Meeting the Productivity Challenge: A 'Head In Hands' Emoji

The thesis is simple.

Forget the purported four grand challenges in the Industrial Strategy. 

If the major economic issue of our times is increasing productivity then the single greatest contribution to success would be the development of a widely recognised emoji to express the feelings associated with having ones head in ones hands.  

This after all is the position adopted by employees most frequently in workplaces up and down the land.

Mountains of written communication, avalanches of emails and texts, are expended as a result. There may even be the odd phone call.

If there were instead a single character that could sum up all these feelings which could be sent directly on a one to one or one to many basis it would save so much time and energy.

It would cover all those many moments when almost involuntarily one sighs deeply, mouths 'not again' or 'really?', breathes even more deeply, stares at the desk or the ceiling, stretches a little and then succumbs to a modest bout of chronic rather than acute despair at the world in general.  

It would meet the need when HR send out, yet again, a contract that has the wrong job title, an incorrect salary and the wrong number of hours to be worked (but is, of course, in all other respects absolutely fine).

When you explain something for the fourth meeting in succession and it's still palpably obvious that 'don't get it' remains the dominant reaction. Moreover, many of the attendees have actually forgotten that there even were three previous discussions.

When someone actually reads out in public the phrase 'not for disclosure' and continues to make the associated disclosure whilst maintaining the sense of beatific calm bestowed on those for whom the connection between eyes, brain and mouth is at best fleeting.

The selection of available emojis simply doesn't quite cut it. For example:

🤨   Raised Eyebrow - good for denoting scepticism, disbelief, or disapproval but is rather too simply quizzical rather than capturing the full ennui associated with dealing with repeated nonsense 

🙄   Rolling Eyes - splendid for disdain but the boredom is too straightforwardly contemptuous rather than having more of a sense of despair 

😣   Persevering Face - does provide some of the 'how many times' emphasis and can also suggest being on the verge of tears but also suggests some hope of actual agency to make things different

😕   Confused face - very good for puzzlement but often there's really no puzzle just incompetence and a failure to think things through. 

I think we are coming closer with something like this: 

🤦   Facepalming - to display frustration or embarrassment at the ineptitude of a person or situation, but that has more of a sense of one off immediacy rather than connoting in the fully Nietzschean sense eternal recurrence. 

So the search goes on. The emoji would convey a sense of frustration coupled with a degree of genuine puzzlement; it would add in a touch of disbelief but in a resigned rather than indignant mode; there would be an element of despair and a bit of desperation. Above all there would be a sense that this is just how the world is and always has been and that expecting anything better is tantamount to a fool's errand. So there is an underlying fatalism. 

It would indeed be the perfect symbol for our confusing and troubled times when so little seems to be achieved by so many and indeed most effort is directed at something that is actually counter our best interests. And even then we cock it up.  

Maybe it has an element of this:

This one is probably going a bit far but could work if suffering also from a migraine:

This one would be good for rather more eirenic states of resignation:

So come on all those great minds, the untapped potential about to be unleashed across the UK in response to committing wilful economic suicide by severing ourselves from our main trading partners, lets put together a national competition to design the emoji that best meets the needs of the time. 

Let's work really hard on putting our heads in our hands.

Let's show that you really couldn't make it up.