas along a continuum, from more positive to more negative. A burnout profile requires a negative score in all three. People use burnout as a synonym for tired, and they’re missing the point that there’s a world of difference between those two states – Michael Leiter “There’s a tendency to think if you score negatively on one measure, you’re burnt out,” says Maslach, but that’s an incorrect usage of the MBI. The biggest misconception about burnout, adds Michael Leiter, a Nova Scotia-based organisational psychologist and the co-author, with Maslach, of The Truth About Burnout, is that it’s the same as exhaustion. “People use burnout as a synonym for tired, and they’re missing the point that there’s a world of difference between those two states,” says Leiter. He gives the example of obstetricians, who often work chaotic schedules. “They’re delivering babies at all hours of the night, and they’re totally exhausted, but they’re bringing new life into the world, and making people’s lives better, and they care about that work. That’s overextended and exhausted, but it’s not burnout.” There are plenty of others who meet one of the MBI criteria. “The second largest group, after people who are just exhausted, is people who aren’t fully engaged,” says Leiter. “They’re going to work and it’s not exciting, it just pays the bills. There’s another group that are just cynical. They don’t care about the clientele, or the work.” Still others may have low efficacy, with careers that are stalled for one reason or another. But fewer people can report that all three conditions apply. I can’t. While I’ve definitely experienced exhaustion, and even some disengagement, I still love what I do and haven’t become cynical about my work. It takes all three – exhaustion, cynicism and lack of efficacy – to get what’s scientifically defined as burnout. The majority of us aren’t there. “It’s not an epidemic; it’s over-diagnosed,” says Leiter. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem, or that conversations around burnout aren’t increasing for a reason. “Qualities of burnout are on the rise,” concedes Leiter. “Certainly, more people are heading in that direction.” Burnout isn’t black and white Burnout is a spectrum, and most of us are on it. Early this year, when job search site Indeed surveyed 1,500 US workers across ages and industries, more than half reported that they’re experiencing burnout. And more than two-thirds said the pandemic had made burnout worse. That survey did not use the MBI, and chances are most of those respondents were using the colloquial definition of burnout, not the scientific one. But while burnout – the kind defined by three negative MBI scores – is a profile that Maslach says typically applies to 10% to 15% of people, that doesn’t mean everyone else is all the way on the other end of the spectrum. In fact, Maslach and Leiter’s newer research identifies three profiles in between: overextended, ineffective and disengaged. Evidence suggests more than half of employees fall into one of these profiles, with a strong negative score in exhaustion, efficacy or cynicism. They’re not yet burnt out – but they’re on the way. Many people equate fatigue with burnout, but experts say that burnout is a totally different state than just exhaustion (Credit: Alamy) Many people equate fatigue with burnout, but experts say that burnout is a totally different state than just exhaustion (Credit: Alamy) For people in many professions, says Leiter, things have only got worse as a result of the pandemic, with efficacy issues especially becoming overwhelming. “Schoolteachers have struggled to continue teaching, and haven’t felt accomplished,” he says. “They just know they’re not being the teacher they were before, and that’s discouraging. It’s the same for physicians. It’s improved, but early in the game there were no protocols for dealing with Covid, and everything they were doing was wrong.” Those issues have shifted the data on burnout. A study conducted between March and June of 2020 administered a series of tests, including a burnout inventory similar to the MBI, to more than 3,500 healthcare workers in the UK, Poland and Singapore. Just under 67% measured as burnt out. While historically the true burnout profile for employees in all professions hovers just above 10%, Maslach says “that’s clearly gone up” in light of the pandemic. Now, she believes, it may be closer to 20%. And that’s a huge problem, because true burnout can’t be fixed with a vacation or a wellness retreat. “When people really get to the extreme, the vast majority can’t go back to the same employer or the same kind of work,” says Leiter. “They have to change careers. Burnout runs so deep – just even the feel of going into that building, or that sort of building can be a trigger. It very often prompts career change.” Why measurement matters Avoiding true burnout on a wide scale is vital, especially because it could mean a drain of qualified people from skilled professions. That’s where the MBI, and tests like it, become invaluable tools. Learning that I was not, in fact, experiencing real burnout was helpful. I was able to evaluate what I was actually feeling (overextension), and start thinking about what was causing that and what changes I could make. That is the point of a burnout inventory; it’s not really about diagnosing or ruling out burnout. In fact, says Maslach, “it’s not a diagnostic tool at all. People have misused it that way, but it’s a research measure.” It’s not an epidemic; it’s over-diagnosed – Michael Leiter Though it’s administered to individuals, what the MBI is really designed to measure is their environment. “If there are negative scores, it doesn’t mean the problem is the individual. It’s what they’re responding to,” says Maslach. “You’re not trying to figure out who it’s happening to, you’re trying to figure out whyit’s happening. You don’t use it by itself, you use it with other data to say why is the pattern of scores the way it is? Those scores should be used as warning signals.” An organisation seeing scores on the negative end of the spectrum should be acting quickly, says Maslach, and that doesn’t mean offering yoga classes or mindfulness seminars. “Work is getting tougher, longer and harder to do. People are working more hours because they’re scared they won’t get a promotion, or will lose their job. Doing more with less is at the heart of corporate culture, and that’s not how people do the best work,” she says. “There’s this gigantic self-care industry out there all focused on how to cope with that stress; but to prevent, or reduce, or eliminate burnout, it’s not about fixing the people. It’s about fixing the job.” It’s not actually about measuring how many workers are or are almost burnt out, says Maslach. It’s about identifying workplaces with unmanageable workloads, and using that information to give employees more control, better tools and the discretion to figure out how to do their jobs better – without burning out. “There’s that old saying, ‘if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,’” says Maslach. “The thrust of our argument is, why don’t you change the heat? How about redesigning the kitchen?” [Ignore this message at your own risk.]( Sincerely, Jim Rickards P.S. What you saw happen on Election night was nothing compared to what I fear is next. [The time to prepare is now.]( [devider] [Slogan]( You {EMAIL} received this email as a result of your consent to receive 3rd party offers at our another website. 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