Stop using time as a measure for work and give importance to what is useless
He is very hard-working" or "he has a great capacity for work"; "he is the first to get in and the last to leave". What are the first ideas that come to your mind when you read these sentences? What do you feel?
I imagine that responses may come in different directions. While some will readily identify themselves in a self-congratulatory tone, others may review themselves for opposite reasons and with opposite feelings. There may be some who, like me, will receive them with something close to repulsion. I have observed that phrases like these are often said and heard as compliments, even if associated with some ambivalence. The capacity to dedicate time, in quantity, still seems to be one of the factors most valued by those who evaluate someone's work.
Another, more frightening perspective, in my view, is that from a social point of view "being too busy", "having no time for anything", "life is crazy", wishing the days had 48 or more hours and other such expressions are not only accepted, but are used with a suffering glee. In essence, when we use these statements in our speech we are bragging1 , although it may seem that we are complaining. Such a phenomenon seems to indicate that the amount of time is also a valuable indicator for the self-evaluation of work.
In both cases there is an implicit and disastrous fallacy: quantity of dedicated time is equivalent to quantity and quality of work; it is a predictor of competence. It isn't! This blatant lie is fed by the big business schools2, with their renowned management and leadership 'theoreticians', who continue to reinforce a paradigm where urgency, speed and scarcity rule: we must do more, faster and with less. What's more, companies are even concerned about their people's "happiness", so that they can spend more time working and thinking about work, but happier.
But the "big dead ideas" of management are not solely responsible for the way we associate time with work in this particular way. Obsessions with productivity and efficiency intrude commonly, contributing to living and feeling time as linear and finite3: time as something that is running out, something we are losing. If this is the case, if this is how we live, all time is measured in terms of what we think we are producing; all the time we spend at the office, for example, is associated with the expectation, which will come from both ourselves and others, that it must be useful, usable time, used in creation and production. This requirement that we produce something useful with our time makes it impossible for us to occupy it with useless but important, if not fundamental, things4. This way of thinking is so widespread that we have even started to plan our leisure time, such as holidays, using the paradigms and tools that we learn and use while working. "If I have little time on holiday, much less than I spend working, I have to plan it well so that I can make the most of it. Is it only me that this sentence sounds strange and paradoxical?
We have become tyrants over time, for ourselves and for others. On the other hand, as with all such tyrants, we complain about our powerlessness in the face of its power. Beyond utility is the question of availability: when we do not demand it, we expect it to exist permanently and preferably immediately.
Moreover, the different technologies and forms of communication that we practically all use today make our presence ubiquitous and our attention dispersed. The combination of these two characteristics is having a dangerous effect on our species: we no longer know how to be present and, as a consequence, we no longer know how to think in a certain way; we no longer know how to contemplate and elaborate on what we contemplate. Many of our experiences are being mediated by some parallelepiped made of metal, plastic and glass with cameras and high-definition screens. It is enough to look around us in a restaurant or go to a concert to realize that the devices that have the potential to free us from the chains of the physical world end up being able to distance us in such a way that we are stuck in the digital world, in some "cloud", far away from the experience that is happening and in the expectation of being able to count the times they say they like us. This way of experiencing the world and reality is forcing us to associate a quantitative dimension (the counting) to the quality of any experience; the same that happens with time5.
Now that we are on holiday, have you managed, are you managing or will you manage, as we say in the jargon of the working world, to "switch off" completely6? But before that, how have these desires and needs to switch off taken root in us? What do we connect to when we disconnect from work? It seems to us that we have limited plugs and cables, and to a certain extent this is true. We need to sleep, to switch off our consciousness, to regain energy. Just like time, our energy has a limit. I believe that a good relationship with time will imply knowing how to make the connection between this dimension and our energy. But this subject will deserve a dedicated reflection.
For now, as I have tried to show, simply counting time does not allow us to assess its quality. Much has to change so that working time is seen and experienced differently. Starting by rethinking the way work is contracted where, in a very basic way, we give up the occupation of part of our time in exchange for money; we can go to a set of changes of perspective that, first of all, each one of us should and could make in the way we live and occupy our time.
We are in a total re-individualisation, that is, the individual has to behave like a flawless machine to feed the mega-machine. Today we have even managed to make people sick and feel deeply guilty about it because they are not working. Leisure is only not penalised if it involves the purchase of something. All non-market leisure, such as reading, is highly penalised.
How about starting by reading a book that is, at the outset, blatantly useless for your work and spreading the reading time over your office hours?
Written for Link to Leaders on 23 July 2018; published 31 July 2018.
1. Being tired isn't a badge of honour in Signal v Noise
2. Management theory is becoming a compendium of dead ideas, in The Economist
3. Productivity is dangerous, in The Outline
4. So useless and so important, humour and leadership! in Leader Magazine
5. On the themes of this paragraph I recommend reading the book In the Swarm by Byung-Chul Han
