Sign Me Up for ROWE

The New York Times has an article about wasting time, and I wasted time reading it, and I'm wasting time writing about it. What are you going to do about it, huh?

Let's look at the stats from the piece:

American workers, on average, spend 45 hours a week at work, but describe 16 of those hours as “unproductive,” according to a study by Microsoft. America Online and Salary.com, in turn, determined that workers actually work a total of three days a week, wasting the other two. And Steve Pavlina, whose Web site (stevepavlina.com) describes him as a “personal development expert” and who keeps incremental logs of how he spends each working day, urging others to do the same, finds that we actually work only about 1.5 hours a day. “The average full-time worker doesn’t even start doing real work until 11:00 a.m.,” he writes, “and begins to wind down around 3:30 p.m.”

And this:

The average professional workweek has expanded steadily over the last 10 years, according to the Center for Work Life Policy, and logging 70-plus hours is now the norm at the top. And there are those of us who work even when we are at home, driving or worse.

Okay, so we are working more hours and wasting plenty of 'em. I blame the dot.com boom. Thanks to the tech companies, we can wear khakis and collared shirts instead of suits and ties, but we have to work more hours. Geeks are obsessive and obsession means working nonstop for many hours. Just ask the folks at EA Games working 65 hours a week. What a dream job, huh? Advertising was like that. You're working long hours, but hey, you're in the glamorous advertising biz.

What happened to 9 to 5? And what happened to the three-martini lunch hour? Now alcohol is verboten and fun is a birthday cake every month. Except advertising, in which they have beer blast Fridays, but they need the young ones drunk so they won't question the salary disparities between the senior staff and the assistants who do all the work.

Unfortunately, people have lives outside of the office. All that wasted time is time spent on your actual life: bills, e-mails to love ones, keeping up with the news. But the article gives hope with ROWE—results only work environment. From the article:

There workers can come in at four or leave at noon, or head for the movies in the middle of the day, or not even show up at all. It’s the work that matters, not the method. And, not incidentally, both output and job satisfaction have jumped wherever ROWE is tried.

Really, all one can say to that is "duh!"