Should there be a Wheaton Scale for Productivity?

This is a nascent thought that Terrie put in my head. It’s a scale that was proposed in permaculture and then adapted for Early Retirement Extreme (ERE).

The levels attempt to capture that in a deep field, “people would have varying levels of understanding according to their level of mastery. While people at adjacent levels are able to judge relative competence, there is also a fog of comprehension effect where people separated by multiple levels have difficulty relating to each other.”

I don’t understand either of those communities well enough to describe their scales for you. So I’ll just drop a chart of the levels from ERE and then get on with my nascent thought about productivity.

So in productivity Level 1, or maybe it should be level 0, is someone with no systems who is completely reactive and probably unreliable. Their understanding of productivity is that they work when they are told to work or when something is urgent (the trash is overflowing or there is no food in the fridge).

But let’s say level 2 is someone who uses simple productivity tools like a todo list but isn’t to the point of feeling any sense of control. They have too much to do and either they accept permanent feelings of overwhelm or, just as likely, things don’t get done.