This is what happens when geek toys take over the world but geeks themselves don’t get to decide how to use them:
Tech makes working harder, not easierMost U.S. workers say they feel rushed on the job, but they are getting less accomplished than a decade ago, according to newly released research....
The biggest culprit is the technology that was supposed to make work quicker and easier, experts say.
[from Reuters via CNet News.com]
You can’t blame the technology for this: computers are still just stupid machines that do what we tell them to do. All the cool tech would make work quicker and easier if the suits who make corporate decisions didn’t interpret “hey, workers are working quicker and easier” to mean that “hey, we can give workers more work to do.”
Of course, it only takes one company in which one person makes the decision to pile more work on suddenly more productive workers before every company has to do that: you know, competition and all. Can’t let anyone get ahead of you.
But this is hardly anything new, as the Reuters piece seems to imply:
Unlike a decade ago, U.S. workers are bombarded with e-mail, computer messages, cell phone calls, voice mails and the like, research showed.
A decade ago things were better? Hell no. Fifteen years ago I was witness to magazine publishing moving over to a desktop publishing model -- it was supposed to make the production cycle go more smoothly that the old, lower-tech methods. But what happened when a round of corrections from editors went from taking 24 hours, because page layouts done by hand had to be sent to an outside production house, to an hour, as in-house designers and production geeks could pump out a corrected page from QuarkXpress in a matter of minutes? Did we get the other 23 hours to goof off? Of course not. Whereas once everyone was happy to see one round of layouts for corrections before they were sent to the printer, now everyone wants to see three rounds of corrections. Now editors insist upon making ridiculous corrections -- like rewriting an entire story -- at the very last minute, because the technology allows them to do that.
Reuters again:
Expectations that technology would save time and money largely haven't been borne out in the workplace, said Ronald Downey, professor of psychology who specializes in industrial organization at Kansas State University. "It just increases the expectations that people have for your production," Downey said.Finally, there's a trend among companies to measure job performance like never before, said Challenger. "There's a sense that no matter how much I do, it's never enough," he said.
Bingo. At least Reuters gets that right.
Geeks and Xers get derided as slackers, like that’s a bad thing. But we’ve seen firsthand what happens particularly to smart, competent people who do a good job, do it well, and do it fast: we get more work to do. If our society valued leisure time more than it did, we would all be working four-hour days and getting as much done as we did 20 years ago in eight hours. Who can blame us for preferring not to ride that train?
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