This is a good essay, but it ignores a huge underlying question: How do you measure productivity? If you spend 10 hours thinking about a difficult problem from

This is a good essay, but it ignores a huge underlying question: How do you measure productivity? If you spend 10 hours thinking about a difficult problem from many angles before arriving at an ingenious solution are you more or less productive than if you bang out a series of CRUD endpoints for some web app during that same 10 hours? It seems like this sort of thing is nearly impossible to measure. And without measurment it's very difficult to separate placebo effect and other subjective biases from actual productivity improvement.