Managing knowledge worker productivity is hard.

The biggest problems is that it’s not even really clear what it is they’re doing. If you have a manual laborer, and his job is to make widgets, you can just count the widgets at the end of the day, and there you go.

But, somewhat by definition, a knowledge worker isn’t making the same thing over and over again, and the means of production is not a machine, but their brain, so we have to define the task, and often defining the task improperly can change perceptions and inadvertently reduce productivity.