Deliberate Rest

A blog about getting more done by working less

Month: September 2015 (page 1 of 2)

Abraham Crowley, Of Solitude

September 21, 2015 / / Comments Off on Abraham Crowley, Of Solitude

It’s very old, but Crowley’s essay on solitude is still worth reading:

The First Minister of State has not so much business in public as a wise man has in private; if the one have little leisure to be alone, the other has less leisure to be in company; the one has but part of the affairs of one nation, the other all the works of God and nature under his consideration.

This is a great observation for the Selfie Society:

It is very fantastical and contradictory in human nature, that men should love themselves above all the rest of the world, and yet never endure to be with themselves. When they are in love with a mistress, all other persons are importunate and burdensome to them. “Tecum vivere amem, tecum obeam libens,” They would live and die with her alone.

And yet our dear self is so wearisome to us that we can scarcely support its conversation for an hour together.

It is a deplorable condition this, and drives a man some times to pitiful shifts in seeking how to avoid himself.

On the “Women’s Innovation Panel”

September 20, 2015 / / Comments Off on On the “Women’s Innovation Panel”

Lauren Hockenson at the Next Web pans the recent Dreamforce “Women’s Innovation Panel,” which featured Susan Wojcicki and Jessica Alba being interviewed by Gayle King. Apparently, it did not go so well:

It’s alienating, in no uncertain terms, to have to sit through a panel designed to be about women in technology and instead have it derailed by the seemingly interminable myth that when we want to talk about being a woman in tech, what we’re really saying is that we want to talk about being wives and mothers with day jobs in the technology industry.

One has a hard time imagining asking Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates about how they balance kids and work, or how they manage to look fabulous after a hard day of M&A. But, Hockenson says,

too often, these panels are grandstanding dog and pony shows, designed to trot out successful women and demean them by asking them, “How do you do it all?” as if they are crazy for pursuing their careers as their male cohorts would.

The assumption that either questions about work-life balance are the only things women CEOs are able to talk about, or that other women in tech want to talk about, is clearly screwed up. Unfortunately, this panel seems to have done an especially good job of laying that bare.

On the Pixar theory of work

September 20, 2015 / / Comments Off on On the Pixar theory of work

I have to start by confessing that I love LOVE LOVE Pixar movies. I think Cars and The Incredibles are fantastic, I love Finding Nemo (it’s amazing how little kids at an aquarium will now identify the clownfish by yelling, “Look! It’s Nemo!”), and  Up and Wall-E are marvelous. And I really love the Buzz Lightyear ride in Disneyland.

So I was really struck by “The Pixar Theory of Labor,” a new piece in The Awl by Australian writer , that argues that the movies are really all about being happy workers. Essentially, it argues that all these movies are thinly-disguised propaganda advertising neoliberal capitalism’s belief that you are your job (or your lack of a job), and that you are defined by your economic productivity.

Pixar has created a stable of films for children that is founded on narratives of self-actualization—of characters branching out, embracing freedom, hitting personal goals, and living their best lives. But this self-actualization is almost exclusively expressed in terms of labor, resulting in a filmography that consistently conflates individual flourishing with the embrace of unremitting work.

Is there any other production house operating today that is more obsessed with narratives of the workplace and employment? The basic Pixar story is that of an individual seeking to establish, refine, or preserve their function as an instrument within a system of labor. The only way Pixar is able to conceptualize a protagonist is to assign them a job (or a conspicuous lack of one) and arrange the mechanisms of plot to ensure that they fulfill that job….

Pixar’s debut film [Toy Story] organized a scenario involving sentient toys as a narrative about two men fighting for the same job. In not one but two sequels, it revisited those same characters in a narrative about how bad retirement is, and how awful it is to be made redundant. In [Monsters, Inc]..., it developed a parallel universe populated by monsters and powered by childrens’ screams to tell a story about a workplace duo striving to be the most efficient employees.

Up is ultimately a film about how unthinkable it is to retire; even elderly widowers must find a new vocation. In film after film, Pixar presents narratives chiefly concerned with characters trying to be the best at what they do, or otherwise prove their usefulness….

Cars is a film about an ambitious racecar who is forced to chill out and not be so competitive, except he really just learns that chilling out and not being so competitive is the key to being an even better competitor. This is coming from a workplace culture that, under the guise of compassion, has erased the distinction between free time and labor time, and expects their employees not to notice that they working that much harder. The company exemplifies better than Google or Apple or Facebook the complete merger of life and work: “For Pixar, to live is to work,” and that vision guides life on-campus (where there are all the usual high-end amenities), as well as what they put on-screen.

Having suffered through the likes of Marx and David Harvey and Frederic Jameson (but also having gotten something out of reading Braverman and E. P. Thompson), I get where the piece is coming from. At the same time, the argument bothers me. Not because there’s no mention of The Incredibles,* but because I think the essay confuses two different kinds of “work.”

There’s one meaning of work which is simply hours spent in a workplace, or hours devoted (whether in the office, on the road, at a client site, or at the playground as you ignore your toddler plaintively cries out for help off the slide) to an employer. It’s work as livelihood.

Confusingly, “work” has a second meaning: it’s meaningful activity that improves your self, that gives you a sense of purpose, that lets your exercise and improve mind or body. (It doesn’t do all these things at once, of course.) This is work not as livelihood, but as way of life.

The problem is this: the Pixar movies are all about the second kind of work. Buzz and Woody aren’t trying to be “efficient.” They’re not trying maximize Andy’s hedonic experience, or shorten the amount of time Andy plays with them so he can spend more time doing schoolwork. In Toy Story, Buzz and Woody are the classic unlikely buddies: they start of battling for supremacy, then realize that they need to work together to keep all the toys together and keep Andy happy. And defeat Zurg, of course.

In Toy Story 2, Woody has an opportunity to live a far more efficient life as an economically valuable vintage toy (made even more valuable by his being part of a unique collection of vintage toys). However, in a heart-warming turn of events, he ultimately rejects this exciting career in the Japanese financial services industry in favor of good old-fashioned American care-giving.

And don’t even get me started on an argument that Toy Story 3 represents an argument about efficiency. I can’t even think about the end of that movie without starting to weep.

If Cars is about winning, it’s as much about learning what’s worth winning, and what’s worth sacrificing.

Likewise, Monsters Inc. is set in a world in which the market for the precious commodity of children’s screams is destroyed– disrupted, if you will– by the hapless Mike and Sully in favor of a new economy based on laughter. Arguably this is an economic tale, but it’s hardly a moral of efficiency. More like Schumpeter via Looney Tunes.

And Buzz Lightyear doesn’t become a more productive worker in the course of Toy Story, either. The arc of his character is one in which his single-minded pursuit of the Evil Emperor Zurg is complicated by his discovery of the importance of loyalty, and the need– dare one even suggest it?– to discover a better work-life balance.

And this gets as the essay’s misstep, as I see it. The tragedy we face these days is about how this second notion of work gets appropriated and twisted in the name of the first. It’s entirely appropriate to argue that the modern workplace is badly-organized, along antiquated ways of thinking, in the service of employers who find it convenient to make every-greater demands on workers while avoiding any kind of reciprocal responsibility to employees (to the point of insisting that they actually have no employees).

This is a state of affairs well worth talking about, but it’s not one that Pixar movies advances. (Whether Pixar the studio embraces it is another matter.)

Finally, there’s Up, the story of Carl Fredricksen, a widower who– encouraged by his late wife– goes on an adventure. Wilder Penfield, a neurologist who is make a few appearances in my book, would have approved: he argued that the enforced idleness of retirement, and the idea that retired people no longer have a contribution to make to society, is a huge social problem:

The theory that the man or woman of sixty has nothing more to contribute to society, during the ten or twenty years of active life that remain, is wrong. The belief that men in later years cannot learn new skills, and educated men new professions, is false. Most men who retire could, and would, continue in constructive work if they saw that they were needed. But many of them face a paralyzing psychological misconception. They are halted by it, although there is often no true physical or mental disability. Let me describe to you the evolution of a little-recognized disease. It is a psychological malady which we might name pseudo-senility or false senility.

[The retiree] who yesterday was busy and capable of contributing something that was of value, now stays home…. He notices that his recent memory is not as good as it was when he was younger, although distant memory is good enough. He doesn’t know that this is caused by the fact that the hippocampal / gyrus in the temporal lobe of each side of the brain often suffers some interference in its circulation, while the rest of the brain is as good as ever for many years to come.

He thinks he is good for nothing, not realizing that people who are good for nothing don’t think so. He begins to disintegrate. The only thing that could be guaranteed to make him disintegrate faster would deb an increased intake of alcohol. That man is suffering from a delusion of incompetence, not from incompetence itself; a retirement neurosis of false senility.

The whole trouble was that what he needed when he was given the gold watch was a new job, and difficult job— not a rest. Beyond the normal rhythm of work and sleep, rest was not what he needed. Rest, with nothing else, results in rust. It corrodes the mechanisms of the brain.

The time of retirement should be reorganized and renamed. It is the time for embarking on a new career, the last career perhaps, but not necessarily a less enjoyable one; not, perhaps, a less useful one to society. Disease and disability may overtake men at any age, of course, and force them to withdraw from work. But the capacity of the human brain for certain purposes often increases right through the years that are marked for standard retirement. And who can say? Those purposes may be what the world today needs most.

Penfield, incidentally, wrote that around 1960.

But I’ll give the last word to my daughter, with whom I saw Cars in 2006, when she was seven.

As we were leaving  the theatre, we bumped into one of her classmates, who was on her way to see it.

How was the movie? the friend asked.

My daughter replied, “Mainly, it was about friendship.”

Very true.

“On second thought, it actually really bothers me that that there’s no mention of The Incredibles, because it’s the perfect example of everything the piece is arguing. Mr. Incredible has to discover that his family is his real adventure; Elastagirl has to admit (at the urging of Edna Mode) that she really did enjoy being a superhero; Violet and Dash become well-adjusted kids when they’re allowed judicious use of their superpowers. None of this is about work as efficiency; it’s all about work as identity.

“This looks like a ‘women’s problem,’ but it’s not. It’s a work problem.”

September 19, 2015 / / Comments Off on “This looks like a ‘women’s problem,’ but it’s not. It’s a work problem.”

Anne-Marie Slaughter has an essay in the New York Times about today’s “Toxic Work World.” Following on yesterday’s post on Swedish experiments in a six-hour day, it’s a depressing but all-too-timely read:

This looks like a “women’s problem,” but it’s not. It’s a work problem — the problem of an antiquated and broken system. When law firms and corporations lose talented women who reject lock-step career paths and question promotion systems that elevate quantity of hours worked over quality of the work itself, the problem is not with the women. When an abundance of overly rigid workplaces causes 42 million American citizens to live day to day in fear that just one single setback will prevent them from being able to care for their children, it’s not their problem, but ours.

The problem is with the workplace, or more precisely, with a workplace designed for the “Mad Men” era, for “Leave It to Beaver” families in which one partner does all the work of earning an income and the other partner does all the work of turning that income into care — the care that is indispensable for our children, our sick and disabled, our elderly. Our families and our responsibilities don’t look like that anymore, but our workplaces do not fit the realities of our lives.

I like Slaughter’s argument against the structure and culture of the workplace, and the implicit argument– which I am trying to make more explicit in my own book– that we operate labor markets and working days under several assumptions that are wrong (these are mine, not hers):

  • More time = more productivity. This is true for short periods, but quickly becomes ceases to be a useful strategy, particular in two kinds of workplaces: those in which productivity is defined mainly by the intelligent exertion of physical effort, and those in which productivity is a matter of creativity and problem-solving.
  • Uncertainty makes people better workers. Working in what used to be a union shop, working zero-hour contracts, or not having a promised number of hours per week will make you work harder on the off chance that whatever sliver of security is available will get to you to work harder. If you’re in tech, you work harder because your job could disappear to Bangalore or Romania at any moment. Don’t forget to be passionate and love what you do!
  • The way to beat the competition is to imitate and exceed them. No matter what you’re interested in or what you’re working on, there are 15 guys in a dorm room in Tsinghua living on instant noodles and benzedrine who are working on it twice has hard. The only way you’re going to stay competitive is to work like 16 guys living on freeze-dried krill and two sips of rainwater (three sips would be inefficient).
  • This is inevitable. It’s not that I want to work people to death, or want to turn people from full-time salaried workers into temps and adjuncts; it’s just that this is the nature of the world. As a business leader, I am a farsighted, action-oriented visionary who defines the reality that others live in. I am a figure out of a novel written by the love child of Ayn Rand and Philip Dick. Except when it comes to this. On this, I’m impotent.

It’s also interesting to see the comments to Slaughter’s piece– I’d say they’re 80/20 “this is exactly right” and “this is the world, stop complaining.”

Experiments in six-hour days

September 17, 2015 / / 1 Comment

The Guardian reports on experiments in Sweden to shorten the workday, in an effort to get higher-quality work and reduce turnover. In the Svartedalens care home, a Gothenburg nursing home, for example, nurses are experimenting with six-hour rather than eight-hour shifts.

Ann-Charlotte Dahlbom Larsson, head of elderly care at the home, says staff wellbeing is better and the standard of care is even higher.

“Since the 1990s we have had more work and fewer people – we can’t do it any more,” she says. “There is a lot of illness and depression among staff in the care sector because of exhaustion – the lack of balance between work and life is not good for anyone.”

Pettersson, one of 82 nurses at Svartedalens, agrees. Caring for elderly people, some of whom have dementia, demands constant vigilance and creativity, and with a six-hour day she can sustain a higher standard of care. “You cannot allow elderly people to become stressed, otherwise it turns into a bad day for everyone,” she says.

Toyota service centres in the city have been working six-hour days for more than a decade. Managing director Martin Banck recalls that

Customers were unhappy with long waiting times, while staff were stressed and making mistakes… [Under the six-hour day,]  “Staff feel better, there is low turnover and it is easier to recruit new people,” Banck says. “They have a shorter travel time to work, there is more efficient use of the machines and lower capital costs – everyone is happy.”

Also, “Profits have risen by 25%, he adds.”

These kinds of schemes tend to be expensive, but proponents say that the improvement in quality of service is worth the cost– which is one reason you see these experiments in service industries and jobs that require high levels of focus, a ability to improvise, patience and resilience, and other psychological resources that can be eroded by long working hours.

It’s not just service companies that are finding success with shorter hours: several software companies have, too. The Swedish SEO company Brath has also implemented a six-hour day, and it’s interesting to read their defense of it. They make several points:

  • “Hiring and keeping talent is if not the most so at least one of the most critical tasks for any growing company.”
  • The policy shows that “we actually care about our employees, we care enough to prioritize their time with the family, cooking or doing something else they love doing.”
  • “Another big benefit is that our employees produce more than similar companies do. We obviously measure this. It hasn’t happened by itself, we’ve been working on this from the start. Today we get more done in 6 hours than comparable companies do in 8. We believe it comes with the high level of creativity demanded in this line of work. We believe nobody can be creative and productive in 8 hours straight.”
  • “A third huge reason for shorter days is that we all feel more rested. Obviously we too have to stay late at times, obviously we too are stressed at times but it’s from a better base line.”

Another software company, Filimundus, has adopted a six-hour day. CEO Linus Feldt says:

“Today I believe that time is more valuable than money…. And it is a strong motivational factor to be able to go home two hours earlier. You still want to do a good job and be productive during six hours, so I think you focus more and are more efficient.”

This runs directly counter to several trends in employment and workplace management, as people like Peter Fleming would point out. We assume that keeping people in the office longer automatically translates into higher levels of production, and that it’s better to have a smaller number of overworked employees than a larger number who work more reasonable hours. These places show that, properly managed, a transition to shorter hours can be better for everyone.

“There is no kind of idleness, by which we are so easily seduced, as… the appearance of business”

September 11, 2015 / / Comments Off on “There is no kind of idleness, by which we are so easily seduced, as… the appearance of business”

That was Samuel Johnson writing in The Idler two centuries ago (and quoted in a more recent essay by Steven Poole). Some things seem constant.

There is no kind of idleness, by which we are so easily seduced, as that which dignifies itself by the appearance of business and by making the loiterer imagine that he has something to do which must not be neglected, keeps him in perpetual agitation and hurries him rapidly from place to place…. To do nothing every man is ashamed and to do much almost every man is unwilling or afraid. Innumerable expedients have therefore been invented to produce motion without labour, and employment without solicitude.

Linus Pauling: “We need to study the general problem of the genesis of ideas”

September 11, 2015 / / Comments Off on Linus Pauling: “We need to study the general problem of the genesis of ideas”

So said Linus Pauling in a 1961 talk on “The Genesis of Ideas,” which I just discovered via Robert Scott Root-Bernstein. “As the world becomes more and more complex and the problems that remain to be solved become more and more difficult,” he concludes, “it becomes necessary that we increase our efforts to solve them. A thorough study of the general problem of the genesis of ideas and the nature of creativity may well be of great value to the world.”

Pauling gave a very interesting account of one method he learned to use:

I had developed the habit of thinking about certain scientific problems as I lay in bed, waiting to go to sleep. Sometimes I would think about the same problem for several nights in succession, while I was reading or making calculations about the problem during the day. Then I would stop working on the problem, and stop thinking about it in the period before going to sleep. Some weeks or months might go by, and then, suddenly, an idea that represented a solution to the problem or the germ of a solution to the problem would burst into my consciousness.

I think that after this training the subconscious examined many ideas that entered my mind, and rejected those that had no interest in relation to the problem. Finally, after tens or hundreds of thousands of ideas had been examined in this way and rejected, another idea came along that was recognized by the unconscious as having some significant relation to the problem, and this idea and its relation to the problem were brought into the consciousness.

So Salvador Dali wasn’t the only one to try to turn dreaming into a skill.

I remember quite clearly when I was writing my dissertation, entering a phase where I stopped dreaming about having my computer blow up or the pages blow away, and started dreaming about the people I was writing about. Granted, they would generally chastise me for getting something wrong, but still, it felt like an advance of some kind, like my mind was going deeper into my work.

I often jot down the two or three things I’m going to write about the next morning

Now, at night when I set up my morning’s work, I will often jot down the two or three things I’m going to write about when I get up, partly on the theory that my mind might work on them while I sleep. I don’t know if it’s the case, but I certainly have found that I get a lot of writing done in the mornings.

Oregon State, incidentally, has scanned the talk and put it online. It’s cool to see the original document.

It’s hard work looking like you’re even busier

September 11, 2015 / / Comments Off on It’s hard work looking like you’re even busier

Marketing firm Havas has released a survey, “The Modern Nomad: Catch Me If You Can,” which looks at prosumers and their perception and management of time. A couple of the highlights:

1. The productivity paradox: Complaining about how busy we are has become a standard part of conversations in much of the world, and yet our study shows that fewer than 1 in 3 global respondents always have too much to do, and only 1 in 5 say they’re constantly rushing around. Rather than being overwhelmed, a good portion of the sample (42 percent) admitted that they sometimes pretend to be busier than they actually are—and 6 in 10 believe other people are faking their busyness too. The issue: Free time is now equated with being nonessential. Unless you’re in demand 24/7, you’re not all that important.

2. Times a-wastin’: Social media has been tied to FOMO (fear of missing out), but it also has exacerbated the sense that we’re never accomplishing enough. Nearly 6 in 10 global respondents (including two-thirds of millennials) believe their lives would be better if they were more productive. And around half are laying the blame on themselves, saying they procrastinate or simply waste too much time. It’s hard to feel you’re living a life of meaning when you’ve wasted another morning taking quizzes on BuzzFeed.

3. Can’t sit still: For quite a lot of us, the issue isn’t simply that we feel we should be doing more, but that we no longer know how to be still. Many struggle to relax fully, and around 1 in 5 admit to having trouble focusing on one thing at a time. It’s a serious issue, given that half the sample believe the fast pace of life is actually harming their health.

Amy Wang at Quartz explains:

In a survey of 10,000 adults across various generations in 28 countries, global marketing firm Havas Worldwide partnered with market research company Market Probe International to ask people how technology and connectivity have affected their lives. Perhaps the most illuminative finding: People feel compelled to lie about how busy they are.

When the survey asked to what extent respondents agreed with the statement, “I sometimes pretend to be busier than I am,” roughly half of young people (aged 18 to 34) said they overstate their own busyness to others. Older generations were also prone to exaggerating their obligations, though less so. And overall, 57% to 65% of people across multiple generations said they thought other people were pretending to be busier than they actually are.

The report’s authors suggested that our tendency to lie about how busy we are comes from our belief that being busy is equivalent to “leading a life of significance” and not wanting to be “relegated to the sidelines.” This belief, they found, was paramount in countries that applaud hectic lifestyles, such as Germany and the US, whereas countries known to value leisure above work, like Italy and Belgium, are less convinced that keeping busy is a good thing.

I’m afraid that none of it’s surprising, but all of it’s kind of depressing.

A roundup of end-of-vacation posts

September 7, 2015 / / Comments Off on A roundup of end-of-vacation posts

Just in time for the end of Labor Day are several articles about vacations, why we don’t take them (or admit to taking them), and what happens when we don’t.

First, BBC News writes about America’s national vacation problem, and why Americans leave so many vacation days unused. The reasons are predictable: people are scared to be seen as less than 110% committed to their jobs, bosses send mixed messages about vacations, there’s a certain amount of intrinsic motivation to do a good job or not leave your colleagues in the lurch, and having a life outside work is seen as a distraction.

Second, there’s the phenomenon of the “stealth vacation.” In the Harvard Business Review, CEO Karen Firestone writes about the challenge of having people not want to admit they’re going on vacation until the last minute, and the trouble it causes.

Finally, there’s this Quartz piece on “what 365 days without a vacation does to your health.” The TL;DR is, taking vacations is good for you.

Is the epidemic of sleep deprivation a myth?

September 3, 2015 / / Comments Off on Is the epidemic of sleep deprivation a myth?

At Quartz, Akshat Rathi challenges the claim that modern times has caused a sleep epidemic.

According to a survey conducted by the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) between 2005 and 2007, more than 30% of adults slept less than six hours a night. The National Sleep Foundation’s own surveys reveal something similar: more than 20% of people in 2009 were sleeping less than six hours compared to only 12% in 1998. The CDC declared that insufficient sleep was becoming a public health epidemic….

However, a 2010 analysis, published in the journal Sleep, which used data from a different set of surveys conducted between 1975 and 2006, found very different results. It showed that the proportion of short-sleepers (those sleeping less than six hours) hadn’t changed much in the last 30 years. And, more surprising still, that proportion was only 9.3% in 2006.

Likewise, the studies from other countries suggest that there’s less of a sleep epidemic problem than we thought.

A 2012 systematic review of 12 studies from 15 countries, published in Sleep Medicine Reviews, showed that, between 1960 and 2000, total sleep times across these countries hasn’t changed much at all. They increased by less than an hour per night in seven countries (Bulgaria, Poland, Canada, France, Britain, Korea and the Netherlands), decreased by less than 30 minutes per night in (Japan, Russia, Finland, Germany, Belgium and Austria), and showed no change in Sweden and the US.

But even if the data about chronic sleep deprivation are harder to make sense of than we think, the science around the consequences of sleep deprivation on cognition, performance, decision-making, and so on are still very compelling. It may not be the case that surgery and ER residents are working more hours than their predecessors fifty years ago (though I would argue that they’re less likely to be able to come home and sack out on the couch and assume that their wives will take care of everything), but we have a clearer understanding of how the odds of making a critical mistake compare at hour 6 of a 48-hour shift, and hour 46.

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