| Author: |
boz |
| Dated: |
Thursday, June 02 2005 @ 09:03 PM EDT |
| Viewed: |
466 times |
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 ... And we all wonder why we get so stressed out, too busy for real enjoyment, and drowning in email, voice mail, faxes, meetings, instant messages, conference calls and paperwork.
You can find numerous articles like this with advice on how to keep stress down at work, all over the Internet. But what made this even necessary in the first place?
The beginning of that article even starts with
Imagine working only four hours a day, nine months a year and earning all the money you need to do exactly what you want with all your free time. Does that sound like your life?
That's the life a futurist of the early 20th century predicted the average worker would be living by the 21st century.
Of course, the futurist who made this prediction would have assumed that productivity expectations remained constant even after the introduction of technology that made one more productive.
This is was the cruelest joke of the industrial revolution. Suppose your boss gives you a new tool that cuts your current production efforts in half. You don't get to go home early, do you? Of course not. You are expected to produce twice as much in half the original time.
But wait. It's clear that the competition has the same tool, or is now using the next generation of tools, which are even better. Expectations increase, and this labor saving device is now causing you to produce at a pace faster than the tool can realistically produce for you just to keep up with competition (and management demands). The same situation results at all competitors, and the whole work force is basically working overtime. You go home tired, so the last thing you want to do when you get home is to start cooking, so you order a pizza or grab some fast food on the way home. If you have a desk job, you probably ate the same garbage at your desk while checking your email. Forget about going for a walk after work, since you're exhausted to begin with. There's nothing like exhaustion coupled with stress to keep one from physical activity.
The problem gets incredibly out of hand when we introduce computers, since now we are producing data and information at a ridiculous rate. We need a way to effectively manage it all, and current methods are mainly a bandage approach that don't fix the root of the problems. Just look at middleware vendor growth over the last few decades. They'll sell you something to handle your data.
The better the tools we have, the higher the expectations. The problem isn't in the technology itself, but how we are applying it, the expectations we have for it, and the expectations we have of each other in applying it.
Imagine what life would be like with today's conveniences with the productivity expectations of 20, 30, 40 or even 50 years ago. That sounds nice.
So what do we do in the meantime? I'm going to get some sleep.
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