It’s the second day of the year and I’m about to start
work tomorrow. Unfortunately, it looks like Singapore will, in the new year,
aim towards getting people back to the office and the concept of nine-to-six
will be back. I describe this is an “unfortunate” event because everyone else
will be celebrating the “return to normal,” when the fact of the matter was that
normal was actually unnatural and instead of using the pandemic to create a new
and more sustainable normal, we’ve merely been trying to ride things out so
that things could get back to normal.
I make no secret of the fact that I detest the office
as an institution. The very thought of sitting in an office, looking at files
and attending meetings fills me with a powerful sense of self-loathing. If we are truly honest with ourselves, we will
realise that the office is a place for the worst forms of social congregation masquerading
as a place of work. If I look at my own experiences, I have achieved nothing
note worthy in an office. Everything that I take pride in was done when I was a
freelancer. If I am honest, the only thing I achieved in seven years of an
office job in the financial district was not ramming my forehead into the noses
of the species that thrives in an office.
One of the things I detest most about the office and
all things associated with the office is the fact that they are part of a cult –
namely the “Cult of Busy.” This is an insane cult which worships “being busy”
as if it were the be all and end all of existence.
Now, I have nothing against being busy. If you look at
certain things like the activity on a ship or an aircraft, you’ll realise that
being busy is a good thing. It genuinely requires a lot of activity to keep a
ship moving at sea or a plane moving in the air. In the restaurant, being busy
was a good thing because it meant that you had plenty of customers, which meant
that there was revenue coming in for the day and that in turn means that the
boss has the money to pay your salary.
What I’m against, is when “busy” becomes a cult. This
particularly rife in the professional fields like law and accountancy where staff
are expected to work 12 hours a day and 365 days a year. Now, to an extent,
this is understandable. If you are a lawyer going for trial, you do need to
prepare vast amounts of documents and quite often, it’s the juniors who have to
pull “all-nighters” because its part of the learning curve.
However, you know something is wrong when people whom
you would assume are capable of intelligence start bragging about the hours
they put in and how they don’t sleep and don’t have time for other facets of life.
If you walk around any given office, you’ll find that the one who gets praised
is the guy who comes in “early” and leaves “late.”
I admit that I was part of this cult. My first job for
a small agency worked me 24/7. Ex-wife hated it and threw regular tantrums. I
loved the job. Saw a great future and threw myself into the 24/7 cult believing
that I would grow as a professional and a person. To be fair to my ex, she actually
had a point. After five months on the job, I quit because I reached a stage
where I could no longer string a sentence when writing copy and I lost the
ability to service clients properly.
However, I was proud of my ability to “work the hours,”
that I actually mentioned it in the interview when I was offered a two-week
internship at RappCollins DDB. The reply from the boss was “That’s great
because sometimes we can get insanely busy but I’m more interested in the work
in the hours rather than the hours you work.”
Those words of wisdom have stuck with me. When I left
the agency world to be a freelancer at the end of 2005, I suddenly appreciated
that many of my “busy” hours were actually wasted. As a freelancer I tried to
move away from billing for my time and charging for the results that I achieved
because I had no name and therefore my time had no value, so I had to show the
world that I could get results. For the record, I still believe that you should
charge for results rather than time spent.
When I entered the semi-legal profession of
liquidations, I started becoming “busy” again. It was important to be busy
because revenue was dependent on being busy. Time-sheets were a mantra of being
“professional.” I remember a lawyer from a big firm telling me, “Spending time
is not a problem for us – time is what we sell you.”
That truism is one of the biggest issues with “professionalism.”
Instead of encouraging “professionals” to solve problems, it encourages the “professional”
to blow problems out of proportion because, as this lawyer pointed out – they are
selling you their time rather than their expertise. “Professionals” are not experts
who can achieve better outcomes than a client but very busy people.” Since they’re
paid to be busy, they become good at being busy.
What nobody questions whether that “busy” is actually
going towards achieving the outcome that the client needs. So, you have a
situation where people brag about how many hours, they spent in the office
rather than what they actually do.
For me, the productivity killing powers at the office
or the church to the cult of busy were reinforced by the lock down in April
2020. I managed to produce things free of interruptions, ego management and the
challenges of having the post letters. I’ve done my best to avoid entering the
office since then and avoid any opportunity to brag about being busy because as
long as I was out of the office, I actually managed to do things. As someone on
Linkedin pointed out:
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