I was sitting on the subway last week (which is unusual for me, as I tend to avoid the subway at all costs), and during one of the brief moments where the train goes above ground, was sending a few emails. After giving myself a mental pat on the back for being so productive, I took a look around the subway car. Guess what everyone else was doing?

Exactly the same thing I was.

It was then that I had a sudden realization about productivity: while technology may enhance our productivity when compared to how productive we used to be without (or with a ‘lesser’) technology, I seldom think about how little my productivity actually increases compared to others.

In the 1950s, Pancho Gonzales was one of the best tennis players in the world, and was known to have a particularly fast serve. At a 1951 tournament, officials decided to measure the players’ serves to see whose was the fastest — and Pancho Gonzales beat everybody with a speed of about 214 km/h.

Gonzales’ serve is certainly much faster than mine will ever be. But consider that Andy Roddick, the player who currently has the fastest serve in tennis, has the recorded fastest serve with a speed of 249.5 km/h. Tennis serves have gotten faster in the past 60 years.

Much like there’s more to productivity than technology, there’s more to being a great tennis player than just having a fast serve. But having a faster serve certainly doesn’t hurt.

But let’s go back to Pancho Gonzales for a second. If we could enter Gonzales into a present-day tennis tournament, his once-astounding 214 km/h serve wouldn’t be that far above the average speed of the first serve — around 185 km/h.

So as individual players have gotten faster, other players have had to get faster too, or else face getting left behind by their colleagues. But the speed of your serve is only one aspect of tennis, and as other players get better at hitting returns or improve the accuracy of their serves, that individual player has to get better at all those elements as well.

This kind of evolutionary arms race is similar to the Red Queen effect:

“For an evolutionary system, continuing development is needed just in order to maintain its fitness relative to the systems it is co-evolving with.”

And in terms of technology, we really are evolving one technology within a broader, complex web of other technologies, where continued evolution is necessary just to stay afloat within that broader system.

So while I may be able to read and respond to email while sitting in that train, if everybody else has the same ability, then I’m not really much ahead of where I was before. And if there were some new device that allowed you to send email while the subway was underground, would I be falling behind if I couldn’t do that as well (and yes, the amount of email you send is probably the worst measure of productivity )?

I’ll try to remember to bring a magazine next time I take the subway.