Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It_ The Results-Only Revolution - Cali Ressler [6]
This is interesting, as if you wouldn’t know the quality of the work you’ve done if you didn’t also judge it in terms of time. The line “if not for your employer or your client, then for yourself” says it all. The assumption is that you need to keep track of your time for more than billing purposes. Without knowing how long a piece of work takes you can’t measure its true value.
This unwritten rule about time applies to just about everybody, from administrative assistants on up to the senior leadership. With the exception of sales people, who either deliver their numbers or don’t, most people are judged by a mixture of results and time spent in the office. You are expected to do your job and to complete your tasks, but you are also expected to put in forty hours or even more.
Strangely we only do this at work. If you’re out running errands on Saturday and getting things done, you’re not measuring yourself by the clock. You might be frustrated that a specific chore is taking so long, but you don’t look at a pile of laundry and think, I’d better make sure I’m putting enough hours into this. You either accomplish what you set out to accomplish or you don’t. If anything there is incentive to get things done more quickly and efficiently because then you’ll have more time to do something else. At work, even if we accomplish our tasks we are expected to fill the hours. Because by definition a full-time job takes forty hours or more to complete.
Why do we look at time in this way? Maybe it’s a relic of the Industrial Age, when if you weren’t at your place on the assembly line then the work wasn’t getting done. If you didn’t put in your time the job didn’t get done. Or maybe this attitude about time goes back even further, back to when most people worked by hand. If you were practicing a craft, then time put into making a cabinet or a suit of armor would have more directly translated into a quality piece.
There was a time when the forty-hour workweek served a good purpose. We owe the forty-hour workweek to the Fair Labour Standards Act of 1938, which also ended the practice of child labour and established the minimum wage. The idea was to make labor uniform and fair back when companies had too much control over workers’ lives. But somehow the forty-hour workweek morphed into the gold standard for competency, efficiency, and effectiveness.
In an information and service economy it doesn’t make sense to use time as a measurement for a job well-done. What does forty hours even mean? And what does forty hours get you? Naturally it still takes time to do research or build a body of knowledge or build relationships, but the individual actions we take every day, the little units of work have more to do with communication and problem solving. Today we do more work with our brains than with our hands, and knowledge work requires a different set of assumptions about productivity.
Knowledge work requires fluidity (ideas can happen anytime, not just between eight and five) and concentration (being rested and engaged is more important than being on the clock) and creativity (again, you’re either on or you’re not on, regardless of the hour). Today we spend our lives performing in jobs in which it’s harder to measure effectiveness in terms of time. After all, how long does it take to think of the answer to a colleague’s question? Or to have an insight about the marketplace? Or to say the right thing to close a sale?
When we try to live our lives under this new set of demands but under the old set of assumptions, we get the stories that opened this chapter. We get burned-out, frustrated people struggling to reconcile the old and the new. So what? you might say. These kinds of anecdotes are so commonplace they almost don’t seem worth mentioning. That’s life, right? Everyone has moments like these at work. There is something about time that