• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 721 0

restaurant to celebrate our anniversary. The restaurant is an hour away and to make our six o’clock reservationduring rush hour, I’ll Need to leave work at four thirty. Leaving at this time is unheard of where I work, but tonight I don’t care what anyone says about me. I arrive at the office and fiNd out that my boss has called a surprise meeting with my team. She proceeds to tell us that she hasn’t seen the dedication she Needs to see on our New project. She expects to see us all working until at least six every Night to “put in our time.” I talk with her after the meeting to let her know that I’ll be leaving at four thirty for my anniversary dinner, but I’ll work until seven every other Night this week. She glares at me and lets me know that there are people lined up for my job—I can make my own decisions. I know, in that moment, that my husbandand I will Need to celebrate this weekend instead of toNight.I cancel our reservation and call my husband. He asks me when I’m going to realize what’s really important in life and hangs up the phone. I ask myself the same question as I lay my head down on my desk.

Why does work suck?

If you ask people why work sucks they will usually give one of two answers. They will reach for something vague—it’s a hectic world; people are busy; that’s life. Or they will latch onto something specific to their workplace—a controlling boss who clocks every minute of every break, an unfocused management team that creates a constant state of emergency. But we would argue that the answer is both deeper and more widespread. There are systemic problems that every workplace shares. The details change from person to person and place to place, but the underlying problem is the same. And it’s a bigger problem than life being hard or that business now travels at blinding speeds.

Work sucks in corporate life today because we have time all wrong.

Just look at the two stories above. The first person wants to “score points” for coming in fifteen minutes early. The manager in the second story expects people to stay until six because that somehow shows dedication. Coming in late four days a week might cost you your job. Staying late every night might get you that promotion. You can’t leave at four thirty and you better not come in at nine. And at no point is there any discussion of the quality of the work being done. It’s just time, time, time.

We all labor under a myth:

Time + physical presence = results.

When it comes to work our attitudes about time are so omnipresent they are almost invisible, and here are two trivial examples that we have picked exactly because they are so offhand and random. When New York mayor Michael Bloomberg gave the commencement address at the College of Staten Island, he said some good things to the future workers of America about taking risks and learning how to collaborate with people, but he put the most passion and force into this statement:

“If you’re the first one in in the morning and the last one to leave at night and you take fewer vacation days and never take a sick day, you will do better than the people that don’t do that. It is very simple.”

We think that’s a strange sentiment coming from the mayor of New York. We’re not knocking having a solid work ethic, but when we think of the individuals who have made it in the greatest city in the world, we think of their creativity, innovation, savvy, and competitiveness. We think of people who have brought something to the table—whether it’s in art or finance or government—that no one else has brought before. We certainly don’t think about people putting in hours.

The other example typifies the kind of career advice we give people who work in nontraditional work environments. It’s from a website that offers tips to freelancers for how to be successful:

“Log your time and work. As you have no time clock and no one to watch over you, you need to account for your time, if not for your employer or your client, then for yourself. It’s important that you not have a day go by without