Tool-shaped objects

I came across an interesting article on something the author calls 'Tool-shaped objects': Products or activities that allow you to feel like you're being productive or making progress while engaging with them, but which don't really improve your situation in any tangible way.

Consider Farmville.

FarmVille is a command-and-control interface. No matter where you click, your farm will expand, your crops will grow, and the number will go up. The only input is your time, the direction of which is largely irrelevant. The screen fills with evidence of your effort: crops, cosmetics, and increasingly large barns.

The number goes up. This is the entire product.

The market for feeling productive is orders of magnitude larger than the market for being productive. Most people, most of the time, want to click and watch the number go up. They do not want to be told the number is fake. They will pay— in time, in attention, in actual money— to keep the number going up.

Farmville is a tool shaped object.

-The Article

The author mostly brings up the concept in relation to contemporary AI-hype with tools like clawdbot and complex AI orchestrations. But I think it also has some insight for other topics.

To give a minor example, why some people get stuck consuming productivity / learning content, rather than actually doing the thing they are aiming at.

I also recognized something of myself in this concept: When there is something I should be doing, but for which there is mental resistance, I often divert myself by looking for something else to do that feels productive. Occasionally this actually results in productive action, such as reorganizing my room, but most of the time it has little to no real effect. Worst case, I'm just playing some game or consuming some media to "make progress on finishing this backlog so it won't distract me". Spoilers: It doesn't work.

Knowing about this type of psychology doesn't make it immune, as you'll still have to notice it in the moment it takes hold of you. More, just because you know intellectually what's happening doesn't mean the false intuitions go away. But, it's a start.