The performance of productivity: techtubers and the business of distraction

A new breed of influencer has emerged in recent years: the techtuber, or self-styled productivity guru. They present themselves as models of efficiency, masters of digital workflows, the kind of people who squeeze every drop of value out of their time thanks to the latest tools. Their videos are filled with spotless desks, perfectly aligned laptops, and sleek interfaces displayed on immaculate monitors. They sip coffee in minimalist cafés while typing away on laptops as if to demonstrate that work can be both effortless and glamorous. The message is clear: if you want to be successful, if you want to be productive, then you must do as they do, adopt their tools, mimic their routines, and embrace their digital lifestyle.

Yet behind the glossy surfaces lies a contradiction. These influencers claim to embody productivity, but their very behavior betrays shiny object syndrome, the compulsion to constantly adopt the newest apps, systems, or methods, abandoning yesterday’s “ultimate tool” in favor of today’s trend. What they present as mastery is in fact a cycle of distraction. Each new recommendation is marketed as a revelation, yet within weeks it is discarded, replaced by the next supposedly indispensable solution. The truth is not that these people are paragons of productivity, but that they have turned the performance of productivity into their actual profession.

This performance is not accidental. It is monetized. Every recommendation comes with referral links, affiliate codes, or sponsorships, ensuring that their income is not derived from the productivity they claim to practice, but from the audiences they convince. The real product is not the tool itself, but the viewer’s attention and insecurity. Each new app, notebook, or system is a way to capture clicks, to generate commissions, to keep the wheel turning. Productivity is not their mission but their commodity.

Worse still is the aesthetic deception. Their desks are pristine not because they work there, but because they stage them for filming. Their café “work sessions” are not deep focus marathons but content creation exercises. Real work is rarely so photogenic. It produces clutter: notebooks filled with messy handwriting, tangled cables, stacks of papers, half-finished drafts. What the techtuber shows is not a workspace but a film set, an illusion crafted to suggest a lifestyle of discipline and success that evaporates under scrutiny.

The popularity of these influencers reveals something deeper about our cultural moment. In an age of distraction, many feel overwhelmed, unproductive, and desperate for structure. Techtubers exploit this anxiety, presenting themselves as guides who have already mastered the chaos. They promise that the right tool, the right app, the right workflow will unlock your potential. But this is a false promise. Constantly switching systems does not produce discipline; it erodes it. Chasing tools does not lead to mastery; it keeps you in a perpetual loop of preparation, never execution.

What we are witnessing is not the spread of productivity but the spread of performative productivity, a cultural phenomenon in which people appear busy, organized, and effective while producing little of substance. The bullet journal craze of a decade ago hinted at this trend: people spent more time designing layouts and collecting pens than writing ideas or executing projects. The new digital version is no different: endless hours spent setting up templates, importing plugins, and tweaking workflows, all in the name of work that never actually begins.

This post will strip away the façade. It will examine how shiny object syndrome has become the lifeblood of productivity influencers, how referral codes and sponsorships turn advice into marketing, how staged setups mask the absence of real labor, and how the industry thrives by selling insecurity back to its audience. At its core, this is not a story about tools, but about the commodification of hope: the hope that with the right system, we might finally overcome our procrastination, our distractions, our messy realities. The irony, of course, is that the cure sold by techtubers is the very disease they perpetuate.

The syndrome of shiny objects

The defining trait of productivity influencers is their obsession with the new. Today’s revolutionary tool is tomorrow’s forgotten experiment, replaced by yet another app, device, or workflow hailed as “game-changing”. This is the essence of shiny object syndrome: the compulsion to constantly switch systems, convinced that productivity lies just one tool away. The irony is obvious, every hour spent learning, configuring, and abandoning a new app is an hour not spent actually working. But in the world of techtubers, the act of switching has become the performance itself.

At the heart of this cycle is novelty dressed as necessity. An influencer who praised Notion last month now evangelizes Obsidian. Roam Research was once the ultimate knowledge manager, until it wasn’t. Then came Anytype, then a wave of AI-powered note-takers, then subscription-only “productivity ecosystems” priced like luxury goods. Each is presented not as optional but as indispensable, the key to unlocking a higher level of focus. The implicit message is simple: if you are still struggling, it is because you are not using the right tool. And conveniently, the link to that tool is in the description, with a referral code attached.

The syndrome extends beyond software into the realm of hardware. Techtubers often justify the purchase of the latest Apple devices as though they were productivity tools rather than luxury items. A MacBook Pro with the most expensive configuration is framed not as a lifestyle purchase but as a professional necessity. The newest iPad Pro is presented as the ultimate canvas for “capturing world-changing ideas”, even if those ideas rarely extend beyond drawing boxes in a note-taking app at Starbucks. The latest iPhone is positioned as essential for organization, communication, and “managing creativity on the go”. The narrative is always the same: without these tools, true productivity is impossible. The hidden truth, of course, is that the tools are not the means of productivity, they are the props in a performance.

Even more insidious is the cost of the software and services being promoted. Platforms like Notion, Obsidian add-ons, or AI services such as Humanize AI come with subscription fees that can exceed 50 or even 200€ per month. For ordinary users, this is a significant financial burden, especially when multiplied across several tools. For the influencers, however, these tools are often free, offered as part of sponsorship deals, affiliate partnerships, or review samples. They may not even use them in their daily lives. Yet they encourage audiences to adopt them as though they were indispensable, monetizing the cycle of insecurity and consumption. Productivity becomes not a discipline but a subscription model, one in which the only guaranteed productivity is the influencer’s revenue.

The effect on viewers is predictable. They begin to measure productivity not by what they produce but by what they use. They feel inadequate if they don’t own the same laptop, don’t subscribe to the same tools, don’t have the same pristine setup. The act of working is displaced by the act of consuming. The more expensive the tool, the stronger the signal that one is serious about productivity, even if the tool contributes nothing to the actual work. This is how shiny object syndrome metastasizes: productivity becomes indistinguishable from consumerism, and real work is lost in the endless pursuit of upgrades.

In the end, shiny object syndrome does not make people more productive; it makes them dependent. They become addicted to the cycle of discovery, setup, and abandonment, mistaking motion for progress. The influencers, meanwhile, thrive on this dependency, feeding it with ever-new recommendations and monetizing it with links, codes, and sponsorships. The performance continues, shiny objects pile up, and the only real output is content about productivity, not productivity itself.

Sponsored productivity

The world of productivity influencers runs on a simple truth: they do not make money by being productive, they make money by selling productivity to others. The polished videos, the glowing reviews, the endless stream of “must-have” apps and devices are not acts of generosity or genuine discovery. They are acts of marketing. Every recommendation is carefully intertwined with affiliate links, referral codes, or sponsorships, ensuring that the influencer profits not from using the tool, but from convincing others to pay for it.

The mechanics are always the same. A video appears with a dramatic title, “This one app changed my workflow forever”. The influencer walks through its features, praises its unique design, and positions it as a transformative step in their productivity journey. The unspoken but ever-present footnote: the link to the app, conveniently provided, contains a referral code. Every download, every subscription, every click is tracked, and each one generates a commission. The influencer’s productivity is not in writing, coding, or building, it is in monetizing clicks.

Sponsorships elevate this even further. Entire videos are often underwritten by the companies whose tools are being “reviewed”. At the start or end of the video, a polished disclaimer may appear: “This video is sponsored by…”. But by then, the viewer has already absorbed the narrative that the tool is essential, perhaps even life-changing. The sponsorship transforms what looks like a personal recommendation into paid advertising, though wrapped in the credibility of someone performing as an authority on productivity.

The irony is that many of these influencers do not even use the tools they recommend. They may sign in once, set up a template, and record footage for their video, but their real workflow, if they have one at all, is built elsewhere. Yet they encourage their audiences to commit to subscriptions of 30, 40, or 50€ per month, knowing full well that most users will abandon the tools within weeks. The influencer has already been paid; the cost of wasted subscriptions falls on the audience. The cycle is profitable not because the tools improve productivity, but because they exploit the audience’s desire to feel productive.

This monetization extends beyond software into hardware. Companies send influencers free laptops, iPads, or accessories, which are then showcased as indispensable tools for productivity. The influencer insists that their workflow depends on the latest MacBook Pro or iPad Pro, as though true efficiency were impossible on older, less glamorous devices. The recommendation is not about necessity but about status: owning the latest hardware signals seriousness, and viewers are encouraged to conflate purchasing power with professional capacity. The influencer does not pay for these devices; the audience does.

In effect, productivity influencers operate not as guides but as sales representatives, cloaked in the aesthetics of authenticity. They present themselves as fellow workers, as peers navigating the same struggles, but their incentives are entirely different. The viewer wants to be productive; the influencer wants the viewer to believe that productivity can be bought, and to click the link that proves it. What looks like advice is marketing. What looks like mentorship is sales. What looks like productivity is performance designed to convert.

The hidden cost is enormous. Beyond the wasted money on apps and subscriptions, there is the erosion of trust. The more people realize that the recommendations are driven by profit, the less faith they place in genuine advice. Productivity becomes commodified, stripped of its real meaning, reduced to an endless cycle of ads disguised as guidance. The audience, meanwhile, grows less productive, caught between trying new tools and abandoning them, never staying long enough with one system to create real results.

The ultimate irony is that the influencer is the least productive figure in the equation. Their “work” consists not of building, writing, or solving, but of scripting videos, arranging sponsorships, and editing content. They produce only the appearance of productivity, the lighting, the sound, the spotless desk, while their actual output is recommendations for tools they often barely use. The audience is left poorer in money, time, and focus, while the influencer grows richer on a business model built on selling the promise of productivity rather than its reality.

The performance of work

If there is one thing that defines the techtuber aesthetic, it is the performance of productivity. Their videos are not glimpses into real work, but carefully staged scenes designed to look like work. A MacBook Pro gleams on a spotless desk, the screen open to a minimalistic dashboard in Notion or Obsidian. A wireless keyboard and mouse are arranged with surgical precision, as though misalignment itself were an affront to efficiency. The lighting is warm, the desk bare, the coffee mug artfully placed to suggest both focus and relaxation. Everything about the image whispers productivity, except for the absence of actual work.

The performance extends to café culture. Many influencers film themselves “working” in coffee shops, perched uncomfortably at tiny tables, backs arched, typing furiously while sipping overpriced lattes. The message is that productivity is not tied to context, that you can run businesses, design projects, or change lives from a corner of Starbucks. But anyone who has attempted deep work in such a setting knows the reality: the noise, the instability of the environment, the distractions. Real concentration thrives in spaces built for focus, not in curated backgrounds staged for video. The café is not a workplace; it is a prop, chosen for its aesthetic rather than its practicality.

Even the hardware becomes part of the performance. Influencers justify owning the latest MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and iPhone not simply as preferences, but as necessities for productivity. The argument is always the same: without the fastest processor, the sharpest display, the smoothest pen input, ideas cannot truly be captured, workflows cannot truly flow, and productivity cannot truly flourish. This is not just consumerism, it is consumerism rebranded as discipline. The laptop is not presented as a luxury, but as a sacred tool, as if buying the right device were equivalent to doing the right work.

The cost of these performances is quietly shifted onto the audience. While influencers are often loaned devices or sponsored to showcase them, viewers are encouraged to believe that success is impossible without matching the setup. This leads to ordinary people purchasing laptops worth several thousand euros or subscribing to platforms at 50€ a month, not because they need them, but because they have been convinced that without them, they cannot be productive. The performance becomes a cycle of aspiration and guilt: you are not working hard enough, and perhaps the reason is that you do not own the right tools.

What is missing from these curated scenes are the signs of real work. Work generates mess: stacks of papers, notes scribbled hastily in the margins of books, documents open across multiple tabs, drafts half-finished, sticky notes littered with reminders. Real productivity is rarely cinematic. It is repetitive, often chaotic, and rarely photogenic. The clean desks and glowing café sessions are not the byproducts of discipline but of staging. They are designed to be filmed, not lived.

This is why the influencer’s version of productivity feels aspirational but hollow. It shows you what productivity looks like, not what it is. It is the difference between a set and a workshop: one is designed to impress, the other to produce. In the influencer’s world, productivity must be beautiful, minimalist, and Instagrammable. In reality, productivity is messy, unglamorous, and filled with long hours that never appear on screen. The techtuber does not show the grind, because the grind would break the illusion.

The performance of work thus becomes its own product. The influencer films, edits, uploads, and monetizes not the results of their labor, but the appearance of labor itself. Productivity becomes a brand aesthetic, a curated lifestyle, a consumable video format. And for the audience, the tragedy is that watching these performances does not inspire real work, it convinces them that work must look a certain way before it can count. In chasing the aesthetic, they too fall into the trap of mistaking the performance of productivity for productivity itself.

The bullet journal effect

Before there were techtubers, there were bullet journals. What began as a simple method to track tasks and thoughts in a notebook quickly evolved into a global trend. The idea was minimalist: a pen, a notebook, and a flexible structure that could adapt to the user’s needs. But as the trend spread, simplicity gave way to complexity and aesthetic obsession. The bullet journal became less about recording ideas and more about designing elaborate spreads, decorating pages with washi tape, using expensive pens, and perfecting calligraphy. What was once a tool for productivity turned into a hobby of endless preparation. People spent hours setting up their journals, sometimes entire weekends, only to have little energy left for the work the journal was meant to support.

This phenomenon, substituting preparation for execution, is exactly what we see today in the digital realm. The bullet journal effect has been reborn in the world of apps like Notion, Obsidian, Roam, and a hundred others. Instead of buying pens and tapes, users now spend hours downloading plugins, designing templates, customizing dashboards, and syncing devices. Influencers feed this cycle by showing off their “perfect setups”, complete with pastel color schemes, nested tags, and animated task boards. The audience is persuaded that the secret to productivity lies in having the most intricate digital system. But as with the bullet journal, the time invested in the system often exceeds the time invested in actual work.

The effect is seductive because it offers the illusion of progress. Filling out spreads or designing digital templates feels like work. It triggers the same satisfaction as checking off a task, even if the task is trivial. The brain confuses setup with accomplishment. But the reality is that this is meta-work, activity about work rather than work itself. A writer can spend days designing their Notion workspace and end the week with zero words written. A student can color-code notes in Obsidian and fail to study a single chapter. The bullet journal effect turns tools into ends rather than means.

What makes the modern version even more insidious is the cost structure. A notebook and pen, however overpriced, were still relatively affordable. Today’s digital equivalents often demand subscription monthly fees. Influencers justify these expenses by presenting them as essential investments in productivity. They claim that without Humanize AI or premium Notion setups, one cannot organize thoughts effectively or “unlock creative potential”. But in truth, many of these influencers never pay for the subscriptions they promote; they receive them for free through sponsorships or affiliate programs. For the average user, the bullet journal effect is not just a drain on time, but on money. Productivity becomes a recurring expense rather than a discipline.

The hardware component also mirrors the bullet journal craze. Just as enthusiasts once collected expensive stationery, today’s productivity culture glorifies the acquisition of Apple devices. The newest MacBook Pro, the latest iPad Pro, the most powerful iPhone are marketed as tools of necessity, not luxury. Influencers insist that without the sharpest screen or the smoothest stylus, they cannot properly “express their ideas” or “build systems that change lives”. Yet the reality is that these devices serve more as props than as tools. Their presence in videos signals authority and professionalism, creating the impression that productivity is tied to consumption of the newest gadgetry.

The tragedy of the bullet journal effect, both in analog and digital form, is that it confuses aesthetics with productivity. A beautiful notebook filled with empty spreads, like a dazzling Notion dashboard unused, produces nothing. The work of productivity lies not in preparation but in execution, not in the elegance of the system but in the consistency of effort. Influencers rarely acknowledge this because their content thrives on novelty and aesthetics. A blank page filled with words is less cinematic than a pastel-colored template or a spotless iPad Pro on a café table. And so the cycle repeats: audiences chase beauty, influencers chase clicks, and real productivity gets lost in the performance.

The bullet journal effect endures because it appeals to something deeply human: the desire for control. In a world of chaos and uncertainty, organizing a notebook or configuring an app provides the comforting sense of order. But the danger is that the order becomes self-referential, consuming energy that should be directed outward into real projects. The page is filled, the template perfected, but the novel unwritten, the thesis unstarted, the idea unrealized. The work remains undone.

The exploitation of insecurity

At the core of the productivity influencer ecosystem lies a powerful psychological lever: insecurity. Most people feel, at some point, that they are not productive enough, that they waste too much time, that they could achieve more if only they had better habits or sharper tools. This vulnerability becomes the fertile ground on which techtubers build their business. They present themselves as guides who have conquered chaos, models of efficiency who have discovered the “secrets” of discipline. Their message is designed to resonate with anyone who has stared at a blank page, procrastinated on an important project, or ended a day feeling guilty about wasted hours. The influencers transform that guilt into a market opportunity.

The mechanism is subtle but effective. Instead of telling audiences that productivity is about consistency, focus, and patience, they suggest that the real problem is the tool. You are not unproductive because you lack discipline; you are unproductive because you are not using the right app. Notion will fix it. Roam will fix it. Obsidian will fix it. Notion will fix it. Humanize AI will fix it. Each tool is presented as a cure for inefficiency, a magic key that unlocks hidden potential. The insecurity of the audience fuels this cycle: when one tool fails to solve the problem, the viewer does not blame the system, but themselves. They assume they chose the wrong tool, or used it incorrectly, and so they move on to the next recommendation.

This cycle of insecurity creates dependency. Instead of developing inner discipline, people become addicted to external solutions, forever chasing the next app or device that promises to fix what the last one did not. Influencers thrive on this dependency because it ensures a continuous demand for their content. Every new tool is an opportunity to rekindle hope, every failed experiment a chance to redirect attention to the next “game-changer”. The result is a treadmill of productivity consumption, where people feel busy but never move forward.

The exploitation goes beyond software. Hardware plays a crucial role in reinforcing insecurity. Influencers imply that if your productivity is lagging, it might be because your laptop is outdated, your phone too slow, your tablet insufficiently powerful. The solution, conveniently showcased in their videos, is the latest MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, or iPhone. These devices are presented not as luxuries but as essential instruments of productivity. The unspoken message: if you are still using last year’s model, you are handicapping your potential. The audience is nudged to equate consumption with discipline, as if the path to efficiency were paved not with hours of focused work but with receipts from the Apple Store.

The financial burden is staggering. Subscriptions to premium services, totally overpriced, pile up quickly. For influencers, these costs are invisible, the tools are provided free through sponsorships or affiliate deals. For viewers, they become recurring expenses that eat into incomes without delivering proportional value. The irony is that the very people most likely to follow these influencers, students, freelancers, workers anxious about their productivity, are often those least able to afford such expenses. Their insecurity is not only exploited psychologically but monetized financially.

This model of exploitation thrives because it aligns with a broader cultural narrative: that success is always just out of reach, that we are perpetually failing to keep up, that the solution lies not in changing habits but in buying solutions. Influencers amplify this narrative by projecting themselves as success stories. They show spotless desks, polished routines, and staged café sessions as evidence of their mastery. But what they are really selling is not productivity, but an aesthetic of productivity, a lifestyle that audiences are encouraged to emulate by consuming more.

In the end, the exploitation of insecurity is what makes the techtuber economy sustainable. If people felt confident in their own ability to focus and produce, the demand for endless new tools would collapse. The influencers cannot afford for their audiences to become self-sufficient. Their business depends on keeping people slightly dissatisfied, always questioning whether they are doing enough, always convinced that the next tool might finally be the one that changes everything. The insecurity is not a side effect, it is the product.

The one-hour workday myth

If you watch the “day in the life” videos of productivity influencers, you might believe that these people spend their days in relentless focus, effortlessly moving from one task to another, creating, building, and conquering. Their time seems perfectly managed, their tools flawlessly integrated, their energy boundless. But the truth is far less glamorous. Beneath the polished edits and cinematic background music lies the myth of the one-hour workday, a lifestyle built not on real productivity, but on the illusion that a few staged scenes of “deep work” amount to a professional routine.

The structure of these videos reveals the trick. They begin with morning rituals filmed with artistic precision: the pouring of coffee, the opening of a MacBook, the soft glow of a desk lamp. The influencer narrates their day, speaking of focus and discipline, but the scenes we see are short bursts, fifteen minutes of typing in a café, twenty minutes of note-taking on an iPad, half an hour arranging tasks in Notion. Rarely do we see sustained concentration, messy drafts, or the exhaustion of actual work. What we see instead is montage, cut together to suggest productivity where little exists.

In truth, much of their day is consumed not by work, but by content creation itself. Filming, editing, scripting, negotiating sponsorships, this is their real job. Their supposed productivity systems are not tested in the fires of demanding projects or long deadlines; they are props used to produce more content about productivity. The “one-hour workday” is a performance designed for the camera, where every task is choreographed to look efficient, even if the actual labor of creation barely lasts longer than the shoot.

The hardware and software reinforce this myth. Influencers insist that they need the latest MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and iPhone to work effectively, but what they truly need is for their setups to look impressive on camera. The gleam of a new Apple device, the smoothness of an interface, the cleanliness of a desk, these are not conditions of productivity but of aesthetic credibility. The message to viewers is unmistakable: without the same gear, you cannot hope to achieve the same level of output. The myth of the one-hour workday is sustained by the myth of indispensable hardware, where consumption is equated with efficiency.

The subscriptions they recommend follow the same logic. Platforms highly priced are presented as essential, as though productivity were a commodity accessible only to those who can afford premium memberships. For the influencers, the costs are invisible, sponsorships and partnerships ensure free access. For their audiences, however, these subscriptions become yet another drain on time and resources. The cruel irony is that while followers pay for tools they may never use consistently, the influencer profits from referral codes and sponsorships, regardless of whether the tool actually delivers results.

What makes this myth so effective is that it aligns with the cultural fantasy of effortless success. The idea that you can work for an hour in a café and live a life of abundance is deeply appealing. It promises freedom from drudgery, proof that work can be aesthetic, light, and rewarding. But reality tells a different story: true productivity is neither glamorous nor easy. It requires hours of focus, consistency across days and weeks, the willingness to confront boredom and difficulty. None of this fits neatly into a four-minute YouTube video.

The myth of the one-hour workday ultimately serves a single purpose: to sell. It sells tools, it sells devices, it sells the influencer’s brand. It convinces audiences that productivity can be aesthetic, quick, and purchasable. But the price is steep. Viewers waste time and money chasing a lifestyle that does not exist, mistaking staged performances for real discipline. The influencer thrives, but the audience remains trapped, buying subscriptions, upgrading hardware, and believing that productivity lies just one referral code away.

Productivity without performance

At the heart of the techtuber phenomenon lies a dangerous confusion: the idea that productivity is about appearances rather than results. Influencers present spotless desks, curated cafés, and endless app demos as proof of their efficiency, but what they produce is not meaningful work, it is content about the aesthetics of work. Their careers are built on performing productivity, not practicing it.

This is why their lives look so effortless. Productivity, for them, is not the hours of concentration required to write a book, build a product, or design a system. It is the thirty minutes required to film themselves typing on a MacBook Pro, or the half-hour spent setting up a Notion dashboard that will never be used again. The rest of the day is consumed by sponsorship negotiations, editing footage, and posting affiliate links. Their “output” is not innovation or creation, but referral-driven sales disguised as advice.

The cycle is self-sustaining because it feeds on insecurity. Viewers are told that their struggles with focus or discipline can be solved with the right device or subscription. They are nudged to believe that without the latest iPad Pro, they are at a disadvantage; that without subscribing to premium platforms, they are falling behind; that without replicating the influencer’s spotless desk setup, they are not serious about their work. The reality is that none of these tools matter if the work itself is not done. Productivity is not a question of what you use, but of what you finish.

The tragedy is that audiences mistake the performance for the practice. They believe that copying the aesthetic will deliver the discipline, that buying the same tools will unlock the same results. But productivity has never been about the shine of new objects. It is about the unglamorous repetition of effort: messy notes, cluttered desks, hours of concentration that no one will ever film because they are not beautiful. Real productivity leaves behind results, books written, products built, projects completed. Influencer productivity leaves behind videos, affiliate links, and abandoned dashboards.

The techtuber economy survives because it transforms hope into consumerism. It convinces people that the path to discipline lies in constant switching, that every new tool is a revelation, that every subscription is an investment. But the real cost is not in money; it is in time. Hours are spent configuring apps, learning features, and abandoning systems, hours that could have been spent creating something tangible. The audience ends up poorer not only in dollars but in days.

True productivity is invisible. It does not glow on camera, it does not fit neatly into sponsorship deals, it does not require the latest Apple device or a paid subscription. It is messy, repetitive, and often boring. It produces results, not performances. To confuse productivity with its aesthetic is to miss the point entirely.

In the end, the lesson is simple: tools do not make you productive, consistency does. Techtubers can sell the performance of work, but they cannot sell the discipline that sustains it. That remains unmarketable, unfashionable, and profoundly human. And it is precisely what separates those who merely perform productivity from those who actually produce.