Define Productivity
There is a natural tendency for people to equate putting in hours of effort with productivity,
They are not the same thing. People can put forth dedicated effort with the best intentions, and still be unproductive or even counter-productive (e.g. much of what has been done in implementing the US FISMA legislation) There are also activities that are necessary to maintain productivity, but do, per se, produce any direct output.
This is not new or unique to the information age. But the way we design and employ technology exacerbates it. And it is getting worse.
I find it takes an inordinate amount of time simply to get the technology to work. Constant updates and patches make configuration management (at least as I knew it "back in the day") virtually impossible.
Documentation and support have degraded. My impression, confirmed by some of the folks I talk to in industry, is that most user documentation is generated from the software design documentation system. It tells you in exquisite detail what the program can do, but not what the user needs to do to make it happen
Support for many consumer products is generally off-loaded to "Communities" of users. . . unless you want to pay for it. Searching for solutions to any virtually any problem will generate a bewildering array of results. 99% are not relevant to the problem at hand. Feedback indicates that the 1% that are (all of which require changes to the registry) worked only for the person submitting the idea.
The resulting loss in productivity is enormous.
Age is doubtless a factor in personal productivity. But looking back through my corporate records I find that two decades ago we routinely generated analyses and products in quantity and quality that simply cannot be achieved today. (The technology does other things that we could not have begun to do back in the day. But the ability to generate hard, actionable knowledge has degraded dramatically.)
And putting everything in the cloud and assuming that big data analytics will generate "the" right answer is not going to help one bit.