Game of the Week: Dungeons of Hinterberg, productivity, and the quest to escape engagement

Is productivity secretly the great issue of our times? That feels quite hard to argue at the moment, what with everything else, and yet it does keep coming up. The UK in particular seems to be struggling. "Britain’s productivity problem is long-standing and getting worse", worried The Economist, in 2022. In 2023, The Financial Times went in search of answers, claiming productivity was "so weak at UK companies" because of "longstanding problems of low investment and skills gaps exacerbated by overconfidence and lack of management time." The New Statesman meanwhile turned in desperation to the general public, opening a competition at the start of the year with a £5,000 prize for the best answers to the question: "Britain is stuck. How can we get the country moving again?"

The implication with all of this is ultimately that we - you and I, the labour force or the populace - aren't getting enough done with the time we're given. "Productivity" in economics terms is a lot like productivity in normal terms: it's how much GDP is created relative to hours worked. GDP is the monetary value of goods and services produced. So: produce more goods and services (or more valuable ones) in the same amount of time, and your productivity goes up. Productivity goes up, then all else being equal, GDP goes up, which means the economy grows. Hooray!

The issue - and stop me if this doesn't apply to you - is that I think most people feel like they're doing too much already. So much so that there are entire cottage industries dedicated to the art of being productive. Have you tried Monday? What about ToDoist? Do you use Asana? Or Trello? What about a bullet journal, a pomodoro timer, setting a Work Focus on your iPhone, meditating for 10 minutes every morning, listening to condensed versions of books, monitoring your glucose responses to avoid insulin spikes, starting every day submerged in an ice bath, or maybe it's just cramming in a bit more work on the train home?