Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It_ The Results-Only Revolution - Cali Ressler [39]
It’s okay to grocery shop on a Wednesday morning, catch a movie on a Tuesday afternoon, or take a nap on a Thursday afternoon.
If work teaches us how to do one thing well, it’s how to make up really excellent excuses for not being there. By the time you’ve been in the workforce for three or four years you are, if anything, a black belt in excuse making. Everyone has their favorite excuses. Everyone knows to save the good ones for when you really need them. Everyone knows to rotate the old favorites or to put a new spin on them to keep the Sludger at bay.
There are also rules for excuses. If you’re going to be late, then you’re going to want to blame it on traffic, not on the fact that you were eating the most delicious pancakes you’d ever had in your life and it seemed a shame to rush a moment you’d rather savor.
So the status quo makes us masters of the white lie. But there is something deeper going on here, something that gets back to the idea that your job owns your time. If your job owns your time, then it is doing more than dictating how to use your time. Your job is also creating an alternate universe with its own set of rules that govern the socially acceptable and unacceptable uses of all this time that you don’t own.
In a traditional work environment, socially acceptable excuses are the ones that you use to stop nasty comments. It’s stuff like being sick, a doctor appointment, a funeral, a store visit to do competitive shopping, a car accident, a snowstorm, or even something as small as taking a personal call from your sick mother. If someone says, “Where were you yesterday?” then noting that you were at the doctor’s office or at a funeral is going to stop them in their tracks. You can’t Sludge someone who has a “good excuse.”
Socially unacceptable excuses are the truths about our time that in a traditional work environment we dare not utter. This is when your lunch runs long because you were getting a haircut or running some personal errands. This is when you leave early because you want to catch a movie or go to a ball game. If someone says, “Where were you yesterday?” you would never in a million years say you were at a baseball game or getting a haircut. If you’re walking in late you would never say it’s because you were hungover or because you honestly didn’t want to come into work that day and the very thought of walking those halls filled you with such dread that you couldn’t get out of the shower.
And yet, let’s look at how much time both the socially acceptable and the socially unacceptable activities take. (We’ll leave the hangover and the dread discussion for later.) A hair appointment or a doctor appointment might take about two hours each. A funeral or a baseball game might take half a day. Some things, like dropping off your dry cleaning, aren’t any more time-consuming than a quick phone call. We’re back to those fifteen minutes that seem so important, but probably aren’t.
Here is one of the ironies of the workplace: We put so much emphasis on time and yet we don’t have a very good handle on how long things actually take.
If you were to give your boss a choice between having you out of the building for half an hour running personal errands or in an hour-long meeting at which your need to be there was dubious, most bosses would probably pick the time-wasting meeting. Even if you could guarantee that nothing would get done in the meeting and that it might even run longer than an hour, many managers would rather have their employees in the building during traditional working hours doing nothing than out of their sight and being productive