At a lot of companies, first the winners and losers are selected, then the metric procedures and goals are defined to document the pre-selected outcome. Manager A spends 20 minutes finding memes and obviously is the better manager because he met the expected pre-defined goal result while also having 20 minutes left over to meme-search and at a personal level is better because the report was more entertaining, so Mgr A gets promoted. Mgr B sees that, understands his spot in the hierarchy was baked into the cake before the metrics and goals were even defined so there's no point working harder on the supposed real job, and if memes worked for Mgr A, he may as well spend 200 minutes meme-searching, and if he doesn't get promoted he should meme-search for 400 minutes next time...

There is usually a compressive effect where if everyone in the industry is un or under employed unless they're in the top 5%, then only the top people are employed and there's not much "spread" to rank results on anyway. How many companies only hire "top ivy CS grads" or "rockstar ninjas", for example? I'm just saying a bell curve matches reality and enables usable predictions if you're looking at a sample of the height of the entire US Federal Census, but its meaningless if your sample is NBA championship winners. You can't cargo cult 80s era Jack Welch style rank -n- yank the B and C level players if it would be a CYA HR firing offense to have ever hired a non A level player. That's what supply and demand mismatch does to a system. The entire concept of competitive metric result reporting is obsolete.

I understand your point, but the goal of technology should be to help us be more productive, not to try to separate the ones that have strong willpower from the rest. The clear trend here is that technology companies want people to become slaves to whatever process they setup, instead of working to improve our lives.

I agree with you in abstract, but examples in this article are quite odd. Leaving aside typing, which is faster if you do it by yourself once you learned it, they just don't take that much time. Neither travel booking nor filling expenses nor work related supermarket shopping. Even normal power point presentations are done very fast with company template. Preparing speech and content when presentation mattered a lot seemed to take way more time then layout.

Even candy crush is an odd example, middle management is not main audience and I doubt they play it all that much in work.

And then again in larger corporations, middle management (the ones that are not part of teams that produce) are what used to be administration. They have zero decision power, know nothing about projects they are assigned to and they are there to produce reports so that programmers don't have to.

It depends on how much you do. If you need to book travel once a year, then it is clearly easy to do it yourself. I used to work in a place that had a secretary available for these tasks. I would just give her a pile of receipts and get a check a few days later. The secretary would make reservations and schedule important meetings. This can save a huge amount of time over the years. Nowadays all these little tasks combined consume a lot of time we should spend doing real work.

What coliveira said, the tech is designed to be addictive. Most people don't have the willpower, so are they now sentenced to a life of low productivity? Isn't there something that can done to improve?

Tim Harford is an irreverent economics/stats/maths journalist and broadcaster. He's got enough confidence! :)