Busily Unproductive

 I make no secret that I detest working in the office and regard white collar work as a form of masturbation where people get a high on being in a cubicle because they happened to have had the good fortune of spending three years in a cocoon so that someone who has done nothing useful would be able to issue them a certificate as a validation of their cleverness.

Sure, I’ve worked in a professional organization for the last nine-years of my life. I do so because it provided me with the steady income, which allowed me to contribute to the family that I was building and now, I have a chance to feather a small nest for the day I am too crippled to be of any use to anyone. It pays relatively better than blue-collar work too. However,  I make it a point of doing all the physical work in the office because it gets me away from the office and needing to look at files and spreadsheets, thus making things tolerable. 

I do appreciate the fact that work professionals do. A good lawyer saves you a lot of trouble. A good accountant is must have when it comes to managing money. As a former US president pointed out – you would want the surgeon operating on you to know everything that there was to know everything to know about surgery. So, I am not against professionals or academic study per se and I whilst I detest entering offices, I appreciate that it works for some.

What I am against is office culture and the need for paper qualifications being imposed on me. I admittedly took a “serious” job late in life and now that I achieved what everyone expected, I'm left wondering if my life was better for it. Sure, I have an nice, respectable title and the income helped pay down the house for a while. However, when I had a lot less anger towards the world and respected the clients I worked with when I was a freelancer. 

Being an employee has its benefits but there are things about it that grate on me. One of them is an obsession with visibility rather than with actual production. I remember when I first started at the Bistrot and my colleagues would urge me to look for things to do because the boss wanted to see his staff being busy.

Now, I get why you need to do things on a job but I don’t see why I should look for things to do for the sake of doing it. My time in the Bistrot was best spent focusing on important things like making sure premium wines moved rather than inventing things to do so that the boss would feel that he was getting hour’s-worth out of me (I made the point to him that as long as I managed to sell a certain number of glasses of wine, I was actually paying myself).

What is true in the blue collar world, is even more so in the office where people have come to take great pride in the fact that they burn their spare time in the office and how they are so consumed by work that they don’t eat, sleep or drink.

Now, I get that working long hours from time-to-time is necessary and as an uncle who once pointed out to me, the days when you knocked off exactly at six-o’clock have long gone. Here in East Asia, we take particular pride in being among the most hard-working people on the planet. The Japanese and Koreans in particular, make no bones about the fact that they devote their lives to the company they work for.

However, whilst there are times when putting in the hours are necessary, one has to ask whether the hours worked are necessarily beneficial. Why do we equate long hours spent in a cubicle as being the same as hard work? I could, if pushed to, sit in the office and send emails out at obscene hours but would that mean that I was hard working or productive?

Let’s take a look at the countries that work the longest hours:

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-work-week-by-country

 

 Now, let’s look at the countries that are deemed as the most productive:

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/most-productive-countries

 

 The most obvious point here is that there is no correlation between the places that work long hours and the countries that produce the most per worker. If you argue that the average Irish worker is lazy for working 39.7 hours per week when compared the average Mauritanian who works 54 hours a week, the automatic counter is that the Irish workers gives significantly more back in terms of what is produced.

Go to any given office in a developing country and you are bound to find people running around like there was a lot to do. Posting letters is a full time job for some people in the office and they become very busy at it. In the developed world, offices are different. One has to avoid sitting near the exit because at the end of the day, there will be a stamped.

Are we saying that people in developing countries are more hard working and dedicated to their jobs than those in developed ones? Well, maybe they are but why aren’t companies leaving developed countries to hire more devoted and hardworking employees? Well, it could be because the guys in the developed countries are more productive?

In a way, the problem in developing countries is the fact that bosses like the appearance of busy and hence you get workers who become busy but nobody knows what they are busy doing. I’d call this being busily unproductive.

The solution is simple. Instead of paying people to look like they are doing work, why don’t we actually pay people to produce work. Hence, instead of spending time in an office until the wee hours of the day, people will focus on getting things done and busily unproductive might finally be an oxymoron.