So this is probably a little Marxist, but isn't the reason we're not working 3 hours a day the fact that the owners of capital capture all the gains from technological advance? In other words, money is more powerful if you can buy a robot at a high up front cost with small ongoing costs.
On a micro level, I see this as a worker figuring out how to do his 8 hour task in 4. Boss man says great, now you can do this other task for 4 hours also instead of going home at noon.
I'm surprised the article didn't mention anything about the time required to achieve and maintain proficiency.
If knowledge and skill comes from time immersed in work and study, then the knowledge worker who puts in 60 hours a week will be far more valuable than the one who only devotes 15 hours a week.
A surgeon who practices medicine only 2 hours a day will be much less capable than one who does more surgeries, spends more time learning new procedures and technologies, and keeps current with all the latest research.
If you need to design a suspension bridge, do you go with the engineer who spends 80% of her time not designing bridges, or do you choose the engineer who lives and breathes bridge design and has many more successful projects in her portfolio?
An attorney making $600 per hour might survive financially on 4 hours per week if her hourly rate stayed constant. But if she tried to do that, her knowledge would quickly atrophy, and nobody would pay that rate any more.
It's a bit of a paradox. To make enough money per hour to live well on a small number of hours, knowledge workers must acquire a very high level of knowledge and skill to make their time a scarce resource.
But to acquire and maintain that level of knowledge and skill demands a large and continuing investment of time.
Competition with other knowledge workers ensures that the highest rate per hour goes to those who spend the most time actively engaged in their field.
Honestly I think this is why unemployment is so high. At first they had to let people go during the recession, and then they were like, "oh hey, we didn't need a lot of those people in the first place.."
I wouldn't call myself a marxist, but I do think we're entering an era where something like a universal basic income might make sense. Nothing against people getting wealthy off their labor, but it seems apparent to me that the job market will continue to shrink as things become more and more automated, and shaming people that don't have some distinct skill-set that can't be automated doesn't sound like a recipe for a great society...
Strictly speaking, if my wife and I worked 3 hour days, and were paid for 3 hour days, we could make a living. It wouldn't be a great one, but it would be possible at our current pay rate.
A surprising number of working professionals are at that level, but some factors prevent it:
1) It's simply more efficient to have one person working on a problem than 2 or 3...e.g. the mythical man month. The problems I work on don't get smaller just because I work less. I can either work on it 3 times as long, which puts my company at a competitive disadvantage over companies that have employees willing to work full-time. Or we can have 3 people working on it, which, for a variety of reasons turns out to also be less efficient than 1 person working on a task and is also a competitive disadvantage.
2) The standard of living at 3 hours a day is significantly less than the one I get to live working 8. Is it sufficient? sure, is it nice? No. Even if I took the cut and downsized, many of the hobbies I enjoy now, I wouldn't have the money or space for any longer. I'm also able to live well below my means and save up significant amount of money for eventual retirement. I can't stay in the labor force 3 times as long to save up the same amount.
You might argue that the owners of capital capture all the gains from technological advance, but it would be wrong. This model only works if there is only one entity operating in the economy that's advancing. In a competitive economy technological advances allow you to undercut your competitors either by offering the same item/service at a cheaper price, or by offering more at the same price. Doing this, you end up shaving into your profit regularly. In general, the profits at the most technologically advanced companies tend to be among the slimmest.
Profits are also eaten up as reinvestment in continuous technological advance. R&D is hideously expensive, and it fails most of the time. Economies that send all the profits home with the workers tend to also have stagnant technological advances and rely on espionage against economies that do innovate to maintain parity.
Pretty much. That there are more people willing to do the same job for less because there's an oversupply of labor as a consequent of globalization's progression. Further, because of the optimizations of production, it's cheaper than ever to produce most things and especially zero unit cost goods like software. The only problem/challenge from the supply side is that niches are getting more microoptimized because the big problems have already been solved a zillion times over.
My hope is that when people get to live and work in space on a semipermanent basis, it will start the single biggest goldrush the human species is or ever will witness beyond leaving the solar system. (Hint: invest with Musk.)
I don't see that working out significantly differently in a Marxist system. Or at least a Marxist-Leninist system. There'd be a change in the boss's motivations, but it'd only be cosmetic. Instead of "Great, that means we can double production, which will earn me rewards because we can sell more stuff!" it would be "Great, that means we can double production, which will earn me rewards because it will impress my superiors!"
It's this and that the owners of capital have so much power over labor, that employees can't simply say, "I want a 3 hour day," but hear, "You have to work 10." And you can't argue because unemployment is so high (because of those productivity gains).
The reason you can't work just 3 hours a day is that you need to make money for other people as well. Too many governmental jobs that has really no real value, but exist due to socialistic idea, governments want to give work to people for votes and for statistics.
And you must pay for those jobs yourself, be it through direct taxes or by the fact that products you buy cost more, because companies are obliged by regulations to hire someone to do something that they have to pay for.
So this is probably a little Capitalist, but isn't the reason we're not working 3 hours a day the fact that the owners of capital capture allocate investment towards technological advancements? In other words, technology is more sought after if you can allocate research towards a robot at a high up front cost with small ongoing costs.
On a macro level, I see this as a economy optimizing for technological expansion over leisure. Worker man says shitty, then pulls out his magical pocket sized supercomputer on the bus ride home at 6pm.
We should able to bring discussions like this without having to apologize that it may seem Marxist. Marxism was wrong, it gave birth to some of the most awful oppressive regimes in the XX century. But we should be able to have discussions about equality, and the relationship capital and labor with out fear of it seeming Marxism.
Or how about "I've got more ideas on how to improve productivity. How about a raise, or I go to work for your competitor?"
Heck, a worker who can double productivity can write their own ticket.
I would like to provide another explanation for the longer hours at work: reverse-telecommuting (doing personal stuff on company time).
Particularly with the advent of the internet, there isn't that much stuff that we NEED to be away from work to do. We can easily organize our personal finances, research and schedule various appointments, order groceries, etc. all the while coordinating with one's spouse.
The expectation to stay longer hours at work seems to have come with more goodwill towards running personal errands and general slacking around at work, such that though we work longer hours, the work itself is much less concentrated.
I blame my own personal loss of time partially on long commutes. Previously, I lived about ~8 minutes away from where I worked. Now I live about ~40 minutes (which is only about 12 miles) from work. So, that works out to ~5.3 extra hours a week I lose sitting in my car. Or about 6.5 work weeks of time a year. With that time, I could be teaching the kids something, learning a new skill, exercising, working on my own projects, or just relaxing.
Think about how much work you can get done in 6 weeks at work. That is what is being lost because I live in a state/city that puts infrastructure projects near the bottom of the priority list.
"That is what is being lost because I live in a state/city that puts infrastructure projects near the bottom of the priority list."
I'm not belittling your problem or saying that it's your own fault or anything, and it's empirically true that that short commutes contribute significantly to QoL, but more or better infrastructure is not (should not be) the goal. The mantra (which has become the norm in transportation research, to a lesser degree in professional transportation planning circles and only to a small degree in policy circles) is 'we don't need better mobility, we need better accessibility'.
To make this more concrete, you don't need better roads, you need better jobs close to your home. But you'll only get these once this becomes the common sentiment and people start voting with their feet. Because what you're doing now (take better job in exchange for worse commute) only makes the overall situation worse - more people competing for jobs in central locations, and/or people trading bigger houses further away for a longer commute.
A lot of work is being started (in Europe, I know little details of efforts elsewhere but from the current literature it seems this is a global trend) on getting people to change their sentiments on transport and home/work location. It will take a number of years for the first effects to show of course. Just spatial planning policy interventions take 10 years to become active, let alone for their effects to be significant.
And you're falling into exactly the trap the article is talking about. Worrying about the cost of all that time spent in the car, when you could be thanking your lucky stars you have that extra time to yourself.
My commute is 1 hour each way and it's wonderful. Having a busy job and 2 kids means I have a lot to do at work and at home, but those 2 hors a day are entirely my own.
Mostly I listen to podcasts and audiobooks, but I also carry an iPad and read on that when I get a seat on the train. It's a great opportunity to listen to novels, history and science podcasts, comedy shows or read material I wouldn't get a chance to otherwise. Podcasts and audiobooks are perfect for car journeys too though.
This right here is my strongest motivator for embracing remote working. Reclaiming these hours has been the single most liberating and uplifting thing I've done in the pursuit of the oft promoted but rarely implemented work-life balance.
Depending on your personal situation and goals, cycling to work could be a solution. 12 miles works out to 20km, which for me would amount to less than an hour of cycling time with good equipment.
As a bonus, you'll arrive home with an empty head and you'll already have exercised!
YMMV, but I find that audio-books and audio-courses are a superb way to make an otherwise boring commute more tolerable. I hate commuting as much as anyone, and thankfully my commute isn't long, but even then, it's much more fun "reading" a book while sitting in the car.
"I don't have time for that" should be translated as "That's not a high enough priority for me to make time to do it."
While we live in a world where setting our priorities one way (more money, less time) is facilitated by everything from labour laws to social conventions, we do have a choice to set them differently.
There are two prongs to this: 1) setting our personal priorities differently, and consciously accepting the trade-offs that involves and 2) promoting social and corporate policies that enable our preferred priorities.
Setting personal priorities may involve simply not working through lunch every day and ramping up from there.
Promoting social and corporate policies may involve things that facilitate telecommuting (reflecting the discussions here on the time-cost of commuting) or a move toward more European-style labour policy, which doesn't seem to have harmed European productivity (http://ieconomics.com/productivity-euro-area-united-states). That's another way of saying the Anglosphere all-work-all-the-time ethic is really inefficient, and who wants to be inefficient?
For many people, though, leisure time is over-rated. People work long hours because they value their working hours more than their leisure hours, and set their priorities accordingly. There are a lot of reasons why people have those priorities, some of which may be related to how bad we are at judging what is likely to make us happy: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kirsten-dirksen/happiness-rese...
1) People seek purpose in their jobs. The jobs that provide this usually require an investment of time.
2) People seek status. Status comes from relative wealth and intelligence, which requires an investment of time.
3) People usually don't have the choice to trade money for time. You usually can't say, "I'm going to work 5 hours less per week and in return take a smaller salary". Hourly workers can (sort of) do this, but they're the ones who usually can't afford to do this.
All that said, there still are plenty of opportunities to exchange money for more time and people (IMO irrationally) pass these opportunities up. Ex. paying for food instead of taking the time to cook, clean, shop. Ex. paying someone to clean your house. I'm not really sure what the explanation for this is.
In paying for these things, you're also giving up control, possibly leisure (some people enjoy cooking), and possibly quality. It can still certainly be a win, but you're not simply comparing prices of a fungible good.
People fail to correctly value (1) the cost of these time saving services and (2) their own time.
It's similar to how people will drive around to save 5 cents per gallon on gasoline. Usually, they will only end up saving a dollar. Or someone will make multiple trips to their car to unload all groceries (which can add significant time in apartment buildings) because they wanted to save 20 cents and not buy a paper/plastic bag during checkout. These little things add up in time.
Being a Star Trek fan, I was watching TOS (The Original Series) yesterday with my son. As was the norm for that show, in every episode Kirk somehow managed to find an alien planet with a beautiful woman on it that needed some sort of help. [insert long discussion about misogyny in 1960s TV shows]. I'm a bit of a movie buff, so I started using IMDB to look up some of these actresses to see what they're doing now.
Dang. They're either dead or in their 80s.
We are becoming the first generation to have a multi-media reminder of how short life is. In previous generations once grandpa died, you might have a painting and/or some family stories to share. Perhaps a tombstone to visit. Over time the memory faded away. In this generation and future ones, when grandpa dies? Hell, he might still be online, a bot posting his musings for the next 50 years. I don't see a reason grandpa can't send the grandkids a "Happy Birthday! Now you're 60!" message decades after he passes.
This is a good thing overall, in my mind, but this constant reminder of how short life is has the effect of making people really stingy about their time. That's probably not such a good thing, as many important connections happen when we're not looking for them.
As I get older, I find the need to orchestrate my time instead of conserving it: spending some time on high-energy, deeply-focused tasks and spending some time purposefully _not_ focusing and instead spending time socially with others I care about. Working in a good technology team is good for the former, exercise, outdoors, and family is good for the latter, at least for me.
Being mindful of time is fine. Being stingy with it or bitter about losing it? Not so much.
I think death is less present now than it has been historically. Losing babies used to be a pretty common event, infections were often lethal, etc.
My parents were fairly old when I was born, so I've had the experience of seeing a fair number of relatives of their generation die (I'm younger than 40). None of that has left me with any particular urgency about how I spend my time. I don't mean to dismiss what you are saying, I suppose my point is that such things are probably more individual and personal than you have stated it.
"Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day."
Of course, because problems that don't kill people or at least seriously physically disables them are not real and whoever has them should just suck it up and be thankful they're not living in Sudan, right? rollseyes
In the current economy, service providers are no longer incentivized to provide ease of use. Everything is commoditized. Grocery shopping, banking, plumbers, auto repair, travel. We want it as cheaply as possible because we're all strapped. This creates time bloat on both sides - it takes longer to get what we want, and it takes longer on the other side to actually provide services.
We're currently in an artificial starvation economy. When you're starving, it's important to conserve energy (or in this case capital) which means that things take longer than they should. You spend a few hours more to save a few dollars more, but, long term, the stress of being stretched causes impulse purchasing, which creates a positive feedback loop.
Its called 'Pain Optimization'. I think its the ultimate goal of a capitalist economy as practiced by Americans (and now parts of China). It doesn't create the best possible situation, it optimizes down to the least worst situation the super-majority of its participants will accept.
> Grocery shopping, banking, plumbers, auto repair, travel
Arguably, grocery shopping, banking, and travel are all easier than they has ever been. Plumbing and auto repair seem more or less the same to me, but car ownership itself is simpler due to improved quality of cars overall.
It's like survival of the least terrible... And then standards of a country plummets and it becomes less competitive compared to an upstart that then disrupts them completely. Upstart is banned.
My opinion is that people who are motivated to do things or make money work as much as they can to work towards what they want. Sitting around would be frustrating. That doesn't mean they need to work so much to survive, they just want to.
Personally I've never done that. I often worked 3 day weeks. Now I do programming at home whenever I feel like and have a low-hours day job. I make enough money to be comfortable and it's quite nice.
I think the predictions have come true - for anyone who wants it.
As a personal corollary, this year I started doing nights and weekends consulting. After having spent years playing video games in my free time I now feel like any hour away from my 9-5 job that I'm not billing is an hour wasted. My bank account has never been healthier but I know I'm burning the candle at both ends and it will catch up with me. I can't shake the feeling of time not worked being time wasted, though.
Our population of working age (18-65) is about 3 mio. people with about 1 mio. on some kind of welfare (unemployment benifits, government paid sick leave, disability pension etc.).
So here in Denmark mr. Keynes has turned out to be right.
What he failed to see was the rise of the welfare state and just how unevenly distributed work or "busyness" would end up being.
When I worked for a large established company a lot of the older, more senior staff who had been around for a long time would complain constantly about the workload being much higher than it was a decade ago.
When younger team members got promoted to similar roles with the same workload they didn't have the same issues. The big difference between the two was the use of technology. The workload expectation was based on efficient use of all of the systems and programmes we had available. Those that still used paper-based systems and ignored automated processes and other efficiencies really struggled, and their days were much longer as a result.
Its simple, because we want to consume. People work hard and then buy a expensive car. Well you could have work less and drive a shitty old car.
I dont understand what the mystery is. I myself could probebly get by with working 4 hours per day but I dont, I rather work 8 hours and buy myself cool computer shit and books.
It's perhaps not so simple. I'm a pathology resident. My only interest in cars is to move my family around for the lowest cost (in time and money) per mile. My time costs a fair bit, and experience has taught me a new Honda every 200,000 miles is cheaper overall (in time and money) than used cars. Try finding a used Honda Accord without a salvage title.
My work is dictated by the needs of various hospitals and clinics. Some days I work from 5 am to 11 pm and come in on the weekend to finish. Some days, like today, I'm on Hacker News at 9:30 am because I'm waiting for:
* techs to pull some cases for my research project,
* my batch of surgical cases to come out, and
* tumor board at 11, which I prep'd for yesterday.
I suppose I could be working on a rosalind.info problem right now, but I crushed one on the first attempt yesterday, so I'll delay that until this afternoon, probably after a 5 mile run through the San Diego zoo. I could be working with the videographer for my lab video (requested by some grants) but ... I don't want to. Although, I have 40 minutes, so maybe I could review the script.
We save a fair bit but we also spend on lessons for the kids and an annual vacation.
I'm always busy, because I want to wring every ounce of awesome I can out of life.
There are a number of life lessons that go into this. Find work that you enjoy. Live within your means. Exercise. Get plenty of sunshine. Eat less. Set low expectations, you'll succeed more often and ultimately get further. Give employees specific, actionable tasks ("specific" may vary depending on who you're talking to, and learning where to draw that line is a life-long exercise).
Learn how to modify your own behavior by modifying your environment. For example: throw away your TV. This will significantly reduce your exposure to advertising. Similarly, subscribe to a good music service: you'll avoid the ads and your taste will drift away from the mainstream toward whatever you genuinely enjoy. Avoid the news. There's so much news that someone else will know whatever's going on and you're ignorance will give them an opportunity to tell you. All of a sudden, you're having a valuable conversation. I have adopted Knuth's position: other people make it their job to stay on top of things. My job is to get to the bottom.
Another thing to consider is that the law is heavly focused on full employment and there are lots of benefits. This is true in almost all countrys, laber market regulation have a clear focus on this.
We have no idea what the (abstract) free market laber time would be. For better or worse our economys have devloped into a kind of paradigm that is not focused on flexibilty. This has devloped in the industrialisation and should be more relaxed now. In some places (most places programmers work) working hourse are allready much more flexible.
The underlying problem is to figure out what you really want. Yes, I've felt that feeling of uneasiness in "wasting" time a lot, especially as I moved into jobs which significantly increased the monetary value of my time. But one thing I did know was that I did not value money as much as I valued the time I spent meeting people, being outdoors, reading books or just thinking about things.
Another lesson that self-help books give out a lot is that if you don't decide the course of your life, others will do so for you. I suspect that most people take money as a proxy for success and happiness and hence keep desiring more of it. Ironically, our consumerist environment makes us spend even more as we earn more...making us want to earn even more.
Anyways, this is simply hypothesis. I can't say that I've figured out things, but I do think I am on the right path.
The beauty of being human is that we aren't rational when it comes to managing our time. At least, for me, in terms of what has the biggest long-term payoff (e.g. making better friends v. reading articles two-levels removed from original HN linkage).
> But being busy has become a refrain and rationale for the things we don’t do, an acceptable and even glamorous excuse. My friend at lunch reminded me of what the Buddhist monk Sogyal Rinpoche calls “active laziness” – the filling of our lives with unessential tasks so we feel full of responsibilities or, as he calls them, “irresponsibilites.”
This piece resonated with me strongly. I am currently down in Florida with my parents on a two week break from work for the holidays. This is the first stretch of time off from work I have taken in 2-3 years which involved more than a day or two out of the lab in Boston (I have accrued 8 weeks of paid time off and in addition my employer has effectively told me I can take as much time off as I want). There is a nice pool where I am, a beach, unlimited booze, other fun amenities, and yet I found myself complaining to my best friend last night on gchat that I have been feeling anxious and somewhat bored / unhappy for most of the trip.
I feel like I should be spending this scarce free time better learning python and facilitating my career switch from bio E into data science; I don't want to eat out because that will harm my ability to cut weight for powerlifting (my main hobby); and when I am not trying to code or work on lab work, I spend many hours a day looking for gyms / in the gym. I effectively am attempting to do what I do every day (work from morning until I sleep punctuated with some time spent lifting) and am feeling miserable because I am not doing it as well as I would be able to do it at home. Last night I was checking how much it would cost for me to change my departure date so that I could go home early and use my vacation days more effectively studying.
Part of this angst is driven by the fact that while I love my family and enjoy spending time with them, I feel angry that this is how I am forced to use my special large break. I am never able to spend time with my friends. I see my best friend and close high school friends maybe once or twice a year for 2-3 days. They are scattered across the midwest and simply don't have any vacation days to spend hanging out with me. My college friends in the midwest invited me to spend New Years with them, but they admitted that they would be working the entire week and would only be able to hang out with me for about a day, so I declined. My friends from work are in the same situation as me and don't have time to go on a trip.
As this article correctly points out, I realize that I have no right to complain as these are completely self-imposed behaviors and though processes, but to be honest I'm not sure what else to do with myself or my time. I sometimes ask why I work the hours I do; is this really the best way to live my life? While I realize that the answer is probably no, I don't know what else to do, and so I keep doing it.
Isn't the standard prescription to do something that doesn't feel like work for a living?
I quite enjoy programming, so it's not like I'm constantly watching the clock when I work. I'm sure there are loads of other jobs that people like doing that don't make them feel like they would rather be doing something else.
[+] [-] waylandsmithers|11 years ago|reply
On a micro level, I see this as a worker figuring out how to do his 8 hour task in 4. Boss man says great, now you can do this other task for 4 hours also instead of going home at noon.
[+] [-] panarky|11 years ago|reply
If knowledge and skill comes from time immersed in work and study, then the knowledge worker who puts in 60 hours a week will be far more valuable than the one who only devotes 15 hours a week.
A surgeon who practices medicine only 2 hours a day will be much less capable than one who does more surgeries, spends more time learning new procedures and technologies, and keeps current with all the latest research.
If you need to design a suspension bridge, do you go with the engineer who spends 80% of her time not designing bridges, or do you choose the engineer who lives and breathes bridge design and has many more successful projects in her portfolio?
An attorney making $600 per hour might survive financially on 4 hours per week if her hourly rate stayed constant. But if she tried to do that, her knowledge would quickly atrophy, and nobody would pay that rate any more.
It's a bit of a paradox. To make enough money per hour to live well on a small number of hours, knowledge workers must acquire a very high level of knowledge and skill to make their time a scarce resource.
But to acquire and maintain that level of knowledge and skill demands a large and continuing investment of time.
Competition with other knowledge workers ensures that the highest rate per hour goes to those who spend the most time actively engaged in their field.
[+] [-] overgard|11 years ago|reply
I wouldn't call myself a marxist, but I do think we're entering an era where something like a universal basic income might make sense. Nothing against people getting wealthy off their labor, but it seems apparent to me that the job market will continue to shrink as things become more and more automated, and shaming people that don't have some distinct skill-set that can't be automated doesn't sound like a recipe for a great society...
[+] [-] bane|11 years ago|reply
A surprising number of working professionals are at that level, but some factors prevent it:
1) It's simply more efficient to have one person working on a problem than 2 or 3...e.g. the mythical man month. The problems I work on don't get smaller just because I work less. I can either work on it 3 times as long, which puts my company at a competitive disadvantage over companies that have employees willing to work full-time. Or we can have 3 people working on it, which, for a variety of reasons turns out to also be less efficient than 1 person working on a task and is also a competitive disadvantage.
2) The standard of living at 3 hours a day is significantly less than the one I get to live working 8. Is it sufficient? sure, is it nice? No. Even if I took the cut and downsized, many of the hobbies I enjoy now, I wouldn't have the money or space for any longer. I'm also able to live well below my means and save up significant amount of money for eventual retirement. I can't stay in the labor force 3 times as long to save up the same amount.
You might argue that the owners of capital capture all the gains from technological advance, but it would be wrong. This model only works if there is only one entity operating in the economy that's advancing. In a competitive economy technological advances allow you to undercut your competitors either by offering the same item/service at a cheaper price, or by offering more at the same price. Doing this, you end up shaving into your profit regularly. In general, the profits at the most technologically advanced companies tend to be among the slimmest.
Profits are also eaten up as reinvestment in continuous technological advance. R&D is hideously expensive, and it fails most of the time. Economies that send all the profits home with the workers tend to also have stagnant technological advances and rely on espionage against economies that do innovate to maintain parity.
[+] [-] rab_oof|11 years ago|reply
My hope is that when people get to live and work in space on a semipermanent basis, it will start the single biggest goldrush the human species is or ever will witness beyond leaving the solar system. (Hint: invest with Musk.)
[+] [-] bunderbunder|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] david927|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snird|11 years ago|reply
The reason you can't work just 3 hours a day is that you need to make money for other people as well. Too many governmental jobs that has really no real value, but exist due to socialistic idea, governments want to give work to people for votes and for statistics.
And you must pay for those jobs yourself, be it through direct taxes or by the fact that products you buy cost more, because companies are obliged by regulations to hire someone to do something that they have to pay for.
[+] [-] 3pt14159|11 years ago|reply
On a macro level, I see this as a economy optimizing for technological expansion over leisure. Worker man says shitty, then pulls out his magical pocket sized supercomputer on the bus ride home at 6pm.
[+] [-] huherto|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] falcor84|11 years ago|reply
Particularly with the advent of the internet, there isn't that much stuff that we NEED to be away from work to do. We can easily organize our personal finances, research and schedule various appointments, order groceries, etc. all the while coordinating with one's spouse.
The expectation to stay longer hours at work seems to have come with more goodwill towards running personal errands and general slacking around at work, such that though we work longer hours, the work itself is much less concentrated.
[+] [-] StillBored|11 years ago|reply
Think about how much work you can get done in 6 weeks at work. That is what is being lost because I live in a state/city that puts infrastructure projects near the bottom of the priority list.
[+] [-] roel_v|11 years ago|reply
I'm not belittling your problem or saying that it's your own fault or anything, and it's empirically true that that short commutes contribute significantly to QoL, but more or better infrastructure is not (should not be) the goal. The mantra (which has become the norm in transportation research, to a lesser degree in professional transportation planning circles and only to a small degree in policy circles) is 'we don't need better mobility, we need better accessibility'.
To make this more concrete, you don't need better roads, you need better jobs close to your home. But you'll only get these once this becomes the common sentiment and people start voting with their feet. Because what you're doing now (take better job in exchange for worse commute) only makes the overall situation worse - more people competing for jobs in central locations, and/or people trading bigger houses further away for a longer commute.
A lot of work is being started (in Europe, I know little details of efforts elsewhere but from the current literature it seems this is a global trend) on getting people to change their sentiments on transport and home/work location. It will take a number of years for the first effects to show of course. Just spatial planning policy interventions take 10 years to become active, let alone for their effects to be significant.
[+] [-] simonh|11 years ago|reply
My commute is 1 hour each way and it's wonderful. Having a busy job and 2 kids means I have a lot to do at work and at home, but those 2 hors a day are entirely my own.
Mostly I listen to podcasts and audiobooks, but I also carry an iPad and read on that when I get a seat on the train. It's a great opportunity to listen to novels, history and science podcasts, comedy shows or read material I wouldn't get a chance to otherwise. Podcasts and audiobooks are perfect for car journeys too though.
[+] [-] afoot|11 years ago|reply
People who live close to the office manage to cook nice meals, exercise, spend time with family etc all while I'm commuting.
The most I manage is replying to a few emails and listening to podcasts while standing up on the train with carriage after carriage of commuters.
[+] [-] jzwinck|11 years ago|reply
Isn't it rather because you choose to live 12 miles from work?
[+] [-] radicalbyte|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lordbusiness|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smu|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eliben|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tjradcliffe|11 years ago|reply
While we live in a world where setting our priorities one way (more money, less time) is facilitated by everything from labour laws to social conventions, we do have a choice to set them differently.
There are two prongs to this: 1) setting our personal priorities differently, and consciously accepting the trade-offs that involves and 2) promoting social and corporate policies that enable our preferred priorities.
Setting personal priorities may involve simply not working through lunch every day and ramping up from there.
Promoting social and corporate policies may involve things that facilitate telecommuting (reflecting the discussions here on the time-cost of commuting) or a move toward more European-style labour policy, which doesn't seem to have harmed European productivity (http://ieconomics.com/productivity-euro-area-united-states). That's another way of saying the Anglosphere all-work-all-the-time ethic is really inefficient, and who wants to be inefficient?
For many people, though, leisure time is over-rated. People work long hours because they value their working hours more than their leisure hours, and set their priorities accordingly. There are a lot of reasons why people have those priorities, some of which may be related to how bad we are at judging what is likely to make us happy: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kirsten-dirksen/happiness-rese...
[+] [-] adamzerner|11 years ago|reply
2) People seek status. Status comes from relative wealth and intelligence, which requires an investment of time.
3) People usually don't have the choice to trade money for time. You usually can't say, "I'm going to work 5 hours less per week and in return take a smaller salary". Hourly workers can (sort of) do this, but they're the ones who usually can't afford to do this.
All that said, there still are plenty of opportunities to exchange money for more time and people (IMO irrationally) pass these opportunities up. Ex. paying for food instead of taking the time to cook, clean, shop. Ex. paying someone to clean your house. I'm not really sure what the explanation for this is.
[+] [-] dllthomas|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Chronic30|11 years ago|reply
It's similar to how people will drive around to save 5 cents per gallon on gasoline. Usually, they will only end up saving a dollar. Or someone will make multiple trips to their car to unload all groceries (which can add significant time in apartment buildings) because they wanted to save 20 cents and not buy a paper/plastic bag during checkout. These little things add up in time.
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|11 years ago|reply
Dang. They're either dead or in their 80s.
We are becoming the first generation to have a multi-media reminder of how short life is. In previous generations once grandpa died, you might have a painting and/or some family stories to share. Perhaps a tombstone to visit. Over time the memory faded away. In this generation and future ones, when grandpa dies? Hell, he might still be online, a bot posting his musings for the next 50 years. I don't see a reason grandpa can't send the grandkids a "Happy Birthday! Now you're 60!" message decades after he passes.
This is a good thing overall, in my mind, but this constant reminder of how short life is has the effect of making people really stingy about their time. That's probably not such a good thing, as many important connections happen when we're not looking for them.
As I get older, I find the need to orchestrate my time instead of conserving it: spending some time on high-energy, deeply-focused tasks and spending some time purposefully _not_ focusing and instead spending time socially with others I care about. Working in a good technology team is good for the former, exercise, outdoors, and family is good for the latter, at least for me.
Being mindful of time is fine. Being stingy with it or bitter about losing it? Not so much.
[+] [-] maxerickson|11 years ago|reply
My parents were fairly old when I was born, so I've had the experience of seeing a fair number of relatives of their generation die (I'm younger than 40). None of that has left me with any particular urgency about how I spend my time. I don't mean to dismiss what you are saying, I suppose my point is that such things are probably more individual and personal than you have stated it.
[+] [-] oldspiceman|11 years ago|reply
"Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day."
[+] [-] roel_v|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] debacle|11 years ago|reply
We're currently in an artificial starvation economy. When you're starving, it's important to conserve energy (or in this case capital) which means that things take longer than they should. You spend a few hours more to save a few dollars more, but, long term, the stress of being stretched causes impulse purchasing, which creates a positive feedback loop.
[+] [-] tsunamifury|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] humanrebar|11 years ago|reply
Arguably, grocery shopping, banking, and travel are all easier than they has ever been. Plumbing and auto repair seem more or less the same to me, but car ownership itself is simpler due to improved quality of cars overall.
[+] [-] galfarragem|11 years ago|reply
Nowadays is more difficult to make money because we want it cheaper.
The busyness and time bloat comes from this. The perpetual looking for the best deal and the perpetual looking for work.
The "bad guy" responsible for this negative loop in western world (besides ourselves): Mr. Globalization.
[+] [-] rab_oof|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sorgam|11 years ago|reply
Personally I've never done that. I often worked 3 day weeks. Now I do programming at home whenever I feel like and have a low-hours day job. I make enough money to be comfortable and it's quite nice.
I think the predictions have come true - for anyone who wants it.
[+] [-] ascendantlogic|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chvid|11 years ago|reply
Our population of working age (18-65) is about 3 mio. people with about 1 mio. on some kind of welfare (unemployment benifits, government paid sick leave, disability pension etc.).
So here in Denmark mr. Keynes has turned out to be right.
What he failed to see was the rise of the welfare state and just how unevenly distributed work or "busyness" would end up being.
[+] [-] kirk21|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] afoot|11 years ago|reply
When younger team members got promoted to similar roles with the same workload they didn't have the same issues. The big difference between the two was the use of technology. The workload expectation was based on efficient use of all of the systems and programmes we had available. Those that still used paper-based systems and ignored automated processes and other efficiencies really struggled, and their days were much longer as a result.
[+] [-] nickik|11 years ago|reply
I dont understand what the mystery is. I myself could probebly get by with working 4 hours per day but I dont, I rather work 8 hours and buy myself cool computer shit and books.
[+] [-] niels_olson|11 years ago|reply
My work is dictated by the needs of various hospitals and clinics. Some days I work from 5 am to 11 pm and come in on the weekend to finish. Some days, like today, I'm on Hacker News at 9:30 am because I'm waiting for:
* techs to pull some cases for my research project,
* my batch of surgical cases to come out, and
* tumor board at 11, which I prep'd for yesterday.
I suppose I could be working on a rosalind.info problem right now, but I crushed one on the first attempt yesterday, so I'll delay that until this afternoon, probably after a 5 mile run through the San Diego zoo. I could be working with the videographer for my lab video (requested by some grants) but ... I don't want to. Although, I have 40 minutes, so maybe I could review the script.
We save a fair bit but we also spend on lessons for the kids and an annual vacation.
I'm always busy, because I want to wring every ounce of awesome I can out of life.
There are a number of life lessons that go into this. Find work that you enjoy. Live within your means. Exercise. Get plenty of sunshine. Eat less. Set low expectations, you'll succeed more often and ultimately get further. Give employees specific, actionable tasks ("specific" may vary depending on who you're talking to, and learning where to draw that line is a life-long exercise).
Learn how to modify your own behavior by modifying your environment. For example: throw away your TV. This will significantly reduce your exposure to advertising. Similarly, subscribe to a good music service: you'll avoid the ads and your taste will drift away from the mainstream toward whatever you genuinely enjoy. Avoid the news. There's so much news that someone else will know whatever's going on and you're ignorance will give them an opportunity to tell you. All of a sudden, you're having a valuable conversation. I have adopted Knuth's position: other people make it their job to stay on top of things. My job is to get to the bottom.
[+] [-] nickik|11 years ago|reply
We have no idea what the (abstract) free market laber time would be. For better or worse our economys have devloped into a kind of paradigm that is not focused on flexibilty. This has devloped in the industrialisation and should be more relaxed now. In some places (most places programmers work) working hourse are allready much more flexible.
[+] [-] pm90|11 years ago|reply
Another lesson that self-help books give out a lot is that if you don't decide the course of your life, others will do so for you. I suspect that most people take money as a proxy for success and happiness and hence keep desiring more of it. Ironically, our consumerist environment makes us spend even more as we earn more...making us want to earn even more.
Anyways, this is simply hypothesis. I can't say that I've figured out things, but I do think I am on the right path.
[+] [-] wallflower|11 years ago|reply
> But being busy has become a refrain and rationale for the things we don’t do, an acceptable and even glamorous excuse. My friend at lunch reminded me of what the Buddhist monk Sogyal Rinpoche calls “active laziness” – the filling of our lives with unessential tasks so we feel full of responsibilities or, as he calls them, “irresponsibilites.”
https://medium.com/thelist/the-cult-of-busy-bbb124caed51
[+] [-] teddyh|11 years ago|reply
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-c...
[+] [-] Thriptic|11 years ago|reply
I feel like I should be spending this scarce free time better learning python and facilitating my career switch from bio E into data science; I don't want to eat out because that will harm my ability to cut weight for powerlifting (my main hobby); and when I am not trying to code or work on lab work, I spend many hours a day looking for gyms / in the gym. I effectively am attempting to do what I do every day (work from morning until I sleep punctuated with some time spent lifting) and am feeling miserable because I am not doing it as well as I would be able to do it at home. Last night I was checking how much it would cost for me to change my departure date so that I could go home early and use my vacation days more effectively studying.
Part of this angst is driven by the fact that while I love my family and enjoy spending time with them, I feel angry that this is how I am forced to use my special large break. I am never able to spend time with my friends. I see my best friend and close high school friends maybe once or twice a year for 2-3 days. They are scattered across the midwest and simply don't have any vacation days to spend hanging out with me. My college friends in the midwest invited me to spend New Years with them, but they admitted that they would be working the entire week and would only be able to hang out with me for about a day, so I declined. My friends from work are in the same situation as me and don't have time to go on a trip.
As this article correctly points out, I realize that I have no right to complain as these are completely self-imposed behaviors and though processes, but to be honest I'm not sure what else to do with myself or my time. I sometimes ask why I work the hours I do; is this really the best way to live my life? While I realize that the answer is probably no, I don't know what else to do, and so I keep doing it.
[+] [-] dennisgorelik|11 years ago|reply
Why not?
[+] [-] bshimmin|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lordnacho|11 years ago|reply
I quite enjoy programming, so it's not like I'm constantly watching the clock when I work. I'm sure there are loads of other jobs that people like doing that don't make them feel like they would rather be doing something else.