Working in an office 2015

Productivity 

According to BBC.com 

1. The average British worker spends 36 days a year answering work emails. London workers in particular receive close to 9,000 emails each year.  80% of employers consider it perfectly acceptable to contact their employees outside business hours.
2.  British workers waste 18 months of their lives commuting, which is often expensive and stressful
3. One accounts of having "worked to death" being reported in the corporate sector, as was the case with the Bank of America intern, Moritz Erhardt in 2013. He died of an epileptic seizure after working 72 hours straight.

Here is the BBC definition

Productivity measures how much each employee makes over a period of time

Calculated by dividing total output by the number of workers - if a factory employing 50 staff produces 1000 tables a day, then the productivity of each worker is: 1,000 tables/50 staff = 20 tables

With this notion of productivity, no wonder suicidal cases like Moritz Erhard exist

The creative Office

Time magazine September 21 issue, placed a mirror in front me, where I saw myself in California.

"In 20 years time" writes John Acuff , "we'll laugh at the idea that work could only be accomplished in a cubicle, after a soul-crushing commute and aggressively terrible break-room coffee," 

The office will never completely die. Face to face must replace the tasteless virtuality. "But the office will transform into a an occasional reconnection point, not in  a five days a week destination". 

"Instead of saying: "I have to go to work", we say "I have to work" and we will - whenever it is that we found ourselves"

On Silicon Valley, the Creativity, not the Productivity is the goal. This is best defined by Peter Thiel. Quoting David Brooks in New York Times

 Thiel argues, we often shouldn’t seek to be really good competitors. We should seek to be really good monopolists. Instead of being slightly better than everybody else in a crowded and established field, it’s often more valuable to create a new market and totally dominate it. 

Now to be clear: When Thiel is talking about a “monopoly,” he isn’t talking about the illegal eliminate-your-rivals kind. He’s talking about doing something so creative that you establish a distinct market, niche and identity. You’ve established a creative monopoly and everybody has to come to you if they want that service, at least for a time.

Creativity is not a single number, like Productivity. An certainly one can not be creative in a cubicle, watching the time not to miss the last train ride and rarely talking to stimulating people.