You Work Less Now 💻

Why does it feel like work is consuming our lives? Over the last 150 years, the number of hours we work on average has gone down by approximately 50%. In the past, people used to work an average of 60-70 hours per week for 50 weeks a year. By the 1920s, we would work 8 hours a day, 6 days a week. Then by the 1940s, we were working 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Since then, we’ve started to take more vacations, as back in the 1870s, we would take 4 days off and now we’re taking around 20 days off (as usual, our European neighbors take closer to 40 days off). There are companies and countries that are now experimenting with a 4 day work week. Statistically, we’re working less than ever, yet it doesn’t feel like it. Why is that? With the rise of modern technologies like Gmail and Slack, along with the sudden increase in remote work and “always on” connectivity, our work is more draining than ever before. So what can we do about it?

Linkedin’s Biggest Non-fluencer

Technology has undoubtably changed our lives, we’re traveling to new places, building new companies and coming up with crazier ways to procrastinate. With the modern advances of artificial intelligence to the growth of the internet and smartphones, the world is unrecognizable from a generation ago, much less hundreds of years ago. One notable author, Cal Newport, has written extensively on Linkedin’s favorite subject, how to work better, despite not having a Linkedin account. He argues that technology has had a significant decrease on our lives and well-being. Cal Newport isn’t against technology, (he’s actually a computer science professor at Georgetown), but he’s against how technology has shaped how we work. Technology like Gmail and Slack have ballooned into multi-billion dollar companies with tens of millions of users. As these technologies have become commonplace within our workplaces they have come with a hidden cost.

Our modern technology has made it possible to reach anyone in the world, at any time at zero cost. The lower barrier to entry has forced an “always on” connectivity. The expectation of immediate responses to Slack messages, emails, or text messages within seconds often leads to frustration and distress. The hidden cost of the “always on” connectivity has meant that there is a lack of Deep Work, which has leads to poorer productivity and overall well-being. According to Cal Newport, Deep Work is defined as

If you haven’t already, I would highly encourage you to read Newport’s Deep Work. Distraction free work is hard to come by these days. The cost of these distractions makes your time and attention come cheap. Newport also touches on the cost of context switching, which is the mental cost that comes from switching tasks, especially frequently. It can take around 20 minutes for our brains to focus on a task and enter a flow state. If we’re constantly being pinged about a different task we need to finish, we’ll never be able to focus.

Standing Desks & Factory Life

One of the unforeseen consequences of remote work was the sudden influx of office furniture being sold off to individuals to improve their home offices. Many companies now offer a "Work from home stipend” to make a home office more productive and comfortable. As you can see, everyone has a home office and items such as standing desks have hit an all time high in the last few years. But what does this have to do with working more?

According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM),

The lines between work and life have blurred. With the “always on” connectivity, you can now get as much work done at 9 pm as you could at 9 am. Suddenly everything is urgent and important and needs to be worked on immediately. This represents a significant shift from traditional work practices.

Before most of us started working remotely, going to the workplace gave everyone clear start and end times. When you worked in a Ford factory, you couldn’t take work home with you, attaching the doors onto the frame (as you can tell, I’m very handy with cars). You would clock in, do your work, and then clock out. Nowadays, it seems more common to meet people who have to go home and do some more work before they head to bed. Checking your work email on the weekend is the default when you have a moment to wait for the bathroom. These are all new phenomenons that we have to take conscious and deliberate action against.

So What Now?

To me, the most interesting man in the world was my old sociology professor, Michael Webber. Known as “a walking Welsh teddy bear!“ (Rate my professor), he interjected his lectures with rants on modern technology and the “always on” phenomenon. His mother’s criteria for something being important were 1) Is a child in danger? or 2) Is someone dying? If neither of those criteria were met, the supposed emergency was something that could wait. Unless you work as an EMT or fire-fighter (which if you do, thank you for your service), your work doesn’t qualify. That isn’t to say you should blow off your employer while working, but outside of set work hours, leave work at work. You can remove your work email from your phone and turn off your slack notifications after hours. You’ll find that you have much more time than you thought.

-Derek