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Just dropping in here to say that in 2020 or 2021, BBC Worklife -- the source of the article at the top -- was hiring a new editor. I applied, miraculously got through the AI screener, and someone in the hiring process asked me to submit, as a kind of edit test I guess, a bunch of coverage ideas and an overall editorial and content strategy, among other things. Or, in other words, intellectual labor for which I wasn't compensated for. But what was most egregious is that, after all that work and time I spent in trying to get hired for a job I only kind of wanted (I wanted to get out of my current gig more), BBC Worklife ghosted me. They acknowledged receiving my submission but never 1) reading it, 2) commenting on it, or 3) considering it when deciding if I'd fit in the role. Spoiler alert: I didn't fit in the role. And I had to learn that it was filled by searching Twitter to see if a new person was carrying that title.

That's all a long way to say that BBC Worklife sucks. Hard. And it's not surprising that it would run such pearl-clutchy managerial-class fear mongering as part of its clickbait mill.

Thank you for reading these so people like me don't have to!

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It’s a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.

The effective worker who gets a lot done and produces huge value tends to be shamed for “not having enough commitment” if she doesn’t stay late, come in early, etc. despite being highly profitable.

And the hard worker who slaves away his nights and weekends and wants higher pay or better work conditions as a result gets told to “work smarter and maybe you wouldn’t be working all the time.”

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For me, the absolute best source of motivation and focus is this, "When I finish this, I can get up."

The same task that takes an hour if I know I can get up afterwards might take all day -- a distracted day filled with depressing breaks for stuff like social media -- if I know that I can't get up when I finish.

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Today's equivalent of checking to see if someone is working in the office is checking to see what status color their Microsoft Teams icon is showing...

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I am so glad I graduated from high school in 1967, and became a hippie. When I needed money, I called my temp agency, put on a bargain basement outfit, and spent a couple of weeks in corporate America. Most of the people I knew then had a natural understanding of the labor theory of value. We weren’t about to create any more profit than we had to.

Maybe what’s happening now is a rebirth of the hippie mindset. Those who can aren’t working at all (how are they surviving?), and those who can’t just quit are refusing to do more than the minimum.

But the deeper problem, which doesn’t go away, is that Marx was right: human beings thrive on “productive activity” and capitalism robs them of the time and motivation to do that. I suspect that computer games and Facebook are a poor substitute for working at something you really love, with people who love it as much as you do, and no bosses of any kind. When I’ve been lucky enough to do work like that, I had to be reminded to take a break.

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The pressure to make your career your identity is a deep sickness peddled by hustlers who adopted that position, and pushed by their admirers who envy their apparent success. The logical conclusion is if you aren’t hustling, you are failing. Time spent slacking off is time wasted.

The boss trying to extract every drop of labour is as old as the industrial revolution. This is a more insidious version of the Protestant work ethic, setting a benchmark of devotion where any failure to meet it is a moral failing. You didn’t need this when you could get away with paying so little that people needed to work 14 hours a day to survive, although the “gig economy” is working hard to bring us back to those days.

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Jul 5, 2022·edited Jul 5, 2022

Great points.

For a long time, I had a job where I could finish my work and then enjoy some free time -- I was in the office and available to do whatever came up, so I was obviously "at work" and deserved to be paid even if there wasn't anything to do at a given moment.

Then the company owner died and his widow came roaring in, accusing all of us employees of stealing from the company if we had "nothing to do," and threatening not to pay us hourly workers for a full week if we couldn't show a full 8 hours of work on our time sheets, every single day of every single week.

Since then, it's been miserable. I, for one, spend more mental energy worrying about what bullshit "work" I'm going to do/put on my time sheet should I finish my "real" work than I put into doing that work.

And there's an awful game going on. Along with everyone else, I immediately stopped being fast and efficient and instead started dragging my work out to take up as much time as possible since there was no longer any psychic reward to getting anything completed, and I needed to fill up my day. Since some of that work was billable, this mostly punished our clients who, through no fault of their own, were suddenly paying for 5 hours of time on a report that should have taken 2 to 3 hours. Then the new owner seemed to realize that we were all extending our work to fit the 8-hour day, and started putting time limits on how long you can spend on any type of project. Now you can't take the length of time it might actually take to do a job right -- you have to fit it into an allotted time, whether that's long enough or not.

This battle between extending some work to fit more time, and then being disallowed to take the proper amount of time on other work, is completely artificial and ridiculous. The idea that owners shouldn't have to pay workers to be available, but only to be performing "work" -- no matter whether it's the work they were hired to do or not -- is absurd. It's crazy stressful. My work for this company has gone greatly downhill, as I'm no longer focusing on what I'm doing, but only worrying about whether I'm keeping the owner happy with the amount of work I'm doing each day and whether it's the magical "right" amount to get me paid for a full 40-hour week.

Turnover at my company has been terrible since this regime started -- we've lost 60% of the pre-widow employees over the past 2 years, and succeeded in hiring replacements for only some of them, with people who lack the knowledge and experience of those who left. And I will be next out the door. I feel slightly guilty about that since I'm doing two people's jobs right now on account of the last person who left, and someone else will have to pick up both those jobs when I leave, but I hate this situation too much to stay.

Who on earth thinks this forced labor attitude toward work creates "productivity" by any genuine, meaningful measure? I needed time to loaf, to recharge my brain and to allow me to be enthusiastic when work picked up again after a slow period (my company is in a seasonal industry, which makes the 8 hours every day work requirement even more difficult to fulfill). Now my job is just drudgery, even when I'm doing tasks I used to enjoy.

Ed, this isn't "protestant work ethic" bullshit. It's "plantation work ethic" bullshit, poisoning too many business owners and managers with a leftover cultural memory of a time when slaves toiled under the eyes of overseers, couldn't pause or rest, and were allowed sick time, leave, or holidays only at the beneficence of their owners. Sadly, this attitude remains socially acceptable because so much labor law sucks and isn't on the side of workers.

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everything about our work world is set up to make the kids who ask for extra credit advance at the expense of everyone else

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I know Elon Musk isn't working eight hours a day, because in the Behind the Bastards podcast episodes about him they quoted a bunch of employees talking about how he would distract them from their work and make them watch random internet videos with him.

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You touched on something I've written about/looked at a lot--how "fake news" gets spread even when the "fake news" is not political but some poorly done business-related "study" that has a click-baity conclusion ("Employers losing billions!") and thus gets picked up by multiple legitimate publications who see the articles as harmless filler and don't check into the fact that the survey is based on 19 people found via Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

Those articles then get picked up by other legitimate publications and then others still, none of which cite the original source, but rather, link back to an article at another legitimate site (e.g., the BBC will link back to Vice, which links to Wired, etc.) to the point where you'd need a forensic examination to uncover the origin of this piece of information which has become widely accepted as fact...despite that fact that it stems from a poorly designed survey of 19 people done 10 years earlier.

Long-winded way of saying your Websense study is far from unique.

Also, in terms of focus, Dr. Andrew Huberman, in his popular podcast, says that most people can only focus for 90 minutes and has research to back that up.: https://podclips.com/m/FOfXst

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Human Nature in the Digital Age is what this article is all about. I am in Real Estate and I tell people/clients/prospects this all the time. "If Real Estate is not the first thing a REALTOR does in the morning and the last thing that person does at night, then he or she or they is not serious about this business". Notice how I say nothing about the rest of the day--- the cyber-loafing portion?

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