Sign me up for the 1-hour plan, please.

I completely agree with you. I have had numerous white collar jobs in varying aspects of accounting, finance, and consulting. All contain large amounts of wasted time on a daily basis. A few jobs had a “busy” season, which required 7-9 PM quiting times and working Saturdays. The extra time basically became a social hour and a way to “prove” you were worthy of the job. Maybe 10-20% of that extra time was used for work, and most of that work wasn’t very valuable. It is pathetic. This is why job cuts in white collar workers is possible in a downturn. It’s not because paperwork drops off, as that drop off is negligible. In fact you might have more with all the chaos in the economy, people not paying, etc.

@ Philip
I don’t think Jacob is talking about a flash, as much as a short hot burn. Example you start on a project and crank out a good 2 hours of work and then mindlessly fill an hour or so. Then you go to lunch. When you get back you spend 15-20 minutes shuffling things around and then do another hour of work. After this you talk about the big game or what happened on The Office last night around the holy coffee maker. Then you sit down to work again and maybe do 15 minutes. You look at the clock and realize you only have a half-hour, which allows no real time to get serious work done so you read the “amazing” article your boss emailed you about managing your time…then home. That’s a normal white collar creative day. As you can see you could be home by noon or be done by 10-11 AM if you just did the work at home and didn’t waste time getting dressed or driving to work. I know this because I have had that job and have a current white collar job that allows me to work from home 2 days a week. Amazingly, I get as much done in those 2 days by noon, as I get done when forced to go into the office for a normal work day.

Obviously, I would take the 1-hour plan.

A lot of creative types actively participate in this kind of highly inefficient work. I saw this in graduate school and continue to see it in academia in general.

The breakdown I observe goes like this.

~5% of people are 9-5ers

They get as much as possible, or as little as required, done in an 8 hour day and go home. These people tend to either hate their job or have other things to do with their lives besides work.

~90% of people are time dilators

They take 5-6 hours of work and do it in 12. The rest of the time is spent going to coffee, having lunch, chatting with friends, napping, working out or otherwise goofing off. Or most importantly of all, making sure that everyone around them knows just how long they work. They all think that they are on the fast track to success because they ‘work’ as much as the workaholics. On the brighter side they usually quite satisfied with their jobs. I imagine that this feeling disappears when they finally realize that they are never going to make it past post-doc.

~5% of people are true workaholics

They work continuous strings of 12 hour days filled with insane levels of productivity. They will probably be the ones that actually wind up becoming tenured faculty and principle investigators. They either have no life whatsoever outside of their job or when they do take time off they party so hard that they can’t even remember it. On the brighter side, these people tend to really love their job and will probably love doing what they do until they retire or die.

If I am going to work for a salary or set amount each month, I want an employer who will describe the job and entailments, and then walk away with me being the responsible person for that job. I will accomplish the job with all it’s entailments within the month’s timeframe. I realize this describes more or less a management job. In other words, what ever comes up or needs to be done, I have agreed to assume those responsibilites. The end result, be it profits for the employer, a certain accomplishment of progress, or other tangible measure is up to me to produce. I expect a certain amount of transfer of authority to myself and support from the employer, yet no interference with my actions.
This mirrors the formula of 1 hour or 8 hours. Hereby the time worked makes no difference, it is the result that is the measure of success. I have this type of situation now. In my apartment complex, which I fully manage, we have a partnership of five investors, including myself. I act as the full manager, and am responsible to the other four investors. All they see is the quarterly P&L and some other income documents from our accounting firm. I answer to them only if our expected profit is below par.
Therefore it can be compared to my working the one hour if I could do that, or a full day, if it took that. My schedule and requirements are solely my own. For me, I could not be fitted into an hourly job, where I had to be there at a desk or station even if there was nothing needing done.

The 8 hours per day, 40 hours per week concept is a leftover relic from a different time that will, unfortunately, take employers a great deal longer to learn how to forget.

Until then, most of us who work for someone else in a traditional, full-time job will just be stuck with time to fill during our scheduled work days.

I think most of you folks talking about shorter work weeks for the same amount of pay are missing the realities of working for corporations.
Back in the early 80’s the talk was that we could all work 20hrs per week with no loss in wages because the productivity gains that were coming would make up the difference. What happened? Corporations realised they could reduce the size of their workforce with no loss in production.
And once one corporation made that connection, the others had to follow suit or risk being driven out of business by their higher labout costs. Where I work, management keeps adding more to your responsibilities as the years go by. The more you accomplish, the more you are expected to do.

Fred

I lead a computer helpdesk. I used to design/configure networks. In our organization, doing more/better work is rewarded by having more work assigned to you while the less productive people are given less to do, so the incentive for being productive is not there. Thus it was better for me to switch to the helpdesk.

Helpdesk environment is like a fire station. We put out fires and make suggestions on how to avoid future fires. Technically that would mean we put ourselves out of business, but inept planning of new systems means the helpdesk has a never-ending job.

@tollermaus – Are you saying you’re not going to buy my “eHow article collection IPO” based on a P/E of 200 and two data points? 😀

I just found this site a few days ago and have found it quite interesting so I guess I will make my first post on this topic.

I have a Ph.D. in economics and oddly enough, about the only job I have had in my entire life where I worked 8 to 5 was a position on the faculty of a southern university as an assistant professor. This was my first job after I obtained my degree. After my first week, the department chair explained to me that I was to show up for work at 8:00 am and go home at 5:00 pm. This was so different from the western university where I earned my degree. There, people came and went; some were seldom available during the day but would be in their office late at night. Most of these people were very productive. I found the requirement that I be at my desk (or teaching) from 8 to 5 every day to be stifling. My research output plummeted. I seemed unable to function within the daily confines of my office from 8 to 5 every day. So after two years I did the only intelligent thing I could do – I quit. I think most creative people are not at their best within the rigid confines of the standard workweek.

@Fred

But, you keep letting them do it (add more work to your workload). Most people don’t ask for more money or threaten to quit. They just meekly accept it and move with the herd. This is one place that being very frugal would help everyone, as it would give you leverage to challenge your employer. Of course, insisting on a brand new Tahoe, a 2,000 sq. ft. home, and an island vacation ties most employees to the yoke rather strongly….thus, no leverage.

Interesting post. Not sure if I agree with some of your assumptions but I always appreciate your thoughtful posts.

For years I managed a creative online product development team and we constantly had work and creativity oozing from our screens. Many of the people on team made in the ballpark of $80,000 a year too (San Francisco wages of course).

So in my experience those with full-time creative jobs see them as extremely efficient from all points of view.

But in terms of lifestyle I wouldn’t wish a 40+ hour day job on anyone in any field. Selling our time on ANY job is not efficient. It’s like using any limited commodity, and time is our most precious.

That’s why I’ve taken my salaried day job off the steep corporate ladder, work from home, still work creatively by day, but do my most dear work at night (Tiny House Design).

Eventually, like you, I’ll transition from the day job to financial independence but for now I’m very happy to use my hybrid efficient creative job and power my long term goals.

@Chad
obviously you don’t work for the same group of folks I do…if you don’t pick up the work, you are out.
And as for getting raises, they only come with increased responsibility (which is different from increased work). These are the HR imposed rules regarding compensation.
Fred

I worked for a large financial firm and I think it is true that many white collar jobs have large chunks of unproductive time. We spent so much of our days having meetings to let everyone else know what we were doing, reading weekly, daily, monthly reports that were full of nonsense information, making status reports, etc. I would say that I was very busy, but only 1-2 hours of my day were spent doing meaningful work.

After I left, 3 of my 4 bosses were let go (yes, we had four bosses to report to for a department of about 30) and from what I heard, not much changed around the office after they left so we never really needed to have 4 bosses!

I think this is one of the main reasons why the trend is toward the “cloud” workplace.

It’s mutually beneficial to the worker and the employer to adopt a flexible model. The worker gets more money per hour, and more time to themselves while the employer pays more in dollar terms, but gets more value out of each dollar spent.

The output from creatives may only last a few hours but I think the output is tremendously valuable. If you look at the value as a metric and then divide by the number of hours worked creatives may indeed be have a case for being salaried.

Ill take the 1 hour at 40 dollars, and give the next two hours at half price of 20. 00 each. Total, 80.00 for 3 hours! Didn’t jetson have a 3 day 3 hour workweek?

What I’ve come to realize is that many weeks I am working straight-out, both in the field with clients and from home. I don’t have time to engage in “water-cooler talk” and in fact, am not generally in the office to do so. I don’t have time to surf the web or engage in mindless and endless “meetings”. In short, I’m really productive most of the time now. And by the end of my work week I’m a zombie(4 10+hr days). So a 40 plus hour week, if one really works productively, is a recipe for burn-out.

I really wish I could work fewer hours for the same pay as I’m really productive but doubt that would happen. Or else I’ll have to start building in some slack time to my schedule or I’ll burn-out in no time.

I’d say that most white-collar jobs are set up with the idea that real productive work is only done for so many hours a week; the rest of it is just face-time. So I’d happily work fewer hours for higher pay. But working for myself is likely the only way I’ll be able to achieve that.

For sure there is inefficiency in salaried white collar jobs (I spent at least a hour per day browsing at the office, like now 😉 ), but not always because somebody wants this. If I analyze my work, then I notice that I spent a lot of time in communication, making sure that teams are aligned, understand the strategy, agree on the actions, etc..especially noticeable in big organizations. You can call this built-in non-efficiency, but it is still required to do, otherwise you cannot keep the “machine” running in the right direction. So, if I would be honest, I spent a avg hour max a day being “creative”, and at least 3 hours per day on communication (across a big region). So, conclusion, 4 hour per day would be enough.

For me the choice might be about, perhaps weighting the advantages and disadvantages of the 1 vs the 8 hours. If the 8 hours would get me faster to financial independence, I might strongly consider that tradeoff too 🙂

In my experience the corporate 9 to 5 world productive work is punished by loading you up with more work. I once had a job where I worked as what I thought a normal pace and I was easily able to be done by 1:00 in the afternoon. Where others doing the same job took all day (8:30 AM to 5:00 PM) my reward for doing a good job in a shorter time was to have more work dumped on me.

After a few weeks of this I had a talk with the management and wanted to just go home at 1:00 as I did my work for the day. Answer to my request was NO.

So I worked slower as did all the other people did. This got me a stern talking to and a threat of being fired. I still refused to work harder if I wasn’t going to get paid more or be able to work less hours.

End result was that I continued to do work at a slower pace and did not get fired. But less then a year later I moved on to being self employed and my level of enjoyment of life went way up as did my hourly pay. It’s been 12-years since I punched a time clock and I don’t ever want to go back to such a depressing, useless felling life. I do more creative things working for myself that while I make less then overall then when I was working 6-days a week, I am so much happier then before. I also live below my income level. This has allowed me to enjoy life much more and build more of a retirement nest egg. I have a safe with lots of silver (and a bit of gold) in it that is there because I went to all cash buying. I have zero debt and zero debt is a freedom that is beyond wonderful.

PS: The time clock is one of the most evil things to come out of the industrial age. It sucks the life out of you.