A work/life balance that truly divides the work and life components of a person’s experience may be okay for a job. But for a career? It simply won’t fly. There’s no disputing it—sometimes emails need to be sent at night. Sometimes calls need to be taken early in the morning. Sometimes a Monday deadline necessitates a few hours of work on a Saturday.
And what’s more, this “balance” implies a strict tradeoff between the two constituent parts, a polarizing schedule of on/off. At work, you’re all on. After work, you’re all off. But this mindset is problematic in that it puts an undue amount of pressure on us to be all on when, in reality, sometimes we can’t be. It also bases one’s day around an arbitrary time frame that measures productivity by hours spent behind a desk as opposed to the actual work product put out.
Our careers are a part of our lives. And try as we might to leave work at the office, the expectation is just as unrealistic as leaving home at home. Inevitably, sometimes things bleed into one another. If we are at work and receive a phone call from our crying child, would we not take it? If we are in a meeting and discover there is a leak in our house, would we not rush out?
This writer thinks that by not being available 24/7 we are hampering productivity while mentioning that the working day is indeed an arbitrary set of hours.
Instead of imagining a better allocation of work during work hours (or reducing the hours) it’s about spreading work to beyond work hours since we can spread “life” into work.
I’ve seen this a lot in the last 17 months of WFH. Management will pay lip service to burnout while actually slowly dropping the work-life balance discussion.
I think that with so many different fields attempting to integrate “agile” (it’s a buzzword at this point) management techniques and workflows, they’re attempting to quietly extend the working day and effectively do away with even the idea of work-life balance.
This goes back to Marx's Capital, where he talks about how Capitalists want to push for night work/24-7 operations because machines don't make money if they are idle.
Flex hours is really just a way to make you work 24/7 because that's the nature of "knowledge" work - it's large periods of downtime with sporadic big outputs. The point of answering emails at all hours of the day is eliminating the slack inherent in the process and pushing things through as quickly as possible, just in terms of white collar work vs literally making widgets in a factory.
It also bases one’s day around an arbitrary time frame that measures productivity by hours spent behind a desk as opposed to the actual work product put out.
i've had a manager openly tell me that when you're more productive you don't get more free time you get more fucking work - he didn't say this as criticism of the workplace, the dumb fuck actually thought this was reasonable ("be a good worker to your company" or whatever) and didn't understand what this incentivizes me to do, which is to procrastinate and to be the worst, most inefficient wage slave i can be
so yea of course we have to measure it by fucking hours because productivity is an useless measure as the capitalist just wants to suck every single inch of my energy regardless of how efficient i am
That's the whole crux of the contradiction of a non-democratic work place. Your boss wants the most work with the least pay and you want the inverse. How how how how can libs be so fucking stupid as to not understand this??
Because liberals are craven dogs ready to sacrifice their own children on the altar of Capital if someone will just tell them that they're a Good Boy for doing it at the end of the day.
Shitheads like this annoy me. I put up tasks on the board every Monday, and if they're done by 10:30 that day they can go home or play MMOs or mine bitcoin on the company network.
Whatever as long as I can occasionally wrangle one or two of the ones playing eve 25 hours a day to pretend to listen at upper management meetings.
I have the most productive department in this branch of the company.
It also bases one’s day around an arbitrary time frame that measures productivity by hours spent behind a desk as opposed to the actual work product put out.
OK cool then you'll let me go home after I finish all your bullshit work at 1:00
From the article:
This writer thinks that by not being available 24/7 we are hampering productivity while mentioning that the working day is indeed an arbitrary set of hours.
Instead of imagining a better allocation of work during work hours (or reducing the hours) it’s about spreading work to beyond work hours since we can spread “life” into work.
I’ve seen this a lot in the last 17 months of WFH. Management will pay lip service to burnout while actually slowly dropping the work-life balance discussion.
I think that with so many different fields attempting to integrate “agile” (it’s a buzzword at this point) management techniques and workflows, they’re attempting to quietly extend the working day and effectively do away with even the idea of work-life balance.
This goes back to Marx's Capital, where he talks about how Capitalists want to push for night work/24-7 operations because machines don't make money if they are idle.
Flex hours is really just a way to make you work 24/7 because that's the nature of "knowledge" work - it's large periods of downtime with sporadic big outputs. The point of answering emails at all hours of the day is eliminating the slack inherent in the process and pushing things through as quickly as possible, just in terms of white collar work vs literally making widgets in a factory.
i've had a manager openly tell me that when you're more productive you don't get more free time you get more fucking work - he didn't say this as criticism of the workplace, the dumb fuck actually thought this was reasonable ("be a good worker to your company" or whatever) and didn't understand what this incentivizes me to do, which is to procrastinate and to be the worst, most inefficient wage slave i can be
so yea of course we have to measure it by fucking hours because productivity is an useless measure as the capitalist just wants to suck every single inch of my energy regardless of how efficient i am
That's the whole crux of the contradiction of a non-democratic work place. Your boss wants the most work with the least pay and you want the inverse. How how how how can libs be so fucking stupid as to not understand this??
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because work itself is virtuous so overextending yourself for no reason is good
Because liberals are craven dogs ready to sacrifice their own children on the altar of Capital if someone will just tell them that they're a Good Boy for doing it at the end of the day.
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Shitheads like this annoy me. I put up tasks on the board every Monday, and if they're done by 10:30 that day they can go home or play MMOs or mine bitcoin on the company network.
Whatever as long as I can occasionally wrangle one or two of the ones playing eve 25 hours a day to pretend to listen at upper management meetings.
I have the most productive department in this branch of the company.
OK cool then you'll let me go home after I finish all your bullshit work at 1:00
Your reward for a job well done is more work