Slashdot on productivity

Another cluefull comment:

I hate to sound like a fogey, but I’m in my mid-thirties, I grew up using computers, and trust me, it won’t help.

The problem is not familiarity with computers. It’s an overload of tasks. Productivity is expected to rise on a regular basis (heck, we measure the growth of our economy this way), which means we are expected to do more with the same resources. Automation of common tasks has helped immensely in keeping up with this curve, but eventuallly the edge cases (the things that don’t fit in the automation) overwhelm your time.

I’m starting to see that regularly at my office: I’ve automated about as much as I can automate, and my job now consists of firefighting the systems that (for various technical and political reasons) I can’t automate. It’s not that I don’t know how to use computers, it’s that the task list is rising faster than I can finish them or automate them away.