How long is a working day?
How long is a working day? Ask the question to anyone you meet and most will say 8 hours. Ask children too, they can often give very surprising and apt answers. (they can also give “interesting” answers to WHAT you do at work).
What then is a job to be done during the day? Do you work all the time?
Do you know when you have finished working? Is it a certain time or when your task is done? How do you know when it’s ready? Is it ready at 5 pm?
If one day you have to be at work until 15, can you finish by then?
I don’t have the answers to the questions above. I can only see one thing and that is that the more time we spend at work the less we get done…
If you have time to finish an assignment by 15 instead of at 17, if so, what is it due to? It’s the same task that would otherwise have taken you to 17 another day.
The answer lies in prioritization. And your priorities are in your head. Everything is in our heads.
Not letting their employees (read wage slaves) leave their workplaces to do other things during the working day is also on the employer’s mind. It is based on a mistrust of employees: that they would use my money to enrich themselves. This is exactly what employees do by being ineffective at work. It’s when we sit down and read the newspaper during working hours, read private emails and respond to them. So what exactly is the difference? The only difference is that we stay at the workplace and look busy. All it takes is a stack of papers and a phone next to your ear for everyone to think you’re working. You could fool me anyway….
Most things flow together of leisure and work more and more. For example, we use Facebook for our customer contacts, the blogs we read are involved in our work and our skills.
Where is the line between what is work and what is not work anymore?
What IS a job to be done? How do we measure it and how do we measure whether the work is done in the most efficient way for the organization and the individual? Is a working day 8 hours?
How then have we come to the conclusion that 8 hours is the amount of time we need to do a job? There are of course industries where this may still be justifiable, eg industry, but many other industries would benefit from at least starting to think about how long a working day can really be.
The M Swamp
A survey was conducted by the consulting company Ming Company and their report “Working life in the office” shows that only two (2) hours a day are spent actually working. That is We use 25% of our working day to do what we are there for. So what do we do for the rest of the day? According to the report, we are treading around in the “M-swamp” where meetings, emails and measurements have taken over at the expense of the core mission itself, which is summed up as: “Why do we exist?”
This is what a working day looks like according to the report:
• 45 percent of the day we “communicate”. There are meetings that must be prepared and then they must be sat down. We “communicate at the coffee, the printer, the doorway, the corridor and everywhere we can stop and pass the time.
• 20 percent is used to develop this culture. In other words, the employees are then trained in how to work and, of course, a report must be written on everything.
• 10 percent of the time at work is used for transfers of all kinds.
• 25 percent (that is, what is left) is used to answer the question “Why do we exist?” That is then the employees work to deliver services, service and stuff to those who once thought the company existed for them, ie the customers).
Only 2 hours each day are spent doing the actual work. The rest of the time (6 hours every day) is used to coordinate things, inform everything and everyone, agree with everything and everyone, sit out of meetings or just mess around.
If a job can be completed the day before, why should I be ineffective for a whole day? Can someone tell me about it?
There are those who are able to measure the results of what they have done and in this way they can show the time they put in to get their results. Do you create more value by doing something for longer at work or is it just to seek confirmation from the boss and your colleagues?
Isn’t it better to be productive instead of looking busy all the time?
Or is it like this:
As long as the employer pretends that we get paid well, we can pretend that we do a good job.
If you were yourself, how long would you work days and perhaps the most important question: what would you fill your days with? It is easy to fall into the trap that working days should be between 8 and 5, regardless of whether you are employed or self-employed. As a self-employed person, it is just as easy to fill your days with meaningless tasks that lead nowhere, but only keep you busy.
It’s business, not busyness.
How long is your working day? Do you want 8 hour workdays that you don’t even know if you can fill with something productive?
We are also learning blocks toys marked, so when we choose to step out of the employment quagmire, we often go right into the self-employment quagmire where we function exactly the same. We sit for 8 hours at our computers and our desks, the largest part of which is filling in to “do” our 8 hours. Who’s fooling who here?
We still work as if we were employees – that is, our employer cheats on hours and pretends to be busy. The difference here is that now we are fooling ourselves.
Then when we have finished our 8 hours, the other work as a self-employed person begins bookkeeping and other paperwork that belongs “outside” the regular work. Now we are up for more hours than when we were employed. And we still haven’t made the big bucks and gotten the freedom we wanted when we decided to start our own.