The Economist - Why is everyone so busy?
The predictions sounded like promises: in the future, working hours would be short and vacations long. “Our grandchildren”, reckoned John Maynard Keynes in 1930, would work around “three hours a day”—and probably only by choice. Economic progress and technological advances had already shrunk working hours considerably by his day, and there was no reason to believe this trend would not continue. Whizzy cars and ever more time-saving tools and appliances guaranteed more speed and less drudgery in all parts of life. Social psychologists began to fret: whatever would people do with all their free time?
This has not turned out to be one of the world’s more pressing problems. Everybody, everywhere seems to be busy. In the corporate world, a “perennial time-scarcity problem” afflicts executives all over the globe, and the matter has only grown more acute in recent years, say analysts at McKinsey, a consultancy firm. These feelings are especially profound among working parents. As for all those time-saving gizmos, many people grumble that these bits of wizardry chew up far too much of their days, whether they are mouldering in traffic, navigating robotic voice-messaging systems or scything away at e-mail—sometimes all at once.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ticho on Friday December 26 2014, @01:00AM
You mean in corporate world where due to mass firings... err, workforce reduction... err, workforce management, there is too much to do with too few people (or sometimes with people with too little skill)? No idea.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by frojack on Friday December 26 2014, @01:17AM
While I modded you insightful, I think that you forget the tremendous amount of busy-work that exists in corporate AND government offices. Papers to fill out, memo-chains to weigh in on, road blocks to throw up, meetings to attend. There is a mountain of stuff that could be swept away and, (to quote the Mikado) They never would be missed.
Some of this is the government mandated busyness, other is the busyness affected simply to protect one's own ass, and appear somehow indispensable.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ticho on Friday December 26 2014, @01:20AM
Yeah, I guess that is true. Although, at least in my experience, the people doing the useless busywork are among the last to get axed, because middle management does love their Excel reports.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by buswolley on Friday December 26 2014, @02:20AM
Middle management will be replaced by AI.
Middle-man businesses will be replaced by decentralized networks
subicular junctures
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 26 2014, @04:57AM
Just an anecdote and an observation.
When we were a small company, it used to be a lot of fun working there because we felt we were doing something important. Something the customer wanted done. Something he was paying cold hard cash for.
We each knew our customer, what he wanted, and our customer would come by a lot to guide and help.
Then the big company - an investor group - bought us and whored us out.
We no longer seemed to work for the customer, rather we were now all in competition with each other trying to look important, and it became dog-eat-dog. Each day seemed like cat feeding time with six cats and five bowls. Now we were executively managed by very wealthy investors looking for whoever would pay the most for access to us, while seeing at the same time who among us they could get rid of. It seemed the order of the day was psychological warfare as the highly paid leadership type worked daily on our psyche to convince us we weren't worth much and how easily they could replace us.
The result is the people who could leave, did. The rest of us did not fare well running with the technical folks gone.
The investor group paid themselves well with the proceeds of destroying the company.
The following link is a good one demonstrating how valueless our system now considers skilled labor. Take a look at what they are asking for! Then look at how much they are willing to pay for this kind of skillset...
http://www.higheredjobs.com/details.cfm?Jobcode=176000105&aID=11160&print=yes [higheredjobs.com]
They will pay $30/hour, then deduct all sorts of taxes...
The neighbor kid down the street makes three times that growing pot.
I ran some copies of that ad off and posted it on the college's job board to show the students just how futile it was to study STEM in this country.
Best get into something useful like management and investment banking - something the government will fund and protect the business model of.
A highly paid man wearing a business suit is a helluva lot more useful to society than a skilled workman and his tools.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 26 2014, @06:09AM
The problem is USD30/hour is quite high compared to elsewhere in the world.
See: http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2013/01/16/verizon-finds-developer-outsourced-his-work-to-china-so-he-could-surf-reddit-and-watch-cat-videos/ [thenextweb.com]
and only paying the Chinese consulting firm “about fifty grand annually.
he apparently received excellent performance reviews for the last several years in a row, even being hailed the best developer in the building: his code was clean, well-written, and submitted in a timely fashion.
30/hour works out to more than 55000/year even assuming 1 month of not working (holiday). And keep in mind the Chinese firm was being paid about 50k, their actual employees probably not so much (unless it's a very small firm).
FWIW I work in a 3rd world country making much less than USD30/hour and I probably spell and think better than most US workers earning my salary range. So assuming technology improves (automation, communications, AI), many more US workers are in for a lot more hurt.
p.s. I don't know why you reward your obviously mediocre CEOs so much too. Why'd you need to pay them huge sums to sack people and damage the company? If they can find ways to retain employees and turn a profit, then yes they're worth millions since that's much harder to do.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 26 2014, @12:13PM
p.s. I don't know why you reward your obviously mediocre CEOs so much too. Why'd you need to pay them huge sums to sack people and damage the company? If they can find ways to retain employees and turn a profit, then yes they're worth millions since that's much harder to do.
We do not. The shareholders of the companies do. If the shareholders believe paying tens of millions to someone who promotes a short-term profit-at-all-costs mentality is paramount to the company's success, then that's what will happen.
Most (if not all) upper-tier 'C' level executives aren't employees. They work under a personal services contract and are in it just for one reason: maximizing their personal profits (the exact same reason most shareholders invest in a company).
The idea of growing a business as a place where everyone prospers (principals, shareholders, execs, labor, local community, etc) is a nostalgic relic of days gone by. Quick profits are the name of the game. You can even see this when a large multi-billion dollar international conglomerate posts a great quarter but is slightly conservative with their next quarter projections. The stock can go down even though they just posted great profits.
Greed has become the foundation of large economies (just look at the companies that have government contracts or the ones buying politicians). So much so that now employees need to be greedy just to try to earn a living wage (which certainly hasn't kept up with inflation over the last few decades).
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Friday December 26 2014, @05:58PM
This is one thing I've been saying. We in the US could do fine on much less, if we really tried.
But, it's not so easy for an individual. We have suburban sprawl and "McMansions". You really must have a car in the US, and that of course is a huge expense. To add to the fun, various organizations try to take advantage of this need to squeeze even more money out of car owners, with things like red light cameras, annual license fees, and "safety" inspections that are really more about revenue and drumming up repair and replacement business than actual safety. For instance, Virginia uses safety as the excuse why your windshield basically cannot have any cracks at all. Our cities, especially the newer ones in the south, were designed for transportation by car, and, intentionally or not, are quite hostile to other forms of transportation. There are some places where you can do without a car, but they are few. Then, for housing, there are lots of wastefully large and inefficient McMansions, and not so much in the way of low cost housing. There's a great deal of prejudice against affordable housing. "Trailer park trash" and "the projects". There was a New Urbanism movement some years ago, an effort to build neighborhoods that were actually pedestrian friendly and had low cost housing. In typical American fashion, developers twisted this into the latest fad, worth paying millions for, and the low cost part was quickly dropped. Seaside Florida is a perfect example of this.
As for the CEOs, yes, we and they know they are massively overpaid. "Thief Executive Officer" is one name I've heard them called. They've rigged the system so that it's impossible to work within it to address this issue. Small stockholders have no say in the matter, not enough votes to do anything. Employees can do nothing either, in part because they're kept too busy trying to hang on to their own jobs, made to just feel grateful that they have a job. Customers also have enough to worry about without adding CEO pay to the list of reasons not to buy from a particular company. Regulators have been bought off or suppressed.
America isn't about what you need, it's about having more than your neighbors. Keeping up with the Joneses.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by TheRaven on Friday December 26 2014, @09:37AM
The following link is a good one demonstrating how valueless our system now considers skilled labor. Take a look at what they are asking for! Then look at how much they are willing to pay for this kind of skillset...
University lab techs are among the worst paid skilled jobs. They're paid less than postdocs, who are paid less than faculty (in most places), who are paid significantly less than they could get in industry. They generally fall into three categories:
If you look for similar jobs in industrial research labs, they usually pay a lot more.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Joe Desertrat on Friday December 26 2014, @01:58AM
Saw this interesting article on pbs.org: This is why the middle class can’t get ahead [pbs.org] that addresses this.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 26 2014, @01:29AM
Gosh, how can you ask? 'Tis almost one year now since SN sprung
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Kell on Friday December 26 2014, @01:32AM
Ultimately, it's greed (in all its forms) and the unrealistic expectation of continued growth. No company, organisation, school or government is ever satisfied with 'adequate'. This pressure will not change until humanity alters its mindset from one of endless expansion to comfortable maintenance.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by forsythe on Friday December 26 2014, @02:10AM
I have heard it said that, if you want to, you can live at a 1950s-level lifestyle on two days of work a week. But you have to actually live at a level approximate to a 1950s-level lifestyle, which means things like no internet, reliance on radio and libraries, accepting 1950s-level healthcare, and so on.
The problematic bits come with finding automobiles or other continuously-updated goods that fit into that scenario. Clearly you can't afford a vintage Thunderbird on sixteen hours of work a week. I believe the analysis I read (which I cannot find again settled that by allowing 20-30 year old used cars in reasonable condition, with the reasoning that the wear and tear (if not excessive) was matched by the advances in technology. The end result was something which could be argued to have all the conveniences that people enjoyed half a century ago, but (surprise!) most people don't want to live like that today.
So I think you're correct in that the ultimate cause of this is greed, but not about unrealistic expectations of continued growth. I'm not going to argue that we don't have unrealistic expectations of growth, just that that's not the reason predictions of massive leisure time failed to come about. We're still working hard today because there was growth, expected or not, and we (greedily) want the benefits of that growth.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by tibman on Friday December 26 2014, @03:19AM
Was going to say something similar. You can work only a few hours a day and happily live just like people in the 1930s. Have a garden, repair your car, build your own furniture, barter with the neighbors, and so on.
Consumer products were rugged back then too. Parts often failed but the device was very repairable. Manuals even had circuit diagrams and repair/maintenance instructions intended for the end-user. These days the manual goes straight into the trash. If you ever need to read the manual then you should probably just buy a new device.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by danomac on Friday December 26 2014, @04:28PM
I have my grandfather's old radio (shortwave and AM - a Nordmende 8015 [radiomuseum.org] although mine is in much better shape than that one!) that has the original manual. You are correct, it has a full circuit diagram and troubleshooting tips. Troubleshooting tips in manuals nowadays (if they even exist) are basically turn it off and on again, if it doesn't work call for support. And everyone knows how the call for support goes.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Friday December 26 2014, @04:34PM
Nice radio! I'm jealous : )
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 26 2014, @05:45PM
I like your sig.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by kaszz on Friday December 26 2014, @02:13AM
We have got an in-or-out economy where people are very busy to the breaking point or unemployed and discarded. Being "busy" in a social context also means being in demand and useful to society. So it's kind of a status marker. But in the end you just contribute to the top management coffers and debit your long term health. Anyone heard of old people complain that they didn't put enough hours in?
Most of the efficiency that has been accomplished has ended up in the coffers of corporation management and shareholders. So to benefit from these efficiencies you have to do something else than being a wage slave.
So don't be busy, be smart.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 26 2014, @07:53PM
Wait, did you just say, "Work smarter, not harder," but in more words?
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday December 30 2014, @11:08PM
More like, understand the system and make use of it instead of being used.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by dentonj on Friday December 26 2014, @02:26AM
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/10/better-time [newyorker.com]
This may have something to do with always being busy.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 26 2014, @02:39AM
It's just America, land of the free-to-be-wage-slaves. Here in America we all have to work 50-60+hr work weeks to keep our job. If we don't we are outsourced to another country or replaced with part-timers or better yet, let go and our work load gets thrown on whoever is left. Gone are the days where one income could support a family. We have so much more freedom now!
From what I've read, there are some countries which don't live in this hell. But they are socialistic drones, right? They aren't really happier, more full-filled, or get to spend more time with their family and friends living life and doing stuff....no way.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hb253 on Friday December 26 2014, @02:22PM
Multinational corporations could care less about how hard you work or how productive you are. It's all about the stock price. If the big investment houses demand that a comoany increase its stock price, they will do so by firing you and outsourcing your job to someone who gets paid much less but is also 25% as effective. At my office they have fired 80% of the local workforce and now the outsourcing firm is bringing contractors over from India.
The firings and offshore outsourcing will not stop until morale improves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by emg on Friday December 26 2014, @05:57PM
There are plenty of companies that don't care about the stock price. Usually the ones still run by their founders.
MBA CEOs-for-hire are typically the ones who only care about the stock price, because that's how they make most of their money... and they don't expect to be around when the company collapses.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 26 2014, @03:14AM
There are 85 million in school, which leave 48 million to do the work.
Of this there are 29 million employed by the federal government. This leaves 19 million to do the work.
Four million are in the Armed Forces, which leaves 15 million to do the work.
Take from the total the 14,800,000 people who work for State and City Government and that leaves 200,000 to do the work.
There are 188,000 in hospitals, so that leaves 12,000 to do the work.
Now, there are 11,998 people in Prisons. That leaves just two people to do the work.
You and me.
And you're sitting there reading this.
(Score: 0) by emg on Friday December 26 2014, @05:54AM
Bingo.
We're busy paying the taxes that pay for all the free stuff that people have voted themselves since WWII.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by cellocgw on Friday December 26 2014, @07:01PM
And this is why we need a Mod called "-5 intolerably stupid and counter-reality"
Physicist, cellist, former OTTer (1190) resume: https://app.box.com/witthoftresume
(Score: 5, Funny) by NoMaster on Friday December 26 2014, @01:50PM
One of you should take the time to update this joke - it clearly hasn't been touched in over 30 years!
(I'd do it myself, but you'd just complain about your jobs being outsourced overseas...)
Live free or fuck off and take your naïve Libertarian fantasies with you...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 26 2014, @03:16AM
People are not actually working working. They are just busy. That's the difference.
You can spend all day on a computer, typing away, answering emails, checking twitter/facebook/whatever, and end up accomplishing absolutely nothing. Busy work is not actually lack of time. It's just stuff we do out of habit.
Too busy is an excuse we use to label things that we like to do instead of doing things we should be doing. Case and point is exercise - a scenario most people are very familiar with. Why are people so sedentary? Because they are too busy - that's the excuse. In fact, they are busy. Video games. TV. Books. Homework. Eating. Computer work. Checking news. All means we are too busy. But take away the fluff that you don't need to do. Things that do not add value to your day. Like TV, Twitter, Facebook, news sites and general busy work. etc. and suddenly you end up with hours upon hours of free time. How do you then fill this time? Will you go out as part of exercise? No. You'll quickly pickup that phone and start twittering because that's the habit you developed to fill idle time. Some people are apparently so busy, that they fill the time where they should be paying attention to the road with their preferred busy work instead.
People are creatures of habit. We prefer to do short tasks that are "rewarding" in one way or another. That is how time is wasted, because thees tasks are the most meaningless ones - twitter, facebook, email, SN, TV, etc.
(Another reason for hectic lives are distractions - do one thing until it's done. Multitasking is how you accomplish chaos.)
(Score: 5, Informative) by kaszz on Friday December 26 2014, @03:39AM
Multitasking is the way to accomplish sloppy work in many tasks at the same time. Only done by people that are forced to, lack ambition or just lack the cognitive performance to figure this out.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by TheRaven on Friday December 26 2014, @09:43AM
I read a study some years ago that found that 20 hours a week was optimal for peak productivity if you're doing anything more mentally demanding than manual labour. Between about 20 and 40, your per-hour productivity goes down roughly in proportion to the amount that you work more, so there's no much difference in total output. Above 40, it goes down more. You spend more time fixing the mistakes that you made because you weren't focussed and that outweighs the extra time that you spend working.
When I was freelancing, I tried to adopt this, and used 20 hours a week as my target. Most of my customers were amazed at how productive an hour of my time was in comparison to their full-time staff. I didn't like to tell them that they could have got the same thing from everyone if they'd told them to go home and relax after working their 20 hours each week...
sudo mod me up
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 26 2014, @04:37PM
I have the same motto, mindset, and results -- but my employer bills customers by the hour.
Any time spent shaking toner, or setting up BGP redundancy, is the same cost.
As such, my spending 3 hours to make sure the outage window is 1 hour... is incredibly lazy and not rewarded as much as the person who spilled toner and charged to spend their day on-site cleaning up the mess.
I do not approve of the metric (being ISO 9000 certified, I can tell you the quality is not being measured), but the only things that management seems capable of is quantity metric analysis. If you do not have many billable hours you are a failure, as opposed to those that do the same job in half the time--those people are lazy!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by gallondr00nk on Friday December 26 2014, @12:30PM
I'll throw an idea in the mix. I've been reading a Terence McKenna book that suggested that one of the reasons might be that our society is built predominantly on the use of mild stimulants - caffeine, tobacco and sugar in particular.
As someone also quitting smoking, I can attest to the tobacco. The tough cravings for me are when I need a little jab of energy or concentration, or social situations where other people are a little jacked up as well.
I suspect that we don't really need to be so busy, but it's a deep vein in our culture going back to the Industrial revolution.
(Score: 5, Funny) by wonkey_monkey on Friday December 26 2014, @01:50PM
Why is Everyone so Busy?
What a stupid question. It's because-
Whoop, gotta go.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 1) by Stardner on Friday December 26 2014, @10:56PM
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Saturday December 27 2014, @12:07AM
Subject says it all, our economic system is deprecated. I ask you, what's the purpose of an economic system? Why, it's to distribute limited goods to satisfy unlimited wants, Economics 101. Let's see, say we have foo amount of food production. Do we have enough food for everyone? Yes, at least in the US. Why are people starving? Because you have to work to make money, to buy food! Never mind the fact that there aren't enough jobs for everyone, we'll just toss out all of the unbought food, or even poison it so the homeless can't scavenge, because that's capitalism! What are you, a dirty communist socialist scumbag?
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday December 27 2014, @11:55AM
Reading through the comments here, especially the highly modded ones, I am struck by the consensus. We all know what's going on and agree on the causes. And it's not just here. It's every blog or news feed I follow, with the exception of the couple of mass-media ones like the BBC and Der Spiegel. Everyone, right, left, or center, has arrived at this same consensus at the same time. And 90% of those in that consensus also agree that electing one party or another will do nothing to change anything.
So how is this consensus, this massive and growing social pressure, going to find an outlet? In Tokugawa Japan when things got this bad the peasants spontaneously walked off the rice paddies to gather in towns where they jumped up and down, chanting, "Ain't it great?" (Ee ja nai ka?).
Washington DC delenda est.