More, Faster … Better?
We May Be More Productive, but Are We Happier?
A few years ago my sister did the unexpected. She joined a Big Tech company.
A 20-plus-year career academic, my sister was accustomed to preparing lectures, grading papers, and working on independent publishing projects. Now she was embedded on a team deliberately composed of “non-tech” expats from military, criminal justice, and other academic backgrounds to work on a stealth project that leveraged her deep researching skills.
I was both pleasantly surprised and worried about my sister’s new job: surprised because I knew how hard it was for many with tech experience to land roles in this company and here she was, a history professor, hired to work on a high-profile, stealth project, for the very skills she’d developed over years; and worried because of the severe culture shock I anticipated she’d experience.
You see, my sister had never worked a “Nine-to-Five” with KPIs, a set work schedule, or a company-issued laptop.
She’d written several books, delivered thousands of lectures and was used to working long hours with stringent deadlines, but she often worked independently, on her own schedule. Now she had back-to-back meetings, internal clients, a fob.
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A few weeks into the role she reported what she liked perhaps the most about the role: Her colleagues. She was in the beginning stages of a long, disorienting, sometimes isolating divorce and her co-workers, some literally half her age, took her under their wing, inviting her to lunch every day or out for drinks after work. She joined them when she could but most nights she needed to get home to make dinner for her kids.
“I feel like I’m back in college!” she laughed, and not just because her colleagues reminded her of her former students. Everything, from setting up her laptop to taking the campus bus required new learning – an entirely new way of working.
I knew how different this role was from anything she had ever done before. I was proud of her.
But I could also sense the beginning of the end of her short tenure at this company.
One night during our then-nightly check-in she told me she had to get to the office at some ungodly hour the next day to finish some work.
I asked her why she didn't just finish her work that night so she could be done with it. And she responded: “Because my computer is at the office.”
I was confused. “Don’t you have a laptop?”
“Yeah.”
“Why didn’t you bring it home?”
“Why would I do that? I’m done working for the day.”
I thought back to the last time I’d kept my laptop at the office: It was 2001 and it was what would pass for a desktop today. That was, perhaps, the last year I’d had work boundaries.
I implored her to please, PLEASE bring her laptop home with her next time, not just to prevent her from having to go to the office early to finish her work on time, but to keep her job.
“Yeah, I don’t think so,” she said. “I want to keep my work and home life separate.”
In contrast I was at the time holding a leadership role at another Big Tech, clocking a standard twelve every work day, not counting weekends and travel, working from my phone and laptop at home, from airports, my daughter’s weekend gymnastics practices. Part of me admired my sister for holding so steadfastly to boundaries, and part of me wanted to shake into her the reality of knowledge work in the 21st century.
We don’t clock in and out, Sweetie. We stay on the clock, or at the very least we appear always-on, as table stakes. To do anything less means you aren’t serious.
Not surprisingly my sister ended up leaving her job, by her choice; she didn’t feel there was a fit culturally. I wish I could end this story with, “and from then on, she worked on her own projects, on her own schedule, and worked happily ever after,” but that wouldn’t be true.
My sister did take other roles that played to her strengths of researching, presenting, writing, and educating people, but that also carried updated expectations of productivity.
She had to learn to have a device on her at all times, should her boss need to reach her while at Pilates. Harder still, she had to remember to check it.
During COVID lockdowns she mastered presenting webinars from her home office by doing so hundreds of times to audiences domestic and abroad, and even troubleshooting when she lost connectivity at 4 a.m. in the morning.
She learned the practice of “Slack hygiene” -- keeping notifications current, sending short missives from her phone, integrating with other applications, checking it regularly and responding to others, even while engaged in a meeting.
She’s asked me for advice on managing the dichotomy between critical thinking and the productivity skills that are meant to enable it. I’ve been working this way far longer than she has; I must have some hacks, right?
Sadly I don’t.
I still keep too many browser tabs open, afraid if I close them I’ll never get back to that article, until eventually I have to reboot my computer.
I sometimes forget if I’m in Zoom, Teams, or Google Meet. I need a minute to figure out what system to use, for which situation, depending on who I’m talking with. And I need two minutes to remember how to share my screen in that respective application.
For non-work-related channels Slack has replaced email as a parking spot for the not-too-urgent. I feel slightly threatened by seemingly innocuous statements like, “did you see my Slack?” because if you are asking I likely didn’t, and it suggests I was supposed to be monitoring it rather than focusing on what I’m actually doing.
I accept I will likely never actively read, sort, or deal with the 24,901 unread emails in my Gmail account.
I don’t see all of my texts, or clear them out. I stopped trying to unsubscribe from the political ones.
I don’t start projects using AI. I start with what I want to say and then validate it on Chat GPT.
I still take hand-written notes, in cursive, even when meetings are backed up with an AI notetaker.
Some would say I am unproductive, resisting the inevitable future of work. I would say I’m still finding that place where I net out positive on work I want to do over work done solely to appear productive. Isn’t that the true end game?
08/22/24 Conversationality: Meet Optionality member Paolo Gaudiano, Chief Scientist of Aleria and author of upcoming book, "Measuring Inclusion." He has a chat with Jory and Elisa on the metrics that really matter for organizations committed to DEIB (Hint: It’s less about the D).
Guess what, I had my Optionality tab open for all these months in the hope that I’ll get to all the conversations. I did not want to close the tab with the same fear that I’ll forget.
It worked, I finally read my first!
Having said that I always wonder how my sister is surviving without tech and gadgets enabling her life and then I also marvel at the fact that she is surviving without tech and gadgets.
First off, I love the melting clocks, which I presume were generated by DALL-E.
I cracked up reading this post, as I think I do exactly all the same things you mentioned except for one: my handwriting is so bad, that the few times that I find myself forced to write things by hand, I end up not being able to read them later :-)