13 ms·

Why is everyone so busy?

252 points by Futurebot 12y ago

StillBored 12y ago
I blame my own personal loss of time partially on long commutes. Previously, I lived about ~8 minutes away from where I worked. Now I live about ~40 minutes (which is only about 12 miles) from work. So, that works out to ~5.3 extra hours a week I lose sitting in my car. Or about 6.5 work weeks of time a year. With that time, I could be teaching the kids something, learning a new skill, exercising, working on my own projects, or just relaxing. Think about how much work you can get done in 6 weeks at work. That is what is being lost because I live in a state/city that puts infrastructure projects near the bottom of the priority list.
- radicalbyte 12y ago
  I've just quit a job that is 40mins driving for one which is 10mins drive or 20mins cycle. I'm going to cycle.
  - anton-107 12y ago
    My office is 40mins cycling away - that's the best!
- jzwinck 12y ago
  > That is what is being lost because I live in a state/city that puts infrastructure projects near the bottom of the priority list. Isn't it rather because you choose to live 12 miles from work?
  - sliverstorm 12y ago
    Well, you must make these choices in the context of your city, but 12 miles would not be a big deal with, for example, a subway or lightrail. Living right by work is optimal, but not always practical, so the runner-up of solid transit is a good alternative.
    - BerislavLopac 12y ago
      If more people were allowed (and enabled) to work from home, that would help mitigate that issue heavily.
    - rahimnathwani 12y ago
      > 12 miles would not be a big deal with, for example, a subway or lightrail That's not true at all. I'm from London, which has a pretty extensive subway system (we call it the tube). The only way you'll do a 12 mile* tube journey in 40 minutes in London is if you (i) live and work on the same subway line, and (ii) have <2 minutes' walk at each end. This is not true for 99% of people. Sure, you could build more tube stations at great expense, to reduce the walking time, but more stops means more time stopped, which means more time spent in the tube. I've lived in Beijing and Shanghai, and what I've written above, in reference to London, applies almost equally in those two cities. *When I say '12 mile' above, I'm talking about the equivalent journey by road, not the 'as the crow flies' distance between two points, nor the distance the tube train travels.
      - lmm 12y ago
        To give a concrete example, my commute in London is 5 miles and 50 minutes - 10 minutes' walk to the station, 25 mins on the train, and 15 minutes walking to work. (Cycling is a little quicker, but still in the 40 minute region).
        ido 12y ago
        My commute in Berlin would have been 4.7 miles if done by car & takes me ~30-35 minutes by subway (including ~10 minutes walk), so a little bit better but not much. I would have liked going down to ~20 minutes but beyond that it's entering into diminishing returns territory & I'd much rather work fewer hours and/or from home instead.
      - mattmanser 12y ago
        The worst part of this as well is that my city, Nottingham, and also the whole of England, changed to a "spokes on a wheel" method of organising public transport. This is where they have all public transport go to a central hub, rather than organising around transport demands and having direct buses from residential to industrial areas or cross country trains. So you always have to go into a hub (city center in Nottingham, London in England), and then walk & wait around for a new bus/train (or tube from station to station in London). This significantly increases journey times to anywhere that's not the hub. Also the assholes charge £20 more for having the gall to go through London, even though that's precisely how they set the system up. So now to get to my home town I either have to get 4 trains outside of London, or 2 and a tube through London. It's more economical and profitable for the bus/train companies, but costs everyone not going to the central hub a lot of time.
  - snarfy 12y ago
    More like he was priced out of living any closer to work.
- afoot 12y ago
  This is what regularly makes my 8-9 hour day a 12 hour one. People who live close to the office manage to cook nice meals, exercise, spend time with family etc all while I'm commuting. The most I manage is replying to a few emails and listening to podcasts while standing up on the train with carriage after carriage of commuters.
- lordbusiness 12y ago
  This right here is my strongest motivator for embracing remote working. Reclaiming these hours has been the single most liberating and uplifting thing I've done in the pursuit of the oft promoted but rarely implemented work-life balance.
- simonh 12y ago
  And you're falling into exactly the trap the article is talking about. Worrying about the cost of all that time spent in the car, when you could be thanking your lucky stars you have that extra time to yourself. My commute is 1 hour each way and it's wonderful. Having a busy job and 2 kids means I have a lot to do at work and at home, but those 2 hors a day are entirely my own. Mostly I listen to podcasts and audiobooks, but I also carry an iPad and read on that when I get a seat on the train. It's a great opportunity to listen to novels, history and science podcasts, comedy shows or read material I wouldn't get a chance to otherwise. Podcasts and audiobooks are perfect for car journeys too though.
  - falcor84 12y ago
    Well, that's the difference between having a good public transport option and driving. I hope that it won't be too long until self-driving cars solve this problem.
    - Dewie 12y ago
      > Well, that's the difference between having a good public transport option and driving. Why? He listens to podcasts and audiobooks, something which can be done while driving.
      - pixl97 12y ago
        No. Not exactly. You cannot both focus on the radio and driving at the same time with the equal amount of attention that a person who is just listen to audio while passively riding. It is not possible. Driving is not just visual clues, it is audio. Are my tires making the correct noise? Am I being honked at? Is that a siren I hear? Does the feedback from the road tell me about any dangerous conditions the road my present? There were over 30,000 traffic deaths in 2012. Over 5,000,000 automobile accidents. Yes, listening to audio while driving can be enjoyable, but it is a secondary task to not dying or not killing someone else.
        Dewie 12y ago
- roel_v 12y ago
  "That is what is being lost because I live in a state/city that puts infrastructure projects near the bottom of the priority list." I'm not belittling your problem or saying that it's your own fault or anything, and it's empirically true that that short commutes contribute significantly to QoL, but more or better infrastructure is not (should not be) the goal. The mantra (which has become the norm in transportation research, to a lesser degree in professional transportation planning circles and only to a small degree in policy circles) is 'we don't need better mobility, we need better accessibility'. To make this more concrete, you don't need better roads, you need better jobs close to your home. But you'll only get these once this becomes the common sentiment and people start voting with their feet. Because what you're doing now (take better job in exchange for worse commute) only makes the overall situation worse - more people competing for jobs in central locations, and/or people trading bigger houses further away for a longer commute. A lot of work is being started (in Europe, I know little details of efforts elsewhere but from the current literature it seems this is a global trend) on getting people to change their sentiments on transport and home/work location. It will take a number of years for the first effects to show of course. Just spatial planning policy interventions take 10 years to become active, let alone for their effects to be significant.
  - johnchristopher 12y ago
    > A lot of work is being started (in Europe, I know little details of efforts elsewhere but from the current literature it seems this is a global trend) on getting people to change their sentiments on transport and home/work location. European here. Could you point to some ressources on that work being started in Europe ?
    - roel_v 12y ago
      Well when I mean 'work', I mean that in the research sense (since for me that's 'work' :) ), and what I see and hear on conferences and symposiums, so I don't have any easy links. There are some FP7 projects that worked on this (search e.g. the Urbact websites, the FP7 website under transportation and sustainability themes, the Interreg website under the respective themes etc) and there are also many calls in Horizon 2020 that cover these aspects. There were some calls in the past in ICT subjects with open submissions that were won by projects working on crowd-sourcing and serious gaming applications that also covered this subject. Furthermore (and again without having anything concrete at hand), there are regularly articles that cover aspects of this in the usual journals: European Journal of Transport and Infrastructure Research, Transportation, Transportation Journal, Transportation Science etc.
- smu 12y ago
  Depending on your personal situation and goals, cycling to work could be a solution. 12 miles works out to 20km, which for me would amount to less than an hour of cycling time with good equipment. As a bonus, you'll arrive home with an empty head and you'll already have exercised!
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    Depends if cycling is practical. Many places don't have the weather, topology, or traffic for it. It would frustrating and bad for my health (pollution) to cycle to work in my current city (beijing) while I did nothing but in my previous coy (Lausanne, even with the hills).
    - zhte415 12y ago
      I do not want to sound flippant, just really practical, as I'm also in China (not Beijing) but sometimes have a somewhat long commute. Would it be possible to have a conversation =to argue time in the taxi, with laptop open and on a mobile connection was morning emailing time, and get the taxi charged to the company if it is a regular thing. I just do shift based on core hours I need to be in the office, as does everyone in the company.
      - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
        My company doesn't reimburse taxi fare, I just see it as worth the cost. I do shift my hours to make it worse, but line 10 is so crowded during peak, I'd have to anyways.
- eliben 12y ago
  YMMV, but I find that audio-books and audio-courses are a superb way to make an otherwise boring commute more tolerable. I hate commuting as much as anyone, and thankfully my commute isn't long, but even then, it's much more fun "reading" a book while sitting in the car.
- kirk21 12y ago
  Buy audiobooks :)
bshimmin 12y ago
For anyone interested in the context of the Keynes quote in the first paragraph of this article, here it is in full: https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/1930/our-grandchildren.htm https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/...
Sorgam 12y ago
My opinion is that people who are motivated to do things or make money work as much as they can to work towards what they want. Sitting around would be frustrating. That doesn't mean they need to work so much to survive, they just want to. Personally I've never done that. I often worked 3 day weeks. Now I do programming at home whenever I feel like and have a low-hours day job. I make enough money to be comfortable and it's quite nice. I think the predictions have come true - for anyone who wants it.
- 0x5f3759df-i 12y ago
  What types of companies would let you only work 3 day weeks? I would gladly give up money for more free time but that isn't a deal companies seem to want to make.
  - bjelkeman-again 12y ago
    They exist, we have people working from 50-90%, depending on position and what people want.
  - ibmthrowaway218 12y ago
    IBM certainly do (I work part time for them in a dev role).
  - justincormack 12y ago
    A lot of people just dont ask.
    - yodsanklai 12y ago
      When I was a young graduate, I didn't feel like working 5 days a week. I had many activities that I didn't want to sacrifice. At job interviews, I asked about part-time and surprisingly, some companies were fine with that. At least, until I got hired, then I was quickly pressured to switch to full time (eventually, I moved to academics which suits me better).
  - Sorgam 12y ago
yagibear 12y ago
TLDR, anyone?
- malux85 12y ago
  Too busy to read it? ;)
lordnacho 12y ago
Isn't the standard prescription to do something that doesn't feel like work for a living? I quite enjoy programming, so it's not like I'm constantly watching the clock when I work. I'm sure there are loads of other jobs that people like doing that don't make them feel like they would rather be doing something else.
stealthfound3r 12y ago
Douglas Rushkoff nailed it in a short TED talk http://vimeo.com/65904419 http://vimeo.com/65904419
- rab_oof 12y ago
  A related issue: more people nowadays seem to enjoy working too much (at least in the United States) to just stop, go home and do something else. Maybe people, by and large, enjoy their work or don't think about doing something else. The real question is whether it's a healthy balance or not. Also, glowing boxes like these have an addictive quality. Just go into any college coffee shop and the biggest drug there is no longer the coffee, it's wifi and the glowing screens of laptop, iPad and iPhone getting high on whatever new notification pops up. In conclusion, the instant-gratification of outright gamification of commoditized labor in an Idiocracy-like future doesn't seem either far off or far fetched.
  - stealthfound3r 12y ago
    To the outside observer it can all seem like "work" but to the code artist.. some percentage of it is indeed drudgery but another (hopefully larger) percentage of it is "creative play" using an artistic medium that the master painters and scribes of antiquity would have traded an arm for. For me the problems arise when money enters the equation because then you find reasons to set aside your vision of a masterpiece so you can hurry up and ship your your "Minimal Viable Product". You do make a good point though about the "addictive quality" of shiny boxes. I leverage meditation to help me "decompress" rapidly on the occasions when I do end up overworking. Sol Robeson: Have you met Archimedes? The one with the black spots, you see? You remember Archimedes of Syracuse, eh? The king asks Archimedes to determine if a present he's received is actually solid gold. Unsolved problem at the time. It tortures the great Greek mathematician for weeks - insomnia haunts him and he twists and turns in his bed for nights on end. Finally, his equally exhausted wife - she's forced to share a bed with this genius - convinces him to take a bath to relax. While he's entering the tub, Archimedes notices the bath water rise. Displacement, a way to determine volume, and that's a way to determine density - weight over volume. And thus, Archimedes solves the problem. He screams "Eureka" and he is so overwhelmed he runs dripping naked through the streets to the king's palace to report his discovery. Sol Robeson: Now, what is the moral of the story? Maximillian Cohen: That a breakthrough will come. Sol Robeson: Wrong! The point of the story is the wife. You listen to your wife, she will give you perspective, meaning. You need a break, you have to take a bath or you will get nowhere.
afoot 12y ago
When I worked for a large established company a lot of the older, more senior staff who had been around for a long time would complain constantly about the workload being much higher than it was a decade ago. When younger team members got promoted to similar roles with the same workload they didn't have the same issues. The big difference between the two was the use of technology. The workload expectation was based on efficient use of all of the systems and programmes we had available. Those that still used paper-based systems and ignored automated processes and other efficiencies really struggled, and their days were much longer as a result.
lifeisstillgood 12y ago
Just slow down. I don't do good work when I am rushing, I don't take the time to simplify or improve, but if I feel I have time and the support for good work I can be more productive in days than I would by rushing for weeks.
oldspiceman 12y ago
Necessary reading for anybody who's sick of hearing people talk about how busy they are: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=the+busy+trap&gws_rd=ssl https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=the+busy+trap&gws_rd=ssl "Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day."
- roel_v 12y ago
  Of course, because problems that don't kill people or at least seriously physically disables them are not real and whoever has them should just suck it up and be thankful they're not living in Sudan, right? rollseyes
  - oldspiceman 12y ago
    Thanks, I've never been trolled here before.
dodyg 12y ago
tldr: first world problem.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
chvid 12y ago
Well. Where I live not everyone is busy. Our population of working age (18-65) is about 3 mio. people with about 1 mio. on some kind of welfare (unemployment benifits, government paid sick leave, disability pension etc.). So here in Denmark mr. Keynes has turned out to be right. What he failed to see was the rise of the welfare state and just how unevenly distributed work or "busyness" would end up being.
- kirk21 12y ago
  It becoms a 'Modern forms of slavedom'... You are enslaved by the ppl on welfare. Deal with it.
DanielBMarkham 12y ago
Being a Star Trek fan, I was watching TOS (The Original Series) yesterday with my son. As was the norm for that show, in every episode Kirk somehow managed to find an alien planet with a beautiful woman on it that needed some sort of help. [insert long discussion about misogyny in 1960s TV shows]. I'm a bit of a movie buff, so I started using IMDB to look up some of these actresses to see what they're doing now. Dang. They're either dead or in their 80s. We are becoming the first generation to have a multi-media reminder of how short life is. In previous generations once grandpa died, you might have a painting and/or some family stories to share. Perhaps a tombstone to visit. Over time the memory faded away. In this generation and future ones, when grandpa dies? Hell, he might still be online, a bot posting his musings for the next 50 years. I don't see a reason grandpa can't send the grandkids a "Happy Birthday! Now you're 60!" message decades after he passes. This is a good thing overall, in my mind, but this constant reminder of how short life is has the effect of making people really stingy about their time. That's probably not such a good thing, as many important connections happen when we're not looking for them. As I get older, I find the need to orchestrate my time instead of conserving it: spending some time on high-energy, deeply-focused tasks and spending some time purposefully _not_ focusing and instead spending time socially with others I care about. Working in a good technology team is good for the former, exercise, outdoors, and family is good for the latter, at least for me. Being mindful of time is fine. Being stingy with it or bitter about losing it? Not so much.
- maxerickson 12y ago
  I think death is less present now than it has been historically. Losing babies used to be a pretty common event, infections were often lethal, etc. My parents were fairly old when I was born, so I've had the experience of seeing a fair number of relatives of their generation die (I'm younger than 40). None of that has left me with any particular urgency about how I spend my time. I don't mean to dismiss what you are saying, I suppose my point is that such things are probably more individual and personal than you have stated it.
falcor84 12y ago
I would like to provide another explanation for the longer hours at work: reverse-telecommuting (doing personal stuff on company time). Particularly with the advent of the internet, there isn't that much stuff that we NEED to be away from work to do. We can easily organize our personal finances, research and schedule various appointments, order groceries, etc. all the while coordinating with one's spouse. The expectation to stay longer hours at work seems to have come with more goodwill towards running personal errands and general slacking around at work, such that though we work longer hours, the work itself is much less concentrated.
- patrickk 12y ago
  Superb, hilarious article on this topic: http://www.kenrockwell.com/business/two-hour-rule.htm http://www.kenrockwell.com/business/two-hour-rule.htm
- coldtea 12y ago
  >Particularly with the advent of the internet, there isn't that much stuff that we NEED to be away from work to do. We can easily organize our personal finances, research and schedule various appointments, order groceries, etc. all the while coordinating with one's spouse. Nice theory, but fails down at all those pour sobs working overtime and not allowed to even piss outside of company schedulle -- from factories to call centers etc...
ateng 12y ago
It is interesting to note that there is lots of factors why people in large cities generally walks faster. Someone did a research on this (forgot wherr the source is) and it concluded in average younger people walks faster, and young people are concentrated in cities.
wallflower 12y ago
The beauty of being human is that we aren't rational when it comes to managing our time. At least, for me, in terms of what has the biggest long-term payoff (e.g. making better friends v. reading articles two-levels removed from original HN linkage). > But being busy has become a refrain and rationale for the things we don’t do, an acceptable and even glamorous excuse. My friend at lunch reminded me of what the Buddhist monk Sogyal Rinpoche calls “active laziness” – the filling of our lives with unessential tasks so we feel full of responsibilities or, as he calls them, “irresponsibilites.” https://medium.com/thelist/the-cult-of-busy-bbb124caed51 https://medium.com/thelist/the-cult-of-busy-bbb124caed51
teddyh 12y ago
Commuting not only takes time, it is also expensive: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-commuting/ http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-c...
fwn 12y ago
> "Ever since a clock was first used to synchronise labour in the 18th century, time has been understood in relation to money. Once hours are financially quantified, people worry more about wasting, saving or using them profitably." Right. Cavemen lived lazy through the day. If they did not find an animal to hunt one day they told their children not to starve but to go and get some chicken wings from KFC. Surely they were happy to live before the industrial revolution. The time when time wasn't evaluated by economic ratio. This is a great fairy tale in social sciences.
- arca_vorago 12y ago
  I know your comment is being sarcastic, but it is also a borderline strawman argument. Please remember that the original promise of the industrial revolution was that it would help us be more efficient and therefore would help workers work less and get the same or more done. The problem is that the oligarchs realized they could "force" people to work the same hours and all the extra efficiency in the form of profit trickled up. So I would say don't be so quick to dismiss the lifestyle of a hunter/gatherer society. Of course the modern world can't sustain such a thing and thats the beauty of agriculture, but as a person who grew up hunting, it's nice to get a big kill and have enough food to eat off for a couple of weeks. Thing about how much you spent on two weeks worth of meals, a full half of your monthly budget goes to food in that time. I can spend 1 day out in the forest, get a good elk, and another day dressing/butchering it and have enough food for two weeks. Whens the last time you made that much in one day? Not to mention that a more time-free society has more time to spend educating itself in more nuanced views, a reason I think the enlightenment is in danger because everyone's too busy to even learn these days.
  - nickik 12y ago
    > original promise of the industrial revolution was that it would help us be more efficient On what do you base this? Keynes belived this but nobody said 'Hallo everybody, we are now doing a programm called Industrial revolution and we hope that in 200 years everybody will work less', the Industrial Revolution happend because people were seeking to make themself richer and then do with there money whatever they did. > The problem is that the oligarchs realized they could "force" people to work the same hours and all the extra efficiency in the form of profit trickled up. Thats just socialist bullshit. Any measure of human well beeing has improved at the same time the world population has increased a gigantic amount. That is a unbelivable achivment. > So I would say don't be so quick to dismiss the lifestyle of a hunter/gatherer society. Of course the modern world can't sustain such a thing and thats the beauty of agriculture, but as a person who grew up hunting, it's nice to get a big kill and have enough food to eat off for a couple of weeks. Huting today is not the same. I would advice that you go read actual descriptions of these societys befor you compare it with yourself huting. There are intresting reports by american living with native americans for example. Or court officels from china going into the steppe. These people did not hunt once and then lived on it for weeks. If you killed a buffelo it would have to substain a hole clan of people and it would be carved up with little saving in days. There would also be tons of work making the other parts usable. > Not to mention that a more time-free society has more time to spend educating itself in more nuanced views, a reason I think the enlightenment is in danger because everyone's too busy to even learn these days. What???? There is more education then ever befor! Again, once you read accounts of actual trible societys you will see that they had no time in education beyond what they needed to live. A steppe mongol would train hourse of shooting the bow and learing when it was safe to cross a frozen river, but he did not sit around in the style of greeks and figure out the universe.
debacle 12y ago
In the current economy, service providers are no longer incentivized to provide ease of use. Everything is commoditized. Grocery shopping, banking, plumbers, auto repair, travel. We want it as cheaply as possible because we're all strapped. This creates time bloat on both sides - it takes longer to get what we want, and it takes longer on the other side to actually provide services. We're currently in an artificial starvation economy. When you're starving, it's important to conserve energy (or in this case capital) which means that things take longer than they should. You spend a few hours more to save a few dollars more, but, long term, the stress of being stretched causes impulse purchasing, which creates a positive feedback loop.
- galfarragem 12y ago
  We want it cheaper because nowadays is more difficult to make money. Nowadays is more difficult to make money because we want it cheaper. The busyness and time bloat comes from this. The perpetual looking for the best deal and the perpetual looking for work. The "bad guy" responsible for this negative loop in western world (besides ourselves): Mr. Globalization.
- humanrebar 12y ago
  > Grocery shopping, banking, plumbers, auto repair, travel Arguably, grocery shopping, banking, and travel are all easier than they has ever been. Plumbing and auto repair seem more or less the same to me, but car ownership itself is simpler due to improved quality of cars overall.
- rab_oof 12y ago
  It's like survival of the least terrible... And then standards of a country plummets and it becomes less competitive compared to an upstart that then disrupts them completely. Upstart is banned.
- tsunamifury 12y ago
  Its called 'Pain Optimization'. I think its the ultimate goal of a capitalist economy as practiced by Americans (and now parts of China). It doesn't create the best possible situation, it optimizes down to the least worst situation the super-majority of its participants will accept.
ascendantlogic 12y ago
As a personal corollary, this year I started doing nights and weekends consulting. After having spent years playing video games in my free time I now feel like any hour away from my 9-5 job that I'm not billing is an hour wasted. My bank account has never been healthier but I know I'm burning the candle at both ends and it will catch up with me. I can't shake the feeling of time not worked being time wasted, though.
- Matumio 12y ago
  Work is not supposed to be a religion. Try to figure out what you would be doing on this planet if you didn't have any obligations. You may find it is exactly what you are already doing, but if not, you seem to be in a good position to spend some of your time for your own sake.
pm90 12y ago
The underlying problem is to figure out what you really want. Yes, I've felt that feeling of uneasiness in "wasting" time a lot, especially as I moved into jobs which significantly increased the monetary value of my time. But one thing I did know was that I did not value money as much as I valued the time I spent meeting people, being outdoors, reading books or just thinking about things. Another lesson that self-help books give out a lot is that if you don't decide the course of your life, others will do so for you. I suspect that most people take money as a proxy for success and happiness and hence keep desiring more of it. Ironically, our consumerist environment makes us spend even more as we earn more...making us want to earn even more. Anyways, this is simply hypothesis. I can't say that I've figured out things, but I do think I am on the right path.
tjradcliffe 12y ago
"I don't have time for that" should be translated as "That's not a high enough priority for me to make time to do it." While we live in a world where setting our priorities one way (more money, less time) is facilitated by everything from labour laws to social conventions, we do have a choice to set them differently. There are two prongs to this: 1) setting our personal priorities differently, and consciously accepting the trade-offs that involves and 2) promoting social and corporate policies that enable our preferred priorities. Setting personal priorities may involve simply not working through lunch every day and ramping up from there. Promoting social and corporate policies may involve things that facilitate telecommuting (reflecting the discussions here on the time-cost of commuting) or a move toward more European-style labour policy, which doesn't seem to have harmed European productivity (http://ieconomics.com/productivity-euro-area-united-states http://ieconomics.com/productivity-euro-area-united-states). That's another way of saying the Anglosphere all-work-all-the-time ethic is really inefficient, and who wants to be inefficient? For many people, though, leisure time is over-rated. People work long hours because they value their working hours more than their leisure hours, and set their priorities accordingly. There are a lot of reasons why people have those priorities, some of which may be related to how bad we are at judging what is likely to make us happy: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kirsten-dirksen/happiness-research-ranks-_b_829591.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kirsten-dirksen/happiness-rese...
- jamesaguilar 12y ago
  Sometimes I meet people who feel obligated to work late because they're told to. Since I'm in the privileged position of never having been asked to do this, I can't fully know what my response would be. But I'd like to think at some point I'd simply tell my boss that I would not be working any more, and trust my daytime productivity to keep me my job. In theory, the company would not take negative action as long as my productivity less cost to employ was positive. In fact, in an ideal world, you'd even continue to be promoted as needed to retain your services. But what would actually happen? I've never had the chance to run the test, and, surprisingly, I haven't been able to convince my friends to experiment with their careers either. By the way, I upvoted you, but I also wanted to actually say "thanks" for these links. They are very interesting.
waylandsmithers 12y ago
So this is probably a little Marxist, but isn't the reason we're not working 3 hours a day the fact that the owners of capital capture all the gains from technological advance? In other words, money is more powerful if you can buy a robot at a high up front cost with small ongoing costs. On a micro level, I see this as a worker figuring out how to do his 8 hour task in 4. Boss man says great, now you can do this other task for 4 hours also instead of going home at noon.
- bunderbunder 12y ago
  I don't see that working out significantly differently in a Marxist system. Or at least a Marxist-Leninist system. There'd be a change in the boss's motivations, but it'd only be cosmetic. Instead of "Great, that means we can double production, which will earn me rewards because we can sell more stuff!" it would be "Great, that means we can double production, which will earn me rewards because it will impress my superiors!"
  - coldtea 12y ago
    >"Great, that means we can double production, which will earn me rewards because it will impress my superiors!" That would be a Marxist-Leninist system (or rather a Marxist-Stalinist one). Marxism doesn't say anything other than the society en masse and through democratic means has a say on what the level of production is for each sector. They could have just said "that's enough" if they prioritized leisure. Of course USSR had two problems: it was underdeveloped, and it faced huge dangers from outside ("capitalistic") powers, so it had to ramp-up its production pronto (else, it would have been squashed by Germany in WWII, for example, something which the industrialization prevented). A single country (or even a small alliance) cannot adapt that well to doing what it wants (e.g. emphasize leisure) without falling prey to other powers around it. That was the whole hoopla with the notion of "socialism in one country" btw ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_in_One_Country http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_in_One_Country ).
    - bunderbunder 12y ago
      For me the issue is that if you're going to pick a model, you're kind of stuck with something like Marxism-Leninism or Maoism if you want to be able to do any serious hypothesizing. Vanilla Marxism is the abstract base class of political ideologies. You can't actually instantiate it, because Marx left too much unsaid when it came to the nuts and bolts of how he thought a society should function on a day-to-day basis.
clockworkelf 12y ago
We're always busy because we're trapped in a debt-money system. The Fed creates money out of thin air, the big six banks get it at 0% interest, we can get it at up to 30%. Therefore we're on a perpetual hamster wheel because taxes and interest means we'll never 'catch up' to the people who get the money at 0%.
3rd3 12y ago
I think an obvious fact is overlooked that while new technology accelerates existing tasks, it also introduces a lot more possibilities and new tasks. For example, Internet messaging allows us to spend a lot less time for each message, but it also allows us to send more messages within the same time. It's also cheap, so we are free to set our own limits (which we are pretty bad at).
ZoomZoomZoom 12y ago
Quite an interesting read, but it's just stating the obvious repeatedly. Time equals money. And of course, with slower economics coupled with ever-increasing competition of the global market money becomes more valuable. But why do we feel so? It seems, there are some socio-cultural drivers for this need of the resources. People tend to want same things their neighbours have, or more. Today you feel your neighbour is not just someone living across the fence, but also someone you've just chatted on Skype (across the continents). Our sense of what Normal is is based on the cultural environment we're living in. And with technological progress, modern communications and mass media this sense skews towards images propagated by those who are involved in producing more of this kind of information i.e. western world. This flip side of this process is what might have looked like a decent living now seems less so. When you live in the area with life expectancy about 60 years and suddenly you realize your friends live somewhere where average is 74, you become more stressed to maximize your efforts. So my idea is that most people who work extra hours do so not to get rich, but trying to avoid ending up worse than average. So what is the way we can free our time so we could sit on the "park benches with pretty girls" more often? The only obvious answer I see is to improve the overall life quality of the poorest. This sounds frighteningly lefty, but this notion is based on the realization of one of humanity's ultimate goals: providing personal freedom for everybody to do what person feels preferable for him. The non-destructive way of achieving it is taking off the stress and fears of less income-maximizing life style. When you're certain you still will be well fed and able to afford medical assistance even without extra-hours at work you'll be more inclined to do what fulfils you as a person. At this point it's natural to discuss the old issues of exploiting social care and parasitic lifestyle in market economy, which might be possible in societies with high social guarantees. This is an axiological issue and answers depend on personal senses of equity and sympathy, and it's a hot topic on its own. However, scientific and technological progress is what I think the only plausible potential way of improving the overall life conditions thus leaving more time for leisure. *Some context on happiness vs inequality: Paul Alois. Income Inequality and Happiness: Is There a Relationship? www.lisdatacenter.org/wps/liswps/614.pdf Shigehiro Oishi, Selin Kesebir and Ed Diener. Income Inequality and Happiness. http://www.factorhappiness.at/downloads/quellen/S13_Oishi.pdf http://www.factorhappiness.at/downloads/quellen/S13_Oishi.pd...
- 12y ago
Thriptic 12y ago
This piece resonated with me strongly. I am currently down in Florida with my parents on a two week break from work for the holidays. This is the first stretch of time off from work I have taken in 2-3 years which involved more than a day or two out of the lab in Boston (I have accrued 8 weeks of paid time off and in addition my employer has effectively told me I can take as much time off as I want). There is a nice pool where I am, a beach, unlimited booze, other fun amenities, and yet I found myself complaining to my best friend last night on gchat that I have been feeling anxious and somewhat bored / unhappy for most of the trip. I feel like I should be spending this scarce free time better learning python and facilitating my career switch from bio E into data science; I don't want to eat out because that will harm my ability to cut weight for powerlifting (my main hobby); and when I am not trying to code or work on lab work, I spend many hours a day looking for gyms / in the gym. I effectively am attempting to do what I do every day (work from morning until I sleep punctuated with some time spent lifting) and am feeling miserable because I am not doing it as well as I would be able to do it at home. Last night I was checking how much it would cost for me to change my departure date so that I could go home early and use my vacation days more effectively studying. Part of this angst is driven by the fact that while I love my family and enjoy spending time with them, I feel angry that this is how I am forced to use my special large break. I am never able to spend time with my friends. I see my best friend and close high school friends maybe once or twice a year for 2-3 days. They are scattered across the midwest and simply don't have any vacation days to spend hanging out with me. My college friends in the midwest invited me to spend New Years with them, but they admitted that they would be working the entire week and would only be able to hang out with me for about a day, so I declined. My friends from work are in the same situation as me and don't have time to go on a trip. As this article correctly points out, I realize that I have no right to complain as these are completely self-imposed behaviors and though processes, but to be honest I'm not sure what else to do with myself or my time. I sometimes ask why I work the hours I do; is this really the best way to live my life? While I realize that the answer is probably no, I don't know what else to do, and so I keep doing it.
- dennisgorelik 12y ago
  Fulfilling work could actually be the best way to live your life. Why not?
collyw 12y ago
"American men toil for pay nearly 12 hours less per week, on average, than they did 40 years ago—a fall that includes all work-related activities, such as commuting and water-cooler breaks." Only being 40 I can't really say for sure, but was it not they case that one man would provide for a household 40 years ago, while now we generally have both partners working?
nickik 12y ago
Its simple, because we want to consume. People work hard and then buy a expensive car. Well you could have work less and drive a shitty old car. I dont understand what the mystery is. I myself could probebly get by with working 4 hours per day but I dont, I rather work 8 hours and buy myself cool computer shit and books.
- niels_olson 12y ago
  It's perhaps not so simple. I'm a pathology resident. My only interest in cars is to move my family around for the lowest cost (in time and money) per mile. My time costs a fair bit, and experience has taught me a new Honda every 200,000 miles is cheaper overall (in time and money) than used cars. Try finding a used Honda Accord without a salvage title. My work is dictated by the needs of various hospitals and clinics. Some days I work from 5 am to 11 pm and come in on the weekend to finish. Some days, like today, I'm on Hacker News at 9:30 am because I'm waiting for: * techs to pull some cases for my research project, * my batch of surgical cases to come out, and * tumor board at 11, which I prep'd for yesterday. I suppose I could be working on a rosalind.info problem right now, but I crushed one on the first attempt yesterday, so I'll delay that until this afternoon, probably after a 5 mile run through the San Diego zoo. I could be working with the videographer for my lab video (requested by some grants) but ... I don't want to. Although, I have 40 minutes, so maybe I could review the script. We save a fair bit but we also spend on lessons for the kids and an annual vacation. I'm always busy, because I want to wring every ounce of awesome I can out of life. There are a number of life lessons that go into this. Find work that you enjoy. Live within your means. Exercise. Get plenty of sunshine. Eat less. Set low expectations, you'll succeed more often and ultimately get further. Give employees specific, actionable tasks ("specific" may vary depending on who you're talking to, and learning where to draw that line is a life-long exercise). Learn how to modify your own behavior by modifying your environment. For example: throw away your TV. This will significantly reduce your exposure to advertising. Similarly, subscribe to a good music service: you'll avoid the ads and your taste will drift away from the mainstream toward whatever you genuinely enjoy. Avoid the news. There's so much news that someone else will know whatever's going on and you're ignorance will give them an opportunity to tell you. All of a sudden, you're having a valuable conversation. I have adopted Knuth's position: other people make it their job to stay on top of things. My job is to get to the bottom.
branchless 12y ago
Because land prices have rocketed because the banks lend based on both incomes so now both parents have to work to feed the rentiers.
nickik 12y ago
Another thing to consider is that the law is heavly focused on full employment and there are lots of benefits. This is true in almost all countrys, laber market regulation have a clear focus on this. We have no idea what the (abstract) free market laber time would be. For better or worse our economys have devloped into a kind of paradigm that is not focused on flexibilty. This has devloped in the industrialisation and should be more relaxed now. In some places (most places programmers work) working hourse are allready much more flexible.
adamzerner 12y ago
1) People seek purpose in their jobs. The jobs that provide this usually require an investment of time. 2) People seek status. Status comes from relative wealth and intelligence, which requires an investment of time. 3) People usually don't have the choice to trade money for time. You usually can't say, "I'm going to work 5 hours less per week and in return take a smaller salary". Hourly workers can (sort of) do this, but they're the ones who usually can't afford to do this. All that said, there still are plenty of opportunities to exchange money for more time and people (IMO irrationally) pass these opportunities up. Ex. paying for food instead of taking the time to cook, clean, shop. Ex. paying someone to clean your house. I'm not really sure what the explanation for this is.
- Chronic30 12y ago
  People fail to correctly value (1) the cost of these time saving services and (2) their own time. It's similar to how people will drive around to save 5 cents per gallon on gasoline. Usually, they will only end up saving a dollar. Or someone will make multiple trips to their car to unload all groceries (which can add significant time in apartment buildings) because they wanted to save 20 cents and not buy a paper/plastic bag during checkout. These little things add up in time.
  - adamzerner 12y ago
    I think it's clear that people don't value these things properly. The interesting question is why. What are the underlying heuristics and biases? I'm posing the question, but I don't have a great answer to it.
    - pm90 12y ago
      Because most people don't think that deeply about these things. And while money can be easily quantified, its not the case with time. I think pg has an essay on this.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  In paying for these things, you're also giving up control, possibly leisure (some people enjoy cooking), and possibly quality. It can still certainly be a win, but you're not simply comparing prices of a fungible good.
tessierashpool 12y ago
the article starts out with (paraphrase) "decades and/or centuries ago, we expected tech would save us incredible amounts of time, but it didn't." if you had a computer in 1984, and somebody told you what processor speeds would be in 2014, you might have expected all software to run flawlessly by now. as it is, everybody has more computing power in their pocket than the entire Apollo moon landing ever had, and we use this power to look at pictures of cats. there's probably an economic principle explaining both of these failed prediction categories. in either case, what people do with the new abundance has a lot more to do with what they're willing to tolerate in their lives than what the technology is actually capable of. great tech will only produce great results if you choose to do great things with it.
jotux 12y ago
Similar but a different perspective: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-trap/?_r=0 http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-tra... I personally strive to never, ever, say that I'm busy.
jmadsen 12y ago
In kind of general agreement with many comments below. If I can just take a stab at what I see as at least one of the ways we got here: During the previous recession after 9/11, many company managers jumped on the title of the book "More with Less" and started trying to stretch resources, people first and foremost. (I say jumped on the "title" because the book actually was a clever thesis that had nothing at all to do with making your workers do two jobs for the price of one). That recession was long and deep enough & quickly followed by an even worse one that the new job definitions became the new standards. There hasn't been a enough of a good economic period for labor to take back its decent conditions. I think a lot of it is as simple as that.

252 points by Futurebot 12y ago

I blame my own personal loss of time partially on long commutes. Previously, I lived about ~8 minutes away from where I worked. Now I live about ~40 minutes (which is only about 12 miles) from work. So, that works out to ~5.3 extra hours a week I lose sitting in my car. Or about 6.5 work weeks of time a year. With that time, I could be teaching the kids something, learning a new skill, exercising, working on my own projects, or just relaxing. Think about how much work you can get done in 6 weeks at work. That is what is being lost because I live in a state/city that puts infrastructure projects near the bottom of the priority list.

radicalbyte 12y ago
I've just quit a job that is 40mins driving for one which is 10mins drive or 20mins cycle. I'm going to cycle.
- anton-107 12y ago
  My office is 40mins cycling away - that's the best!
jzwinck 12y ago
> That is what is being lost because I live in a state/city that puts infrastructure projects near the bottom of the priority list. Isn't it rather because you choose to live 12 miles from work?
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  Well, you must make these choices in the context of your city, but 12 miles would not be a big deal with, for example, a subway or lightrail. Living right by work is optimal, but not always practical, so the runner-up of solid transit is a good alternative.
  - BerislavLopac 12y ago
    If more people were allowed (and enabled) to work from home, that would help mitigate that issue heavily.
  - rahimnathwani 12y ago
    > 12 miles would not be a big deal with, for example, a subway or lightrail That's not true at all. I'm from London, which has a pretty extensive subway system (we call it the tube). The only way you'll do a 12 mile* tube journey in 40 minutes in London is if you (i) live and work on the same subway line, and (ii) have <2 minutes' walk at each end. This is not true for 99% of people. Sure, you could build more tube stations at great expense, to reduce the walking time, but more stops means more time stopped, which means more time spent in the tube. I've lived in Beijing and Shanghai, and what I've written above, in reference to London, applies almost equally in those two cities. *When I say '12 mile' above, I'm talking about the equivalent journey by road, not the 'as the crow flies' distance between two points, nor the distance the tube train travels.
    - lmm 12y ago
      To give a concrete example, my commute in London is 5 miles and 50 minutes - 10 minutes' walk to the station, 25 mins on the train, and 15 minutes walking to work. (Cycling is a little quicker, but still in the 40 minute region).
      - ido 12y ago
        My commute in Berlin would have been 4.7 miles if done by car & takes me ~30-35 minutes by subway (including ~10 minutes walk), so a little bit better but not much. I would have liked going down to ~20 minutes but beyond that it's entering into diminishing returns territory & I'd much rather work fewer hours and/or from home instead.
    - mattmanser 12y ago
      The worst part of this as well is that my city, Nottingham, and also the whole of England, changed to a "spokes on a wheel" method of organising public transport. This is where they have all public transport go to a central hub, rather than organising around transport demands and having direct buses from residential to industrial areas or cross country trains. So you always have to go into a hub (city center in Nottingham, London in England), and then walk & wait around for a new bus/train (or tube from station to station in London). This significantly increases journey times to anywhere that's not the hub. Also the assholes charge £20 more for having the gall to go through London, even though that's precisely how they set the system up. So now to get to my home town I either have to get 4 trains outside of London, or 2 and a tube through London. It's more economical and profitable for the bus/train companies, but costs everyone not going to the central hub a lot of time.
- snarfy 12y ago
  More like he was priced out of living any closer to work.
afoot 12y ago
This is what regularly makes my 8-9 hour day a 12 hour one. People who live close to the office manage to cook nice meals, exercise, spend time with family etc all while I'm commuting. The most I manage is replying to a few emails and listening to podcasts while standing up on the train with carriage after carriage of commuters.
lordbusiness 12y ago
This right here is my strongest motivator for embracing remote working. Reclaiming these hours has been the single most liberating and uplifting thing I've done in the pursuit of the oft promoted but rarely implemented work-life balance.
simonh 12y ago
And you're falling into exactly the trap the article is talking about. Worrying about the cost of all that time spent in the car, when you could be thanking your lucky stars you have that extra time to yourself. My commute is 1 hour each way and it's wonderful. Having a busy job and 2 kids means I have a lot to do at work and at home, but those 2 hors a day are entirely my own. Mostly I listen to podcasts and audiobooks, but I also carry an iPad and read on that when I get a seat on the train. It's a great opportunity to listen to novels, history and science podcasts, comedy shows or read material I wouldn't get a chance to otherwise. Podcasts and audiobooks are perfect for car journeys too though.
- falcor84 12y ago
  Well, that's the difference between having a good public transport option and driving. I hope that it won't be too long until self-driving cars solve this problem.
  - Dewie 12y ago
    > Well, that's the difference between having a good public transport option and driving. Why? He listens to podcasts and audiobooks, something which can be done while driving.
    - pixl97 12y ago
      No. Not exactly. You cannot both focus on the radio and driving at the same time with the equal amount of attention that a person who is just listen to audio while passively riding. It is not possible. Driving is not just visual clues, it is audio. Are my tires making the correct noise? Am I being honked at? Is that a siren I hear? Does the feedback from the road tell me about any dangerous conditions the road my present? There were over 30,000 traffic deaths in 2012. Over 5,000,000 automobile accidents. Yes, listening to audio while driving can be enjoyable, but it is a secondary task to not dying or not killing someone else.
      - Dewie 12y ago
roel_v 12y ago
"That is what is being lost because I live in a state/city that puts infrastructure projects near the bottom of the priority list." I'm not belittling your problem or saying that it's your own fault or anything, and it's empirically true that that short commutes contribute significantly to QoL, but more or better infrastructure is not (should not be) the goal. The mantra (which has become the norm in transportation research, to a lesser degree in professional transportation planning circles and only to a small degree in policy circles) is 'we don't need better mobility, we need better accessibility'. To make this more concrete, you don't need better roads, you need better jobs close to your home. But you'll only get these once this becomes the common sentiment and people start voting with their feet. Because what you're doing now (take better job in exchange for worse commute) only makes the overall situation worse - more people competing for jobs in central locations, and/or people trading bigger houses further away for a longer commute. A lot of work is being started (in Europe, I know little details of efforts elsewhere but from the current literature it seems this is a global trend) on getting people to change their sentiments on transport and home/work location. It will take a number of years for the first effects to show of course. Just spatial planning policy interventions take 10 years to become active, let alone for their effects to be significant.
- johnchristopher 12y ago
  > A lot of work is being started (in Europe, I know little details of efforts elsewhere but from the current literature it seems this is a global trend) on getting people to change their sentiments on transport and home/work location. European here. Could you point to some ressources on that work being started in Europe ?
  - roel_v 12y ago
    Well when I mean 'work', I mean that in the research sense (since for me that's 'work' :) ), and what I see and hear on conferences and symposiums, so I don't have any easy links. There are some FP7 projects that worked on this (search e.g. the Urbact websites, the FP7 website under transportation and sustainability themes, the Interreg website under the respective themes etc) and there are also many calls in Horizon 2020 that cover these aspects. There were some calls in the past in ICT subjects with open submissions that were won by projects working on crowd-sourcing and serious gaming applications that also covered this subject. Furthermore (and again without having anything concrete at hand), there are regularly articles that cover aspects of this in the usual journals: European Journal of Transport and Infrastructure Research, Transportation, Transportation Journal, Transportation Science etc.
smu 12y ago
Depending on your personal situation and goals, cycling to work could be a solution. 12 miles works out to 20km, which for me would amount to less than an hour of cycling time with good equipment. As a bonus, you'll arrive home with an empty head and you'll already have exercised!
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  Depends if cycling is practical. Many places don't have the weather, topology, or traffic for it. It would frustrating and bad for my health (pollution) to cycle to work in my current city (beijing) while I did nothing but in my previous coy (Lausanne, even with the hills).
  - zhte415 12y ago
    I do not want to sound flippant, just really practical, as I'm also in China (not Beijing) but sometimes have a somewhat long commute. Would it be possible to have a conversation =to argue time in the taxi, with laptop open and on a mobile connection was morning emailing time, and get the taxi charged to the company if it is a regular thing. I just do shift based on core hours I need to be in the office, as does everyone in the company.
    - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      My company doesn't reimburse taxi fare, I just see it as worth the cost. I do shift my hours to make it worse, but line 10 is so crowded during peak, I'd have to anyways.
eliben 12y ago
YMMV, but I find that audio-books and audio-courses are a superb way to make an otherwise boring commute more tolerable. I hate commuting as much as anyone, and thankfully my commute isn't long, but even then, it's much more fun "reading" a book while sitting in the car.
kirk21 12y ago
Buy audiobooks :)

bshimmin 12y ago

For anyone interested in the context of the Keynes quote in the first paragraph of this article, here it is in full: https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/1930/our-grandchildren.htm https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/...

Sorgam 12y ago

My opinion is that people who are motivated to do things or make money work as much as they can to work towards what they want. Sitting around would be frustrating. That doesn't mean they need to work so much to survive, they just want to. Personally I've never done that. I often worked 3 day weeks. Now I do programming at home whenever I feel like and have a low-hours day job. I make enough money to be comfortable and it's quite nice. I think the predictions have come true - for anyone who wants it.

0x5f3759df-i 12y ago
What types of companies would let you only work 3 day weeks? I would gladly give up money for more free time but that isn't a deal companies seem to want to make.
- bjelkeman-again 12y ago
  They exist, we have people working from 50-90%, depending on position and what people want.
- ibmthrowaway218 12y ago
  IBM certainly do (I work part time for them in a dev role).
- justincormack 12y ago
  A lot of people just dont ask.
  - yodsanklai 12y ago
    When I was a young graduate, I didn't feel like working 5 days a week. I had many activities that I didn't want to sacrifice. At job interviews, I asked about part-time and surprisingly, some companies were fine with that. At least, until I got hired, then I was quickly pressured to switch to full time (eventually, I moved to academics which suits me better).
- Sorgam 12y ago

yagibear 12y ago

TLDR, anyone?

malux85 12y ago
Too busy to read it? ;)

lordnacho 12y ago

Isn't the standard prescription to do something that doesn't feel like work for a living? I quite enjoy programming, so it's not like I'm constantly watching the clock when I work. I'm sure there are loads of other jobs that people like doing that don't make them feel like they would rather be doing something else.

stealthfound3r 12y ago

Douglas Rushkoff nailed it in a short TED talk http://vimeo.com/65904419 http://vimeo.com/65904419

rab_oof 12y ago
A related issue: more people nowadays seem to enjoy working too much (at least in the United States) to just stop, go home and do something else. Maybe people, by and large, enjoy their work or don't think about doing something else. The real question is whether it's a healthy balance or not. Also, glowing boxes like these have an addictive quality. Just go into any college coffee shop and the biggest drug there is no longer the coffee, it's wifi and the glowing screens of laptop, iPad and iPhone getting high on whatever new notification pops up. In conclusion, the instant-gratification of outright gamification of commoditized labor in an Idiocracy-like future doesn't seem either far off or far fetched.
- stealthfound3r 12y ago
  To the outside observer it can all seem like "work" but to the code artist.. some percentage of it is indeed drudgery but another (hopefully larger) percentage of it is "creative play" using an artistic medium that the master painters and scribes of antiquity would have traded an arm for. For me the problems arise when money enters the equation because then you find reasons to set aside your vision of a masterpiece so you can hurry up and ship your your "Minimal Viable Product". You do make a good point though about the "addictive quality" of shiny boxes. I leverage meditation to help me "decompress" rapidly on the occasions when I do end up overworking. Sol Robeson: Have you met Archimedes? The one with the black spots, you see? You remember Archimedes of Syracuse, eh? The king asks Archimedes to determine if a present he's received is actually solid gold. Unsolved problem at the time. It tortures the great Greek mathematician for weeks - insomnia haunts him and he twists and turns in his bed for nights on end. Finally, his equally exhausted wife - she's forced to share a bed with this genius - convinces him to take a bath to relax. While he's entering the tub, Archimedes notices the bath water rise. Displacement, a way to determine volume, and that's a way to determine density - weight over volume. And thus, Archimedes solves the problem. He screams "Eureka" and he is so overwhelmed he runs dripping naked through the streets to the king's palace to report his discovery. Sol Robeson: Now, what is the moral of the story? Maximillian Cohen: That a breakthrough will come. Sol Robeson: Wrong! The point of the story is the wife. You listen to your wife, she will give you perspective, meaning. You need a break, you have to take a bath or you will get nowhere.

afoot 12y ago

When I worked for a large established company a lot of the older, more senior staff who had been around for a long time would complain constantly about the workload being much higher than it was a decade ago. When younger team members got promoted to similar roles with the same workload they didn't have the same issues. The big difference between the two was the use of technology. The workload expectation was based on efficient use of all of the systems and programmes we had available. Those that still used paper-based systems and ignored automated processes and other efficiencies really struggled, and their days were much longer as a result.

lifeisstillgood 12y ago

Just slow down. I don't do good work when I am rushing, I don't take the time to simplify or improve, but if I feel I have time and the support for good work I can be more productive in days than I would by rushing for weeks.

oldspiceman 12y ago

Necessary reading for anybody who's sick of hearing people talk about how busy they are: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=the+busy+trap&gws_rd=ssl https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=the+busy+trap&gws_rd=ssl "Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day."

roel_v 12y ago
Of course, because problems that don't kill people or at least seriously physically disables them are not real and whoever has them should just suck it up and be thankful they're not living in Sudan, right? rollseyes
- oldspiceman 12y ago
  Thanks, I've never been trolled here before.

dodyg 12y ago

tldr: first world problem.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

chvid 12y ago

Well. Where I live not everyone is busy. Our population of working age (18-65) is about 3 mio. people with about 1 mio. on some kind of welfare (unemployment benifits, government paid sick leave, disability pension etc.). So here in Denmark mr. Keynes has turned out to be right. What he failed to see was the rise of the welfare state and just how unevenly distributed work or "busyness" would end up being.

kirk21 12y ago
It becoms a 'Modern forms of slavedom'... You are enslaved by the ppl on welfare. Deal with it.

DanielBMarkham 12y ago

Being a Star Trek fan, I was watching TOS (The Original Series) yesterday with my son. As was the norm for that show, in every episode Kirk somehow managed to find an alien planet with a beautiful woman on it that needed some sort of help. [insert long discussion about misogyny in 1960s TV shows]. I'm a bit of a movie buff, so I started using IMDB to look up some of these actresses to see what they're doing now. Dang. They're either dead or in their 80s. We are becoming the first generation to have a multi-media reminder of how short life is. In previous generations once grandpa died, you might have a painting and/or some family stories to share. Perhaps a tombstone to visit. Over time the memory faded away. In this generation and future ones, when grandpa dies? Hell, he might still be online, a bot posting his musings for the next 50 years. I don't see a reason grandpa can't send the grandkids a "Happy Birthday! Now you're 60!" message decades after he passes. This is a good thing overall, in my mind, but this constant reminder of how short life is has the effect of making people really stingy about their time. That's probably not such a good thing, as many important connections happen when we're not looking for them. As I get older, I find the need to orchestrate my time instead of conserving it: spending some time on high-energy, deeply-focused tasks and spending some time purposefully _not_ focusing and instead spending time socially with others I care about. Working in a good technology team is good for the former, exercise, outdoors, and family is good for the latter, at least for me. Being mindful of time is fine. Being stingy with it or bitter about losing it? Not so much.

maxerickson 12y ago
I think death is less present now than it has been historically. Losing babies used to be a pretty common event, infections were often lethal, etc. My parents were fairly old when I was born, so I've had the experience of seeing a fair number of relatives of their generation die (I'm younger than 40). None of that has left me with any particular urgency about how I spend my time. I don't mean to dismiss what you are saying, I suppose my point is that such things are probably more individual and personal than you have stated it.

falcor84 12y ago

I would like to provide another explanation for the longer hours at work: reverse-telecommuting (doing personal stuff on company time). Particularly with the advent of the internet, there isn't that much stuff that we NEED to be away from work to do. We can easily organize our personal finances, research and schedule various appointments, order groceries, etc. all the while coordinating with one's spouse. The expectation to stay longer hours at work seems to have come with more goodwill towards running personal errands and general slacking around at work, such that though we work longer hours, the work itself is much less concentrated.

patrickk 12y ago
Superb, hilarious article on this topic: http://www.kenrockwell.com/business/two-hour-rule.htm http://www.kenrockwell.com/business/two-hour-rule.htm
coldtea 12y ago
>Particularly with the advent of the internet, there isn't that much stuff that we NEED to be away from work to do. We can easily organize our personal finances, research and schedule various appointments, order groceries, etc. all the while coordinating with one's spouse. Nice theory, but fails down at all those pour sobs working overtime and not allowed to even piss outside of company schedulle -- from factories to call centers etc...

ateng 12y ago

It is interesting to note that there is lots of factors why people in large cities generally walks faster. Someone did a research on this (forgot wherr the source is) and it concluded in average younger people walks faster, and young people are concentrated in cities.

wallflower 12y ago

The beauty of being human is that we aren't rational when it comes to managing our time. At least, for me, in terms of what has the biggest long-term payoff (e.g. making better friends v. reading articles two-levels removed from original HN linkage). > But being busy has become a refrain and rationale for the things we don’t do, an acceptable and even glamorous excuse. My friend at lunch reminded me of what the Buddhist monk Sogyal Rinpoche calls “active laziness” – the filling of our lives with unessential tasks so we feel full of responsibilities or, as he calls them, “irresponsibilites.” https://medium.com/thelist/the-cult-of-busy-bbb124caed51 https://medium.com/thelist/the-cult-of-busy-bbb124caed51

teddyh 12y ago

Commuting not only takes time, it is also expensive: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-commuting/ http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-c...

fwn 12y ago

> "Ever since a clock was first used to synchronise labour in the 18th century, time has been understood in relation to money. Once hours are financially quantified, people worry more about wasting, saving or using them profitably." Right. Cavemen lived lazy through the day. If they did not find an animal to hunt one day they told their children not to starve but to go and get some chicken wings from KFC. Surely they were happy to live before the industrial revolution. The time when time wasn't evaluated by economic ratio. This is a great fairy tale in social sciences.

arca_vorago 12y ago
I know your comment is being sarcastic, but it is also a borderline strawman argument. Please remember that the original promise of the industrial revolution was that it would help us be more efficient and therefore would help workers work less and get the same or more done. The problem is that the oligarchs realized they could "force" people to work the same hours and all the extra efficiency in the form of profit trickled up. So I would say don't be so quick to dismiss the lifestyle of a hunter/gatherer society. Of course the modern world can't sustain such a thing and thats the beauty of agriculture, but as a person who grew up hunting, it's nice to get a big kill and have enough food to eat off for a couple of weeks. Thing about how much you spent on two weeks worth of meals, a full half of your monthly budget goes to food in that time. I can spend 1 day out in the forest, get a good elk, and another day dressing/butchering it and have enough food for two weeks. Whens the last time you made that much in one day? Not to mention that a more time-free society has more time to spend educating itself in more nuanced views, a reason I think the enlightenment is in danger because everyone's too busy to even learn these days.
- nickik 12y ago
  > original promise of the industrial revolution was that it would help us be more efficient On what do you base this? Keynes belived this but nobody said 'Hallo everybody, we are now doing a programm called Industrial revolution and we hope that in 200 years everybody will work less', the Industrial Revolution happend because people were seeking to make themself richer and then do with there money whatever they did. > The problem is that the oligarchs realized they could "force" people to work the same hours and all the extra efficiency in the form of profit trickled up. Thats just socialist bullshit. Any measure of human well beeing has improved at the same time the world population has increased a gigantic amount. That is a unbelivable achivment. > So I would say don't be so quick to dismiss the lifestyle of a hunter/gatherer society. Of course the modern world can't sustain such a thing and thats the beauty of agriculture, but as a person who grew up hunting, it's nice to get a big kill and have enough food to eat off for a couple of weeks. Huting today is not the same. I would advice that you go read actual descriptions of these societys befor you compare it with yourself huting. There are intresting reports by american living with native americans for example. Or court officels from china going into the steppe. These people did not hunt once and then lived on it for weeks. If you killed a buffelo it would have to substain a hole clan of people and it would be carved up with little saving in days. There would also be tons of work making the other parts usable. > Not to mention that a more time-free society has more time to spend educating itself in more nuanced views, a reason I think the enlightenment is in danger because everyone's too busy to even learn these days. What???? There is more education then ever befor! Again, once you read accounts of actual trible societys you will see that they had no time in education beyond what they needed to live. A steppe mongol would train hourse of shooting the bow and learing when it was safe to cross a frozen river, but he did not sit around in the style of greeks and figure out the universe.

debacle 12y ago

In the current economy, service providers are no longer incentivized to provide ease of use. Everything is commoditized. Grocery shopping, banking, plumbers, auto repair, travel. We want it as cheaply as possible because we're all strapped. This creates time bloat on both sides - it takes longer to get what we want, and it takes longer on the other side to actually provide services. We're currently in an artificial starvation economy. When you're starving, it's important to conserve energy (or in this case capital) which means that things take longer than they should. You spend a few hours more to save a few dollars more, but, long term, the stress of being stretched causes impulse purchasing, which creates a positive feedback loop.

galfarragem 12y ago
We want it cheaper because nowadays is more difficult to make money. Nowadays is more difficult to make money because we want it cheaper. The busyness and time bloat comes from this. The perpetual looking for the best deal and the perpetual looking for work. The "bad guy" responsible for this negative loop in western world (besides ourselves): Mr. Globalization.
humanrebar 12y ago
> Grocery shopping, banking, plumbers, auto repair, travel Arguably, grocery shopping, banking, and travel are all easier than they has ever been. Plumbing and auto repair seem more or less the same to me, but car ownership itself is simpler due to improved quality of cars overall.
rab_oof 12y ago
It's like survival of the least terrible... And then standards of a country plummets and it becomes less competitive compared to an upstart that then disrupts them completely. Upstart is banned.
tsunamifury 12y ago
Its called 'Pain Optimization'. I think its the ultimate goal of a capitalist economy as practiced by Americans (and now parts of China). It doesn't create the best possible situation, it optimizes down to the least worst situation the super-majority of its participants will accept.

ascendantlogic 12y ago

As a personal corollary, this year I started doing nights and weekends consulting. After having spent years playing video games in my free time I now feel like any hour away from my 9-5 job that I'm not billing is an hour wasted. My bank account has never been healthier but I know I'm burning the candle at both ends and it will catch up with me. I can't shake the feeling of time not worked being time wasted, though.

Matumio 12y ago
Work is not supposed to be a religion. Try to figure out what you would be doing on this planet if you didn't have any obligations. You may find it is exactly what you are already doing, but if not, you seem to be in a good position to spend some of your time for your own sake.

pm90 12y ago

The underlying problem is to figure out what you really want. Yes, I've felt that feeling of uneasiness in "wasting" time a lot, especially as I moved into jobs which significantly increased the monetary value of my time. But one thing I did know was that I did not value money as much as I valued the time I spent meeting people, being outdoors, reading books or just thinking about things. Another lesson that self-help books give out a lot is that if you don't decide the course of your life, others will do so for you. I suspect that most people take money as a proxy for success and happiness and hence keep desiring more of it. Ironically, our consumerist environment makes us spend even more as we earn more...making us want to earn even more. Anyways, this is simply hypothesis. I can't say that I've figured out things, but I do think I am on the right path.

tjradcliffe 12y ago

"I don't have time for that" should be translated as "That's not a high enough priority for me to make time to do it." While we live in a world where setting our priorities one way (more money, less time) is facilitated by everything from labour laws to social conventions, we do have a choice to set them differently. There are two prongs to this: 1) setting our personal priorities differently, and consciously accepting the trade-offs that involves and 2) promoting social and corporate policies that enable our preferred priorities. Setting personal priorities may involve simply not working through lunch every day and ramping up from there. Promoting social and corporate policies may involve things that facilitate telecommuting (reflecting the discussions here on the time-cost of commuting) or a move toward more European-style labour policy, which doesn't seem to have harmed European productivity (http://ieconomics.com/productivity-euro-area-united-states http://ieconomics.com/productivity-euro-area-united-states). That's another way of saying the Anglosphere all-work-all-the-time ethic is really inefficient, and who wants to be inefficient? For many people, though, leisure time is over-rated. People work long hours because they value their working hours more than their leisure hours, and set their priorities accordingly. There are a lot of reasons why people have those priorities, some of which may be related to how bad we are at judging what is likely to make us happy: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kirsten-dirksen/happiness-research-ranks-_b_829591.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kirsten-dirksen/happiness-rese...

jamesaguilar 12y ago
Sometimes I meet people who feel obligated to work late because they're told to. Since I'm in the privileged position of never having been asked to do this, I can't fully know what my response would be. But I'd like to think at some point I'd simply tell my boss that I would not be working any more, and trust my daytime productivity to keep me my job. In theory, the company would not take negative action as long as my productivity less cost to employ was positive. In fact, in an ideal world, you'd even continue to be promoted as needed to retain your services. But what would actually happen? I've never had the chance to run the test, and, surprisingly, I haven't been able to convince my friends to experiment with their careers either. By the way, I upvoted you, but I also wanted to actually say "thanks" for these links. They are very interesting.

waylandsmithers 12y ago

So this is probably a little Marxist, but isn't the reason we're not working 3 hours a day the fact that the owners of capital capture all the gains from technological advance? In other words, money is more powerful if you can buy a robot at a high up front cost with small ongoing costs. On a micro level, I see this as a worker figuring out how to do his 8 hour task in 4. Boss man says great, now you can do this other task for 4 hours also instead of going home at noon.

bunderbunder 12y ago
I don't see that working out significantly differently in a Marxist system. Or at least a Marxist-Leninist system. There'd be a change in the boss's motivations, but it'd only be cosmetic. Instead of "Great, that means we can double production, which will earn me rewards because we can sell more stuff!" it would be "Great, that means we can double production, which will earn me rewards because it will impress my superiors!"
- coldtea 12y ago
  >"Great, that means we can double production, which will earn me rewards because it will impress my superiors!" That would be a Marxist-Leninist system (or rather a Marxist-Stalinist one). Marxism doesn't say anything other than the society en masse and through democratic means has a say on what the level of production is for each sector. They could have just said "that's enough" if they prioritized leisure. Of course USSR had two problems: it was underdeveloped, and it faced huge dangers from outside ("capitalistic") powers, so it had to ramp-up its production pronto (else, it would have been squashed by Germany in WWII, for example, something which the industrialization prevented). A single country (or even a small alliance) cannot adapt that well to doing what it wants (e.g. emphasize leisure) without falling prey to other powers around it. That was the whole hoopla with the notion of "socialism in one country" btw ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_in_One_Country http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_in_One_Country ).
  - bunderbunder 12y ago
    For me the issue is that if you're going to pick a model, you're kind of stuck with something like Marxism-Leninism or Maoism if you want to be able to do any serious hypothesizing. Vanilla Marxism is the abstract base class of political ideologies. You can't actually instantiate it, because Marx left too much unsaid when it came to the nuts and bolts of how he thought a society should function on a day-to-day basis.

clockworkelf 12y ago

We're always busy because we're trapped in a debt-money system. The Fed creates money out of thin air, the big six banks get it at 0% interest, we can get it at up to 30%. Therefore we're on a perpetual hamster wheel because taxes and interest means we'll never 'catch up' to the people who get the money at 0%.

3rd3 12y ago

I think an obvious fact is overlooked that while new technology accelerates existing tasks, it also introduces a lot more possibilities and new tasks. For example, Internet messaging allows us to spend a lot less time for each message, but it also allows us to send more messages within the same time. It's also cheap, so we are free to set our own limits (which we are pretty bad at).

ZoomZoomZoom 12y ago

Quite an interesting read, but it's just stating the obvious repeatedly. Time equals money. And of course, with slower economics coupled with ever-increasing competition of the global market money becomes more valuable. But why do we feel so? It seems, there are some socio-cultural drivers for this need of the resources. People tend to want same things their neighbours have, or more. Today you feel your neighbour is not just someone living across the fence, but also someone you've just chatted on Skype (across the continents). Our sense of what Normal is is based on the cultural environment we're living in. And with technological progress, modern communications and mass media this sense skews towards images propagated by those who are involved in producing more of this kind of information i.e. western world. This flip side of this process is what might have looked like a decent living now seems less so. When you live in the area with life expectancy about 60 years and suddenly you realize your friends live somewhere where average is 74, you become more stressed to maximize your efforts. So my idea is that most people who work extra hours do so not to get rich, but trying to avoid ending up worse than average. So what is the way we can free our time so we could sit on the "park benches with pretty girls" more often? The only obvious answer I see is to improve the overall life quality of the poorest. This sounds frighteningly lefty, but this notion is based on the realization of one of humanity's ultimate goals: providing personal freedom for everybody to do what person feels preferable for him. The non-destructive way of achieving it is taking off the stress and fears of less income-maximizing life style. When you're certain you still will be well fed and able to afford medical assistance even without extra-hours at work you'll be more inclined to do what fulfils you as a person. At this point it's natural to discuss the old issues of exploiting social care and parasitic lifestyle in market economy, which might be possible in societies with high social guarantees. This is an axiological issue and answers depend on personal senses of equity and sympathy, and it's a hot topic on its own. However, scientific and technological progress is what I think the only plausible potential way of improving the overall life conditions thus leaving more time for leisure. *Some context on happiness vs inequality: Paul Alois. Income Inequality and Happiness: Is There a Relationship? www.lisdatacenter.org/wps/liswps/614.pdf Shigehiro Oishi, Selin Kesebir and Ed Diener. Income Inequality and Happiness. http://www.factorhappiness.at/downloads/quellen/S13_Oishi.pdf http://www.factorhappiness.at/downloads/quellen/S13_Oishi.pd...

12y ago

Thriptic 12y ago

This piece resonated with me strongly. I am currently down in Florida with my parents on a two week break from work for the holidays. This is the first stretch of time off from work I have taken in 2-3 years which involved more than a day or two out of the lab in Boston (I have accrued 8 weeks of paid time off and in addition my employer has effectively told me I can take as much time off as I want). There is a nice pool where I am, a beach, unlimited booze, other fun amenities, and yet I found myself complaining to my best friend last night on gchat that I have been feeling anxious and somewhat bored / unhappy for most of the trip. I feel like I should be spending this scarce free time better learning python and facilitating my career switch from bio E into data science; I don't want to eat out because that will harm my ability to cut weight for powerlifting (my main hobby); and when I am not trying to code or work on lab work, I spend many hours a day looking for gyms / in the gym. I effectively am attempting to do what I do every day (work from morning until I sleep punctuated with some time spent lifting) and am feeling miserable because I am not doing it as well as I would be able to do it at home. Last night I was checking how much it would cost for me to change my departure date so that I could go home early and use my vacation days more effectively studying. Part of this angst is driven by the fact that while I love my family and enjoy spending time with them, I feel angry that this is how I am forced to use my special large break. I am never able to spend time with my friends. I see my best friend and close high school friends maybe once or twice a year for 2-3 days. They are scattered across the midwest and simply don't have any vacation days to spend hanging out with me. My college friends in the midwest invited me to spend New Years with them, but they admitted that they would be working the entire week and would only be able to hang out with me for about a day, so I declined. My friends from work are in the same situation as me and don't have time to go on a trip. As this article correctly points out, I realize that I have no right to complain as these are completely self-imposed behaviors and though processes, but to be honest I'm not sure what else to do with myself or my time. I sometimes ask why I work the hours I do; is this really the best way to live my life? While I realize that the answer is probably no, I don't know what else to do, and so I keep doing it.

dennisgorelik 12y ago
Fulfilling work could actually be the best way to live your life. Why not?

collyw 12y ago

"American men toil for pay nearly 12 hours less per week, on average, than they did 40 years ago—a fall that includes all work-related activities, such as commuting and water-cooler breaks." Only being 40 I can't really say for sure, but was it not they case that one man would provide for a household 40 years ago, while now we generally have both partners working?

nickik 12y ago

Its simple, because we want to consume. People work hard and then buy a expensive car. Well you could have work less and drive a shitty old car. I dont understand what the mystery is. I myself could probebly get by with working 4 hours per day but I dont, I rather work 8 hours and buy myself cool computer shit and books.

niels_olson 12y ago
It's perhaps not so simple. I'm a pathology resident. My only interest in cars is to move my family around for the lowest cost (in time and money) per mile. My time costs a fair bit, and experience has taught me a new Honda every 200,000 miles is cheaper overall (in time and money) than used cars. Try finding a used Honda Accord without a salvage title. My work is dictated by the needs of various hospitals and clinics. Some days I work from 5 am to 11 pm and come in on the weekend to finish. Some days, like today, I'm on Hacker News at 9:30 am because I'm waiting for: * techs to pull some cases for my research project, * my batch of surgical cases to come out, and * tumor board at 11, which I prep'd for yesterday. I suppose I could be working on a rosalind.info problem right now, but I crushed one on the first attempt yesterday, so I'll delay that until this afternoon, probably after a 5 mile run through the San Diego zoo. I could be working with the videographer for my lab video (requested by some grants) but ... I don't want to. Although, I have 40 minutes, so maybe I could review the script. We save a fair bit but we also spend on lessons for the kids and an annual vacation. I'm always busy, because I want to wring every ounce of awesome I can out of life. There are a number of life lessons that go into this. Find work that you enjoy. Live within your means. Exercise. Get plenty of sunshine. Eat less. Set low expectations, you'll succeed more often and ultimately get further. Give employees specific, actionable tasks ("specific" may vary depending on who you're talking to, and learning where to draw that line is a life-long exercise). Learn how to modify your own behavior by modifying your environment. For example: throw away your TV. This will significantly reduce your exposure to advertising. Similarly, subscribe to a good music service: you'll avoid the ads and your taste will drift away from the mainstream toward whatever you genuinely enjoy. Avoid the news. There's so much news that someone else will know whatever's going on and you're ignorance will give them an opportunity to tell you. All of a sudden, you're having a valuable conversation. I have adopted Knuth's position: other people make it their job to stay on top of things. My job is to get to the bottom.

branchless 12y ago

Because land prices have rocketed because the banks lend based on both incomes so now both parents have to work to feed the rentiers.

nickik 12y ago

Another thing to consider is that the law is heavly focused on full employment and there are lots of benefits. This is true in almost all countrys, laber market regulation have a clear focus on this. We have no idea what the (abstract) free market laber time would be. For better or worse our economys have devloped into a kind of paradigm that is not focused on flexibilty. This has devloped in the industrialisation and should be more relaxed now. In some places (most places programmers work) working hourse are allready much more flexible.

adamzerner 12y ago

1) People seek purpose in their jobs. The jobs that provide this usually require an investment of time. 2) People seek status. Status comes from relative wealth and intelligence, which requires an investment of time. 3) People usually don't have the choice to trade money for time. You usually can't say, "I'm going to work 5 hours less per week and in return take a smaller salary". Hourly workers can (sort of) do this, but they're the ones who usually can't afford to do this. All that said, there still are plenty of opportunities to exchange money for more time and people (IMO irrationally) pass these opportunities up. Ex. paying for food instead of taking the time to cook, clean, shop. Ex. paying someone to clean your house. I'm not really sure what the explanation for this is.

Chronic30 12y ago
People fail to correctly value (1) the cost of these time saving services and (2) their own time. It's similar to how people will drive around to save 5 cents per gallon on gasoline. Usually, they will only end up saving a dollar. Or someone will make multiple trips to their car to unload all groceries (which can add significant time in apartment buildings) because they wanted to save 20 cents and not buy a paper/plastic bag during checkout. These little things add up in time.
- adamzerner 12y ago
  I think it's clear that people don't value these things properly. The interesting question is why. What are the underlying heuristics and biases? I'm posing the question, but I don't have a great answer to it.
  - pm90 12y ago
    Because most people don't think that deeply about these things. And while money can be easily quantified, its not the case with time. I think pg has an essay on this.
dllthomas 12y ago
In paying for these things, you're also giving up control, possibly leisure (some people enjoy cooking), and possibly quality. It can still certainly be a win, but you're not simply comparing prices of a fungible good.

tessierashpool 12y ago

the article starts out with (paraphrase) "decades and/or centuries ago, we expected tech would save us incredible amounts of time, but it didn't." if you had a computer in 1984, and somebody told you what processor speeds would be in 2014, you might have expected all software to run flawlessly by now. as it is, everybody has more computing power in their pocket than the entire Apollo moon landing ever had, and we use this power to look at pictures of cats. there's probably an economic principle explaining both of these failed prediction categories. in either case, what people do with the new abundance has a lot more to do with what they're willing to tolerate in their lives than what the technology is actually capable of. great tech will only produce great results if you choose to do great things with it.

jotux 12y ago

Similar but a different perspective: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-trap/?_r=0 http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-tra... I personally strive to never, ever, say that I'm busy.

jmadsen 12y ago

In kind of general agreement with many comments below. If I can just take a stab at what I see as at least one of the ways we got here: During the previous recession after 9/11, many company managers jumped on the title of the book "More with Less" and started trying to stretch resources, people first and foremost. (I say jumped on the "title" because the book actually was a clever thesis that had nothing at all to do with making your workers do two jobs for the price of one). That recession was long and deep enough & quickly followed by an even worse one that the new job definitions became the new standards. There hasn't been a enough of a good economic period for labor to take back its decent conditions. I think a lot of it is as simple as that.