Ever wonder why, with every new piece of so-called productivity enhancing technology we adopt, we just end up with more, not less work? Slack was supposed to get rid of email – only now we find time to email and reply to our co-workers on Slack. Email was supposed to free us from reading through lengthy paper documents everyday, but we now email ourselves the pdfs home to read in the quiet hours after work. And smart phones? Don’t even get me started. A lot of us find ourselves replying to our bosses on the bus, while putting our kids to sleep, or even, God forbid, on the toilet.
Out of Office, a new book by journalists Charlie Wartzel and Anne Helen Petersen, explores why productivity culture has been so successful at making us working more, not less. And with millions either quitting their jobs or having to work from home, they ask how we can capitalize on this moment for the good of workers, not our bosses.
I talked to Warzel and Petersen over – what else? – Zoom the week their book launched.
Everybody seems very fed up with their jobs right now. Why do you think that is?
Charlie Warzel: For years, people in knowledge work have wanted flexibility in their jobs. And they were told by their bosses that offices are this nucleus of productivity that holds the fabric of our organization together.
And then the pandemic comes, we all get forced into this experiment, and productivity doesn’t suffer – workers pull it off. And I think there’s this realization: “Okay, so, if that was bullshit, what else about this arrangement is bullshit?”
Anne Helen Petersen: All of these people quitting – what is that if not a general strike? People are coming together to say: We will not work as waitresses for this pay anymore. We will not work as childcare workers for this sort of treatment. There’s something more to life than my ability to reply to emails. If people can harness that energy, then it could change the way that work is moving forward.
I loved the bit of the book where you talk about how many hours of work people spend actually doing their core jobs.
CW: That was a wild thing. We weren’t like “confess how much you actually work.” And yet somewhere in the survey, 80% of the people were like, “I just got to tell you, I only do real work three hours a week, like when my kids go to bed on Thursday night”, or “Oh, shit, I didn’t do anything this week.”
This book came at a very annoying time for me, because I was reading it during an exceptionally busy work week. I was like, “Yes! I’m going to redesign my life!” But then I was like, “Oh, wait, I need money.”
AHP: Ideally, we still get money. But how can you figure out how to work less, but still make sure you are doing [what’s required of you]? I think it’s possible. If you can figure out the balance so that when you are working, the work is great and when you’re not working, you’re not thinking about your work all the time.
Do you think it’s possible for somebody who is on a minimum wage?
AHP: The fetishization of work is a very bourgeois thing. Office workers are very bad at understanding themselves as labour. [Their work] is an expression of self, instead of the work that they do. Whereas other jobs have something that says: “This is how many hours I work a day. And when I’m done, I’m done.” When I was a nanny, there was no way for me to think about being a better nanny, I could have gone to classes but it would have had no influence on how much I was paid when my job was done.
Now that I think about it … often when I have tried to work less, I have felt like I don’t have a personality anymore.
AHP: We – especially millennials – have poured ourselves into school, work, success – if you take away some of those parts of your identity, what is left?
CW: It’s like, really fucking traumatic, that self audit. When I started doing it, I said to myself: I’m one of the luckiest people! I have a job I like, I am succeeding in it, I’m marching up the career ladder. And yet at the core [I’m] pretty miserable. But when I really started doing the inventory of [my work life balance], it was deeply upsetting. I didn’t know what my hobbies were. I realised I was like a ladder-climbing robot to some degree.
Well, yes! Even when I try to work less, I spend most of my time thinking about how I’m going to be a better worker. What time I will go to bed to be fresh for work? Should I have a drink the night before work? Should I go for a run to make my mind clearer for work?
AHP: That’s a perfect example of work being the primary axis of your life, right? All decisions are made so that you can be better at work. When you de-centre work, you can be like, “Okay, I’m not drinking tonight because I just want to feel good.”
You have a section in the book about how corporations give us “wellness activities” instead of time off, and it made me laugh. I’m staying with a friend at the moment, and she has been working non-stop; she has a very demanding job in the banking sector. I came into the kitchen earlier, and she took out her headphones and said she couldn’t talk because she was doing a company wellness exercise – she was meditating on a screen that she’d already been looking at for the last 12 hours.
AHP: Totally, that’s the worst example of companies trying to give lip service to balance with these programs: the best way to promote wellness in your organisation is to encourage people not to work – but that’s counter to the capitalist ethos.
Are you happy now that you have both de-centered work in your lives?
CW: I find it very similar to going to therapy or to exercise: there isn’t one day when someone says, “Congratulations, you’re in shape, you never have to do this again.”
I have weeks when I relapse into my old work habits, where work is the only way I can feel self-worth or value; I slip back into the warm security blanket of letting work define me. That deprogramming takes a lot of time. I am happier, but I don’t want to make it sound like a fairy tale. Like anything, you’re gonna have good days and bad days.
You say we’re at a crossroads. If we go one way, the pandemic and the shift to working from home for some people will present an opportunity to work 12-hour days under increasing surveillance. Or we have a chance to change our relationship with work. How do you take steps towards choosing the latter?
AHP: Institutions are going to be really resistant to changing their way of doing things. If that’s the case – if all of the signals show the way that you succeed in this organization is through burning yourself out and through removing all sorts of boundaries between life and work – leave that organization. Start looking for a different job now, because the relationship is broken.
CW: But I also think it’s exciting – I spoke to an HR consultant who tries to diagnose toxic corporate cultures. And they were saying the one constant across industries right now is that they’re freaking out. Superiors are scrambling – they don’t want these mass resignations. I think we’re starting to see glimmers of worker power in ways that we haven’t before.
And it doesn’t seem to just be office workers either – the hospitality industry is quitting en masse; teachers are quitting; nurses are quitting.
CW: It’s bigger than remote work. It’s this type of reckoning happening everywhere. It’s the conceptualization of what these jobs ought to mean to us, and what we owe [our bosses] and what they owe us.
I bet loads of people are saying to you, “You’ve got a Substack newsletter, you wrote a book together, Anne has recently published a seven part series of articles in Vox. You’re always working!”
AHP: Now is a bad time, right? Because we’re doing all this press for work. So we’re doing work all the time.
CW: The difference for me is that before, I spent so much of my time performatively working. I would often not have anything to do between three o’clock and six when I left the office, and I would just sit around and fire off emails to make people feel like I was working, causing other work for other people. Walking up to people and having meetings about things that weren’t meetings. I don’t do that anymore.
