The more I work in a regular job, what Americans call 9-5, and is usually 7-3 or 8-4 in Slovenia, the more I think that jobs that are simply time based are an evil theft of time from people. It seems like we’ve all been conditioned that we must work in specific chunks of time for 8 hours a day about 40 hours a week.
“How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”
— Charles Bukowski, Factotum
Having a full time job and being self employed it really made me question it. Why should presence some place just to fill the time quota define whether someone has “worked enough”? If I solve a problem, create something of value, or deliver results, does it matter how much or how little time I spent at an actual desk?
This is especially poignant when talking about creative work. Value isn’t in time spent but in problem solved. If anything, spending less time to solve a problem should be rewarded or seen as more valuable, not less. It repulses me how some people ask about say design and then when they are delivered the draft, they say “oh thank you, I’ll hire my nephew” or some similar rubbish, “who will do it for free or much less, seems easy enough” as though it doesn’t matter how much longer the nephew will need to make the design and it won’t be half as professional as the pro can do it, even with all the AI tools nowadays available. And then half a year later that nephew has nothing going from that job, the business will have troubles in the future for not having done the templates and due diligence to make sure all the considerations are met, as a professional would have done, and where the proper designer will have to go through the trouble of fixing all the mess that the nephew has made. But I digress.
Another thing highly annoying and problems causing with the modern (or so) conception of jobs tied to time, especially the 8 hour jobs, is that millions of people sit in cars during the “rush hour”, wasting time, fuel and energy, all because the system says we must work at the same time. It’s incredibly destructive. And I don’t mean it merely in environmental sense. It destroys villages because everyone has to travel to work somewhere in the city, it destroys the road systems that were devised well before this kind of a job phenomenon as we have now, and it creates traffic jams and necessity to not just maintain but create urbanist and road designs that will alleviate but never solve the problem of too much traffic. And of course, how much creativity and minds are lost before the day even properly starts?
Even when a person gets to come to work though, what does one get? A ton of paperwork. Many roles exist not because they create real value, but because they simply fit into a system that doesn’t care about a person, but rewards time wasted, not outcome created. Think of pointless meetings, bureaucracy, endless email threads, overload of paper or digital forms one must submit, new workshops for new compliance softwares to be compliant with, etc. – all justified with “but they need to be at work!”
We have to be truthful. The 8 hour schedule comes from the era where work really was tied to machines, where being present meant that the machine was running. But most of us aren’t clocking into factories anymore. Work today is often knowledge, creativity, problem solving – not gears and conveyor belts.
Sad thing is that this was inherited also from a worldview where work equaled virtue, where busyness equaled worth. This belief still haunts how we think about schedules, hours and productivity – even when it doesn’t make sense for modern life anymore.
What if work was more meritocratic, about results, not mere attendence? Flexible schedules, asynchronous collaboration, outcome-based compensation… suddenly work becomes something we do instead of something we endure.
Work shouldn’t be a measure of where you are on the clock – it should be a measure of what you create, solve, contribute, where you truly add value.
Isn’t it time we stopped treating time like the only currency of labor? Isn’t it time for Governments to stop hyperregulating work relations and let them be market and merit driven? Isn’t it time that we stop being treated like robots and instead begin to treat each other as human beings?
Additional resource: https://youtu.be/7uonatLO0YI