So, I was thinking about my previous comment. Busy is not productive. So, how do you define productive and increase productivity?

This is going to sound really counter-intuitive, but productive people are the ones not doing work. In theory if you spend 10% of the time actually doing work compared to the next guy then you have 90% availability to do additional work. That part is obvious, but its not about work. Its about what you deliver. If the output is superior quality it will require less effort to maintain and feature dramatically less risk of regression, and these factors mean less work.

So, if person A performs 10% of the work compared to person B then person A is 10x more productive than person B if they deliver the same quantity/quality of output. If person B delivers lower quality output then person A is even more productive. That is how you get 10x developers, and you don't even have to be a good programmer to be a 10x developer. I have been a 10x, or much greater, developer multiple times and I am almost never the smartest programmer in the room.

That is why creative people are important, but they are more important mathematically than it sounds. Creative people tend to get bored quickly and tend to not want to do work just for the sack of qualifying their existence, but creative people tend to really loathe being bored. That means they aren't going to waste time on repetitive tasks and will instead look for something else to fill that time. If they know more repetitive tasks are coming then they will work harder up front to prevent the occurrence of repetitive tasks in the future. In the world of software that can mean writing a new tool or creating a new process.

But, its more than that, because creativity is marginally contagious. Non-creative people are scared shitless of new things, those fucking cowards. However, they really enjoy having more time available for enjoyable things like everyone else. That means non-creative people will not become more productive of their own initiative and will actually sacrifice productivity in proximity to creative people until those creative people demonstrate a superior solution. In the presence of a superior solution the non-creative people will increase their productivity as a result of using that new solution. This is actually a repetitive cycle.

To add to that non-creative people are repulsed and emotionally aggressive when confronted with original things. That is more reason why creative people will work less hard in the office and instead keep their solutions to themselves until it means not losing their jobs or directly eliminating more effort.

Even more counter-intuitive is that to some degree higher intelligence, on its own, is actually harmful to productivity. Organization and industriousness are products of conscientiousness, which is negatively correlated to intelligence at about -0.27. You can't even survive in upper management if you are in the bottom of the population with regards to conscientiousness, much less do anything original. Openness and creativity are highly correlated to intelligence at about +0.4, but you also need persistence and diligence, which is where conscientiousness comes in.