#314: 'Before Internet' Times Seem Quaint; By 2050, What'll Seem Dated?
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David Byrne's newsletter (yes, that David Byrne), Reasons To Be Cheerful, had an item recently describing several companies allowing their employees to work fewer hours for the same salary. This occurred because of the need to work from home (Covid), in one case, or as an experiment to see if shorter hours might lead to higher productivity, in another.
As I've written previously, there's a huge potential for increased efficiency in our work lives that the age of digital data has unlocked. My guess is that a good 10-20% increase, if not more, is possible using simple things like gamification, work-from-home, and other strategies for getting work done faster and more enjoyably, with no loss of quality.
Very well, you say, give us an example. OK, let's say you work behind a cash register, as one of four check-out cashiers, and a fifth and sixth cashier can be brought in during higher volume hours. If you're told that you can just go home if you reach your 150th customer before your 8-hour shift is over, you'll work a bit faster. Not so fast as to make mistakes, but you'll develop a sixth sense for cutting back on wasted time. You'll become so good at it that if 150 customers was the average before the 'leave at 150' changeover, you'll start going home 15- 30-minutes early. That's because you're in charge of your own time.
If this means your employer doesn't need a sixth cashier, they save, too. Plus, customers needn't wait in line as long. But, you say, everyone can't go home if there are only two extra cashiers (who also work in the back of the store). But what if management keeps a record of your time savings (digital data!), and when your hours add up to a day off, you've earned a paid holiday.
Does everyone work faster? No, some cashiers will speed up a little bit, but miss the 150 threshold. And that's another plus for management. Besides, such cases of near misses erase any reason to prefer efficient employees over those that are less efficient. So, nobody's penalized for missing the 150 target.
But, most importantly, the spark of a self-directed life can, in some people, light a fire. At home, they begin to see ways to organize their lives that avoid pointless time wasting: "There's no point sitting here feeling down", someone might say, "Yesterday, I felt so good planting a garden, I'm going to finish that, and then...."
You probably can't imagine half-an-hour a day adding up to a 10-20% productivity gain. But, cashiers are traditionally fast workers. We haven't yet considered those who've successfully found ways to drag out their work (no accusations are necessary, I'm sure I'd be in the same boat if I were in their shoes). There are many people who delight in taking a break from work to chit-chat with customers, to linger in the hallway, or to purposely drink copious liquids in order to be heading for the bathroom every twenty minutes. Again, no accusations are necessary, as these are creative ways to fight for one's self-interest.
Realistically, we wouldn't see a 10-20% change right away. A person who's attuned to frittering away minutes must reprogram their lives, and that takes time. It's like getting in shape, physically. It won't happen right away.
Now, what about my claim that this changeover to a more self-propelled lifestyle is going to feel as monumentally significant as 'the internet'? OK, that's a big claim.
Except, when you think about it, what's just as big, if not bigger than bringing the world to one's fingertips? Well, surely, rising from little more than automaton, to self-determination, approaches that level of significance. In the end, you can't really enjoy life without being in control of your own.
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