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On Point On Slacking
Wellington Grey writes "This week the NPR show On Point has an excellent episode exploring slacking and the American work ethic. (note that it's audio) It touches on some issues that may be of interest to geeks such as outsourcing, the church of the subgenius and the eternal conflict between wanting to be a lazy bum and wanting to work hard. What do slashdotters think: does America need more slack or more work?" It is summer vacation after all, right?
Funny, but I am in the process of trying to figure out how to schedule the work I need to get done this summer around my european counterparts 8 weeks of vacation. Eight weeks, not including holidays! Funny, they never get labeled as lazy.
I have not met a single soul outside of the medical and legal profession whose actual and typical workload could not be accomplished in 30-40 hours of real honest work. The problem is that most of them spend at least 2 hours a day screwing around, reading Slashdot, reading CNN, chatting in the aisles, or doing make-work while waiting for somebody else to deliver something that they need to continue their legitimate work. Now and then we get a rush ("I told the client you'd have it by tomorrow." "That's 2 weeks of work!" "Well, get started!") but by and large I don't know anybody who doesn't spend at least 2-3 hours of their 10 and 12 hour days goofing off to one degree or another. Or, more commonly, 2-3 hours of their 8 hour days, which means they have to come in the weekend. This is invariably blamed on the boss, who is also goofing around but never shows up on Saturday.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
It's not workload. It's stressload. BIG difference.
I can have a metric shitload of work on my plate, and still enjoy every last second of it, and truly enjoy my job --- However, on the other side of that coin, I can have one thing on my plate so stressful that i'll become physically ill.
High stress = depressed immune system response = more likely to come down with garden variety cold/flu bugs. I tracked it once -- During a long-duration "we really shouldn't be implementing this but management says to do it" project, my blood pressure went up 25 points, and stayed there for two months solid. I also left work early at least 3 times during that period, out of frustration or simply because I felt horrible, and had to call in sick/work from home for at least as many days.
Solid work ethic comes when stress is low, regardless of workload; There have been times when being on call and coming in at 3 in the morning is actually fun. Slacking comes when stress is high, regardless of workload; At 3 in the morning, sometimes I wish I could just flip over and go back to sleep.
We're all procrastinators of varying degrees, and thankfully, there are remarkably few truly worthless slackers. Most people have a surprisingly good work ethic, and are devoted to their jobs.
The solution to eliminating slack is not to heap gargantuan problems on the shoulders of one employee, but rather try to identify what tasks really should be shared among several individuals in order to distribute the stress impact. Otherwise it's feast or famine for the average employee's workload, and the door is open to building styrofoam cup and paper clip sculptures.
Cheers,
Bowie
One day a gang of energetic citizens was diggin a trench with their hands, but a slacker said "That's too much work" and went off and invented the shovel.
Time passes. Hard-working men are digging a canal with shovels. A slacker stayed home one day and invented the backhoe.
Etc.
Eli Whitney? Slacker. Too lazy to lift a flail.
Fulton? Too slack to row.
Edison? A slacker with good a good PR department.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
We worked our asses off in the 80s and 90s to create the Internet economy so that there would be good jobs for the American middle class in the new millennium.
Carly Fiorina, Craig Barrett, Larry Ellison, Scott McNealy, and Bill Gates then betrayed us by shipping those good jobs to the cheap-labor centers in India and China.
Carly even stood up in a public meeting and insisted that it was the right thing to do.
A trillion dollars in investment, gone in a few months.
If it had been a war and we'd been harmed to the cost of a trillion dollars in writeoffs and lost jobs, we'd be nuking someone. But the war was lost because the people who were supposed to be on our side were on the enemy's side.
There's a word for that.
Most studies (going back to to one done in 2001) show that Americans put in many more hours at work than Europeans - not only that but the difference has been increasing for decades. New Yorker published an article in 11/2005 about this citing that Germans put in 25% fewer hours over the course of a year than US'ans. French put in 28% fewer hours.
One consequence is that Americans take the "extra money" to hire folks to do the things Americans no longer have time to do: mow the lawn, cook dinner, do the laundery, nanny for the kids, etc.
I've found that in all of my jobs there are people willing to work and do their job and their are people who will just do what they need to get by.
Interesting. Are you saying people should do more than they should be paid to do? Personally I subscribe to work smarter, not harder. I find that people that are preceived as working hard do well.
My dad was a workaholic. He was a lawyer in the morning, fixed computers in the afternoon and worked on mainframes at NASA during the night. (He believed what the Navy told him...i.e. that he only needed 4 hours of sleep.)
My parents got a divorce after 24 years. 24 years sounds nice except I was 14 and I have to wonder if I and my mother would have had a better relationship with my dad if he had just cut back on the working....been around the house more.
Then there was my father-in-law. He's dead now. He worked multiple jobs too to take care of the family (3 daughters.) He died at 47 from colon cancer. His big plan was to retire and enjoy life.
Personally I'd rather see less GNP and more GNH (Gross National Happiness) Working hard should never be a goal. Working smart and being happy should be.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
I have worked as a nurse the last 8 years. It is insanely difficult not to work overtime even if your ideal is only 32 hours a week. I often look wistfully to the European work ethic where you are not called a slacker for only wanting 32 or so hours a week. Asking for a week off of your already earned vacation time is not like asking for someone else's left arm, etc.
I am currently looking for a job, and trying to find a less than full time position. It's probably not going to happen, or they will tell me it's part time and up my hours. It's happened before with constant calls to come to work on my days off.
I know other professions aren't as bad, but my husband is going to get his CPA soon, and has been told his dreams of working less than 40 hours a week were impossible. This remains to be seen, and we are still hoping.
Nothing hides evidence like a stew. -Gus Pratt
SO the moral of the story is that the people are to blame for a) not preventing your government for bringing in anti-social work ethics (a.k.a capitalism) and b) for accepting the situation enforced onto you by your employee (bring back the Unions).
Not as easy as you think...it's really tough to unionize the "new world" of work. There's nothing stopping an employer whose employees strike from moving the work to some other country. That, and the techie pupolation really doesn't think unions are a good idea (even after their fifth 80-hour week in a row.) You can't easily get a new construction crew overnight, or a new set of electrical contractors to work on your building after the other ones leave. However, there are offshore coding and sysadmin firms clamoring for business who would be more than happy to step in.
I would definitely like to see more vacation time and less invasion on personal time, but that costs money.
Let me chime in.
About 200 days into my trip living and working in Beijing you get a different feel for things. Now I am not saying in any way that Chinese isnt the language to learn and that China isnt going to run the global economy for the forseeable future. I dont have room to start on that complex matter. But... ill relate all ive learned and say "Yes" to both sides..
There is a construction army here that I am listening to build the next generation of high rises (inculding the tallest building in Beijing about 1 mile away) at 2;28 am. It never stops. And its everywhere within a twenty mile radius. An amazing thing to watch unfold.
One the one hand.
On the other hand I walk past and through these crews everyday and see the same amount of laying back that I see on a typical highway crew in the States except horrendously worse. Office workers on a whole appear to have the same rep: lotsa hours, same amount fo work. I dont think they are inherently (or culturaly or otherwise) more productive / less lazy than anyone else ive met - but seriously, and think about this - there are that many more. China is a beast, it has been for the last 3000 years, and unified riding a wave of nationalistic expansion there isnt a lot it cant do. And its doing it, now.
IMHO, from what I have seen. But in my defense I have been looking pretty hard through a variety of different lenses.
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
I had occasion recently to travel with the president of the company I work for to attend some meetings (bleah). After the meetings, over a beer, he asked me what I thought of him taking the entire company (~100 employees) to a mandatory 30-hour work week.
My twofold response was:
1. Sign me up.
2. You won't notice a drop in overall output (ie, perceived productivity would go up).
He agreed with me on point #2.
It remains to be seen if he will go through with his nefarious plan. I sure hope he does.
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
The book The Lazy Way to success by Fred Gratzon has some interesting ideas on this. Gratzon has started 2 successful million-dollar companies, all without ever working a day according to himself. Book: http://lazyway.net/ My review: http://positivesharing.com/2006/03/book-review-the -lazy-way/