The Case Against Measuring Work in Hours

One of the more shocking transitions to "real life" for me has been the obsession with measuring work in hours. In this case, I'm talking about all jobs where you're required to work for a specified number of hours each day—not specifically hourly jobs. After all, whether you're salaried or hourly, you're most likely still bound to the clock. Let's talk about why that sucks. A Bit of Context You might be wondering where this rant originates. To be honest, it's something I've been thinking about since my GE days. After all, even salaried employees are bound to the clock. When I was at GE, we were required to show up for 40 hours a week. More realistically, as I've ranted before here and here, that requirement quickly shifted beyond 40 hours a week as minimum expectations were to show up from 8 to 5. When I went off to grad school, I was expecting to spend just as much time working or more. After all, that was my experience in undergrad. The difference being that I actually enjoyed most of undergrad, so I figured that would translate to graduate school. When I got to grad school, I had to get used to jumping from job to job in terms of funding. For awhile, the teaching positions were pretty good work. I was contracted to 20 hours a week, and I rarely crossed this boundary unless it was my choice. Eventually, I moved onto research where the rules changed again. 20 hours meant 20 hours which was fairly annoying given some of the points I'll outline in this article. The Problem with Hourly Work As you can see, whether you're hourly or salaried, you're always going to be bound to the clock. For whatever reason, our society is obsessed with hours as a measure of work, but how well do hours actually represent work? That's what I want to critique a bit today. Rate of Output My very first problem with hours as a measure of work is the reality that people don't work at the same rate. If we're both working on the same task under the same conditions, I might finish the task faster or slower than you. If I'm faster, I still have to work the same amount of hours. Now, I should mention that I'm a leftist, so I'm never going to get mad at my fellow workers who work faster or slower. However, what I am going to get mad at is the fact that employers are going to now exploit the rate at which I work for profit. Since I'm bound to the same amount of hours as everyone else, my heightened productivity just means more profits my boss. Type of Task Another issue I have with hourly work is that not everyone is working on the same task. It might just be that my job is inherently more difficult than my peers (or at least more difficult for me) which makes me look like I'm not as productive (see rate of output above). If I'm perceived as being less productive, I have to work harder than my peers to bridge the gap. Again, as a leftist, I'm never going to complain that my job is harder than my peers'. However, I am going to complain that employees get to use the number of hours card to compare me to my peers. If I have less output than my peers over the same span of hours, I must be bad at my job. Therefore, I have to work harder or longer to match output. Couple this with the rate of work argument above and we end up with quite the predicament. For example, perhaps the slowest work is on the hardest project and the fastest worker is on the easiest project. How do you think that plays out in the office? Hint: it doesn't work out well for either worker. Space for Breaks Yet another issue with hourly work is that it doesn't account for the ebb of flow or organic work. If I'm expected to work 40 hours a week, there will be times where I have to invent work to fill the time. This is particularly frustrating because it would have better to use this time for a break. That way, when the pressure is on, it's not unreasonable to work over 40 hours in a week. Unfortunately, in reality, hourly work is often defined using a lower bound. For example, if I say you're contracted to 40 hours a week, that becomes the minimum. During periods of stress, you may be expected to work many more than 40 hours in a week. In periods of relaxation, work must be generated to fill the space. Again, think about how this plays out for the fast worker on the easy project. Much of their time must be spent pretending to work. Meanwhile, the slow worker on the hard project is often working (unpaid) overtime to meet expectations. In either case, the workers could benefit from less of a focus on hours worked and more of a focus on some of the variables we've discussed thus far. Classification of Work Finally, the last issue I want to talk about is the classification of work. In other words, what counts as work and what doesn't? As someone who largely does brain labor (as opposed to manual labor), I find that much of the hours we're paid for are sort of "in-house" hours. These are hours that are directly tied to being seen in the office producing—regardless of the rate of production. In reality, brain labor is something that can and most certainly is done outside the office. When I am particularly stressed about work, I might put in several hours outside of work just thinking about a problem. Of course, these aren't paid hours because we don't value the types of work that don't directly result in production (see stay at home parents). I find this particularly frustrating as someone who is "neurodivergent" or "neuroatypical." After all, there seems to be this expectation that my brain is able to produce at a fixed rate at all times. Under an hourly schedule, I'm working way over my time limit thinking about ideas related to a project that go uncompensated. At the same time, I'm not able to motivate myself to work on something creative at will. Again, this type of work happens organically and cannot be forced. Similarly, there are tons of hours that when never get included in totals related to working hours. For instance, how many of you are able to count commutes in your work hours? How about lunches (where many are probably working lunches)? What about the time you spend getting ready in the morning? What about any time you spend meal prepping for the week? In my experience, none of those hours are considered work. How is that fair? Current Predicament As the last section may have alluded, there's an obvious reason why I wrote this article. In short, I work as both a teaching assistant and a research assistant. In my teaching role, I am contracted to 20 hours a week. Very rarely do I work 20 hours a week in this role, so when I'm asked to do something, I accept. In fact, there are often times where I voluntarily work up to and beyond those 20 hours to had more value to the course (see here). Previously, I had worked in a research role where the expectation was that I worked 20 hours a week every week on top of all of my other responsibilities as a grad student. As I've pointed out above, there are some reasons why this was frustrating. For instance, I likely spent more than 20 hours a week working that job because much of my free time was spent thinking about the job. Of course, those hours aren't valued, so I can't track them. Similarly, I don't tend to be motivated to work at regular intervals. Instead, I'm more of an ebb and flow kind of guy where work happens in larger focused chunks. Unfortunately, that makes me look lazy. As for rate of work, that's particularly frustrating for someone doing research. After all, research is often about failing and learning from that failure, so to map that process to hours of production is a nightmare. Overall, I find the concept of hours worked as a researcher or engineer one of the more frustrating problems with modern society. I can see why it might be useful as an upper bound, but it's more like a lower bound in my experience. Generally, if hours are necessary, I'd argue for a system more like my teaching job where hours function as a general guide and not some target to be met. In the former case, I often feel significantly more motivated to do a good job because that extra time is devoted to my autonomy as an educator. Imagine that. With that said, that's all I wanted to talk about today. I could have ranted about this topic a bit more, but then I probably wouldn't finish my work for the week. As a result, let's call it for now!

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