White-collar employees 'work' (periods of focused concentration) a lot less than 40 hours
There's definite truth to this, but it's also true that, as many hackers have attested, moments of downtime and wandering attention are often where new ideas come from. Sample:
I suspect a lot of people aren't sure what's the top idea in their mind at any given time. I'm often mistaken about it. I tend to think it's the idea I'd want to be the top one, rather than the one that is. But it's easy to figure this out: just take a shower. What topic do your thoughts keep returning to? If it's not what you want to be thinking about, you may want to change something.
For me anyway, a surprisingly large amount of time spent staring at walls or out windows may be "work" time.
In addition, I'm a grant writing consultant (see www.seliger.com if you're curious), and a lot of a given day consists of pitching new work to callers, or editing, or waiting for someone to edit what I've written, and so forth. That stuff often isn't sustained attention per se, but it is necessary to the function of the business!
Can't that kind of "work" be done just as well while doing yardwork or cooking or similar things? I don't see a strong reason to confine employees for 40 hours a week for that.
This relates to a personal pet issue of mine -- schools like to run surveys asking how much time you spend on homework. But, as far as I can see, the question is ill-posed.
Take a non-hypothetical example: I'm given a math assignment, with the problem "prove (something complicated)". I look over the assignment, think for a few seconds about the problem, think "nah, that won't work", fail to come up with a different approach, and file it away somewhere in favor of surfing the net and watching my roommates play old console RPGs.
Days later, a new approach occurs to me and I come back to the assignment. This time I'm able to prove (something complicated). Writing out the proof takes 20 minutes.
How long did I spend on that question? I wasn't able to do the work immediately, so "21 minutes" can't be right. But I probably didn't actually need to spend several days having it in the back of my mind either. Maybe if I'd been confined in a little room with just me and the assignment I would have had it done in two hours, or five (really frustrating) hours. There's just no way to measure how long I spent "working". My quality of life goes up if I take the approach of "don't sit down to work until the solution serendipitously occurs to you", but, in an analogous situation, my boss might be a lot happier confining me in a room to sit "unproductively" for 5 hours and write ("productively") for 20 minutes.
There's definite truth to this, but it's also true that, as many hackers have attested, moments of downtime and wandering attention are often where new ideas come from. Sample:
I suspect a lot of people aren't sure what's the top idea in their mind at any given time. I'm often mistaken about it. I tend to think it's the idea I'd want to be the top one, rather than the one that is. But it's easy to figure this out: just take a shower. What topic do your thoughts keep returning to? If it's not what you want to be thinking about, you may want to change something.
For me anyway, a surprisingly large amount of time spent staring at walls or out windows may be "work" time.
In addition, I'm a grant writing consultant (see www.seliger.com if you're curious), and a lot of a given day consists of pitching new work to callers, or editing, or waiting for someone to edit what I've written, and so forth. That stuff often isn't sustained attention per se, but it is necessary to the function of the business!