Time Based Work is Stupid
Posted by Sam at January 15th, 2008
My mind races a lot at night and sometimes I have profound strokes of wisdom. Usually in the morning, what I thought was so amazing the night before has become “well, duh” or doesn’t even make sense.
Tonight I was thinking about work and how it’s structured. It’s obvious that trading time for money is stupid. Time itself is of no value. When you trade time for money, you think that you’ve done your job by going and sitting in a desk for 8 hours a day.
The time for money system is perpetuated because misery loves company. Some chump is going to hire you and make you work 9 to 5 because that’s what he has to do - and damn all but he’s not going to let you have a more relaxed schedule then he has!
You’d think flex scheduling wouldn’t work in an environment where you have to deal with customers, but I think it can - it just requires a little more planning. Say you have five sales guys and you need people at work all day. You just figure out what hours are popular and what hours are unpopular. You adjust the pay based on popularity of the shift and compensate. So with a base pay of $10/hr. you might get an extra $2 in the morning, and $2 less in the middle of the day.
But wherever and whenever possible, pay should be based on performance.
Think about it.
Scenario A: Your work schedule is 9 to 5. You show up and know you have to stay until the day is done. You do whatever work you happen to get done and you go home.
Scenario B: Your work schedule is to complete 3 major tasks. You go in when you’ve woken up and become charged and excited for the day, you complete your tasks and you leave. It may take 6 hours and it may take 10.
I bet if more people did scenario B, not only would more work get done but people would end up working fewer hours. Employers might be skeptical at first - why am I paying for a full day’s work when they didn’t work a full day? But they shouldn’t be - they’re just stuck in the stupid 8 hours is the end-all be-all of work. You should pay for value, not to rent a body to fill a chair.
I believe that I will get more done if I just do 3 tasks a day. What’s my schedule? 3 tasks. Of course, you could adjust the number of tasks to how many you think you can reasonably get done in a good day’s work.
Since I work for myself, I’m going to try it for the next week or two. Instead of setting apart 8 hours of every day to work, I’m just going to plan out what needs to be done and do it. I’ll keep a pool of tasks and promote three to my schedule every morning.
I’ll report my results.
I agree, working by the hour is pointless. When someone tries to pay me by the hour I think it’s a joke. They want me to keep track of all the time I stare at the wall and day dream before my mind wanders back to what the project is? And the 4 pages of doodling that are inevitably going to occur before I draw anything productive? Because if I only get paid for the time I’m productive who’s going to pay me for the time it takes to get ready to be productive?
bec
I’m not sure that works in retail. Customers aren’t completely predictable. Today my store was dead but last Wednesday I was swamped, but only in the morning, and the usual lunch rush never showed.
With a desk job I completely agree with that idea which is why most desk jobs are salary instead of hourly, but on the same note, you can’t complain if it takes 12 hours a day for a week to finish a project. Most people would agree with this idea as long as it means less time at work, as soon as something becomes too challenging and requires more time and attention than 40hrs/week, suddenly their pay isn’t fair and they want more.
The bottom line is most people will always think they deserve more pay for less work regardless of the structure. But do you really want to live in France?
Paint Junkie
Another question I have is how many jobs really are task-based? I mean, people who need step-by-step directions are usually pretty cheap employees, and those are the only ones who could have a specific number of tasks to accomplish every day, right?
Prestone
Interestingly, but I agree with the post and the 3rd comment.
There is another problem when you’re not the boss: you could be payed less if a task is estimated as being easy to do, but actually it’s very difficult.
Vasea Pupkin
The first problem is that you are being far to rational and reasoned in your argument. People don’t work like that. May i draw your attention to the classic Hawthorne Studies of the Bank Wiring Room of Westinghouse Corp. The upshot proved to be that changing in variables matters less than the being shown interest by others - as in “value me”.
And then there is the “Protestant Work Ethic” which distils down to you have to find work tough, if it isn’t hard then it’s not proper work.
As my father used to tell me, “Don’t sit down on the job, it’s not supposed to be easy”. i never could work out that sort of mentality.
So, expect work to be tough; expect it to be least likeable; expect it to be inconvenient; expect to be at everyones beck and call (even if you are the boss). Feel like you are suffering and stressed out of your tree. Got all those? Good, then you are working. Kinda odd view, ain’t it?
TasHammer
Agree! I work at a place which shall remain nameless for now (nationwide, everyone knows it). We have 2 sets of employees doing virtually the same job, but they belong to different unions, so they are treated differently on pay.
One group is salaried, and if they go over eight hours, they get time and a half based on their salary (you know Salary/2080=hourly rate).
The other group has their task evaluated every two years. Based on the amount of time their task takes during this evaluation period, their task is rated, and their pay is based solely upon that rating. (We can give them extra tasks, but we have to pay them for it.)
Surpisingly enough, the “hourly” employees regularly use 10-15% OT.
The Evaluated employees regularly take less time than what their job was evaluated at, because once their done, they get to go home. They get their $xxx per day whether it takes 2 hours or 12 hours.
I sure hope upper management figures out a way to get everyone working on the evaluated side. We could save billions.
TMoney
I just stumbled onto your blog from Slashdot. Really interesting content. Anyway, I totally agree with this article. And I feel this very well may be the future of how work is scheduled. I’d definitely love this type of job more; I do work for my dad and get paid $10/hr. Now sometimes I’m doing something such as setting up something for him on his network that takes me literally fifteen minutes. To make it easy I always round to the nearest fifteen minutes while clocking in. (They are equal to $2.50.) That means that I would get paid $2.50 for something that very well could be the difference between life and death for his company. Now this type of thing is negotiated because as I have said he’s my father. But were I NOT working for him and were in the same situation, this would not be good. I also have some times when I need to load up a computer with his customized Linux distribution. That will take a few hours, and isn’t extremely essential. Do I want to be paid less? Of course not, but even I feel that getting paid $30 to set up one computer can be a bit ridiculous. Further, even though a lot of it is waiting, I doubt most bosses would allow me to take a walk to the Pizza store next door, eat a slice, and come back without clocking out even if my work is doing itself.
Brian Recchia