/Message: Overload, Schmoverload: The Myth Of Personal Productivity

While people may think the appropriate unit of measuring the benefits of social tools is personal productivity, it isn’t. As we have moved from hierarchical, top-down, centralized work — think Henry Ford’s assembly lines or the pre-Internet global corporation — to networked, bottom-up, edgewise work personal productivity has been trumped by network productivity. Network productivity is the effectiveness of a person’s entire network: contacts, contacts of contacts, and so on.