We spend a lot of our lives doing nothing. Doing nothing is usually viewed as wasting time, and there are two ways it can be done. When you waste your own time, it’s called idleness. When others waste your time, it’s called waiting. I enjoy idleness. I don’t like waiting.
Wasted time is not empty time. Empty time is meditation. You could argue that meditation is about subjective time standing still. Your productive potential, in theory, is either preserved or enhanced through empty do-nothing. Wasted time is also not the same as recovery, relaxation or recharge time. That’s about using this minute to make another minute more potent.
Wasting time requires putting pointlessly dissipative activity into it. An annoying argument with an idiot about something that doesn’t matter, that ends up frustrating you, is a good example. You actively destroy the productive potential of time. I like doing that sometimes.
Many are disturbed and offended by the very idea of wasting time. There is a beautiful bit in John Updike’s Rabbit series, where Rabbit Angstrom’s young girlfriend Jill accuses him of having a “Puritan fear of waste.”
I used to be like Rabbit. Over the years, I’ve gotten increasingly comfortable with wasting time through idleness. I am still not comfortable with others wasting my time by having me wait, however. I suppose I am not evolved or ego-free enough for that.
Our culture of work is designed around wasting time for others. And it is not just waiting in queues, or waiting for important people who are running late for their appointment with you. That’s merely status-waiting. Robert Levine, in The Geography of Time, has a beautiful discussion of the interplay of status and waiting in different cultures.
I am talking about more deep-rooted ways of wasting time.
Paychecks for creative information work, unlike paychecks for hands-on or routine information work, are not about buying work. A paycheck represents an option, but not an obligation, on the part of an employer, to get value out of purchased time.
This so offends the work ethic of many that they’d rather manufacture highly-energetic and apparently productive ways of wasting time than enjoyable and openly pointless ways. Those who insist on the former love busywork. Those who prefer the latter are part of the retired at work movement. Stanley Bing is the Messiah of this movement.
Employers recognize this deep-seated need to be “productive,” and encourage cultures of busywork over cultures of retired-at-work. This despite the fact that enlightened employers of information workers know they are buying time options rather than time stock, and that those comfortable being retired at work are more productive. So they take on the burden of creating busywork support systems.
Since busywork is by definition unproductive, you cannot find material evidence that it produces anything of value. You must look for social proof. Those who manufacture busywork therefore, do so in social ways, creating collective anxiety complexes to validate the value of each others output in circular ways.
Those who are caught in busywork economies usually recognize that they are really in a holding pattern, waiting for something to actually happen in their lives. But most of the time, they manage to forget it. That’s why they need a good deal more recharge/recovery time than either the productive or the idle. Busywork is vastly more exhausting than either. Waiting is existentially costly. Fred Wilson once said that the iPad is about reducing waiting costs, and he is right. The device lowers status-waiting costs in queues and waiting rooms.
Isn’t it ironic, by the way, that the industrial age created a proliferation of “waiting rooms?”
Unfortunately the iPad does nothing to lower busywork costs.
Fortunately, idleness costs nothing. You do not need to lower the costs of idleness because there aren’t any. If I ever run a big organization, I’ll have idling rooms at random locations, instead of waiting rooms in front of the offices of important executives.
The non-paycheck world is not different, since the same work-ethic anxieties operate everywhere. There is enough room in the murky art of setting hourly consulting rates and pricing project proposals that you can adopt any time-wasting philosophy your anxieties demand. I’ve met consultants who bombard their clients with more busywork output than the most refined bureaucrat, and I’ve met other consultants who spend most of their time doing nothing, but still earn about the same as the ones who manufacture paper. For the latter model, you don’t need to rely on complex global labor arbitrage schemes of dubious morality to create your 4-hour work week. Most kinds of creative information work allow you to do so.
In the world of work, the great divide between those who choose to waste time by waiting, and those who choose to do so through idleness, is far more important than the more nominal divide between paycheck types and free agent types.
On the idle side of the fence, I have met many who like 10 hours of idleness for 30 hours of productive work. These are the high-energy dynamos. I’ve also met others, like myself, who like a ratio of about 30 hours of idleness to every 10 hours of productive work. I am fine with people who follow either pattern, though the low-idleness types tend to run ahead and leave me behind.
It is waiting that bothers me. Others usually don’t know how to waste my time properly. I have to do it myself.
Our methods of measuring and valuing time are very primitive. As information work becomes increasingly about creativity and ideas, the time-value-of-money equation is breaking down badly. But those who are comfortable with idleness have an advantage over those who enjoy waiting.