We’re Waking Up A (Tiny) Bit To The 9-To-5 Lie And How Much People Really Work

If you’re doing quick math at home, that means a lot of well-compensated “knowledge” workers are probably working 20–24 hours/week and getting paid for 40, which makes already-affluent white, middle-class executives pout like teenage girls who got cut from Varsity Volleyball. It’s comical to watch these things unfold and claim “adulthood” is even a reasonable way to describe life. This obviously has a lot of different repercussions and I won’t go through them all, but I will say a couple of quick things here and there: <ol> <li>The main thing going on here is meetings: As you rise up a “knowledge” work chain, you get called into more meetings, which can consume 4–6 hours of your day. Meetings can be productive and/or useful, but most of know that often they are not. There’s a weird perversion around meetings where people of a certain rank want to be surrounded by others of that rank, so they don’t let execution-level people into the meetings, and then they fail to communicate what happened at the meetings (because they went to ever more meetings), so… basically the whole thing makes no sense. But if you are an execution-level worker and you don’t get invited to meetings, and all your bosses just sit in meetings all week, then of course you will only work 20 or so hours. What else would you even know to do or be working on? The people tasked with providing that direction are sitting in meetings.</li> <li>The other thing is that work has gotten easier: SaaS and platforms and ways to automate some tasks, etc. Work isn’t really that hard and a lot of assigned tasks are more meaningless than we let on.</li> </ol> <a href="https://tedbauer.medium.com/were-waking-up-a-tiny-bit-to-the-9-to-5-lie-and-how-much-people-really-work-44aca27fc768">Learn More</a>