I was just blogging about a similar topic last month, here. The NYT had an article about how younger workers are resisting going back to the office, and I quoted a comment :
The dirty secret the white collar world doesn't want to admit is that most people are not working 40 hour weeks anymore, and/or are coming to the realization of how much time they were wasting doing nothing at the office. Why would anyone want to give up 10-20 more hours of their week when they are just as productive....
That seems to assume people want more personal time, but it's consistent with the idea that you could get one job done quickly and do a second job, all in a 40-hour week. I wrote:
If you're at home getting the work done, no one knows how long it took you, and the time you save by working quickly and efficiently is time you get to keep for yourself.
"Keep" is a funny word there. You can't keep time. But we all say "save time" and you can't save time. You can only use time, for good or ill, efficiently or wastefully, and it's going to flow by constantly, whatever you do. That's why you can feel awful about those meetings, about needing to be present in a particular place, without controlling the speed of getting things done.
The WSJ links to Overemployed, which has a list of techniques for pulling off working 2 jobs at once from your home base. Excerpts:
Have a story. You’ll want excuses and explanations at the ready for tricky moments. Need to dodge a meeting? Say you need ‘head-down focus time to finish another deliverable'...
Resist overwork. Boss asking too much of you? You can always drop one job and find another—or just take a breather.
When you have 2 jobs, it's easier to quit one. But maybe you risk underperforming on both, and your effort to avoid working too hard leads you into a life of overwork, always juggling 2 or more inadequate jobs, endless gigs, and you wonder what's it all for.
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Studies have shown that most office workers spend 60-65% of their time, if that much, actually working - with the majority of there is no incentive to be more productive. Salary will be the same, pay raises might be slightly more for the really good workers, but not significantly more. So this isn't surprising - if there is the opportunity to double your salary while spending the same amount of time at your desk, why not?
I will date myself here and acknowledge that my work attitude comes from another era. Or maybe it's in my genes. But in my career I worked for major corporations, small family owned business, medium sized regional companies, and for myself, in businesses that I started and ran. I never ever considered my work to be 'done'. I never considered grabbing onto another job with my extra time, to make more money. I wish I had. Today it would be much easier to do.
I always had running lists for myself of things I wanted to accomplish, to create, to get done. I updated those lists daily/weekly. I guess I always found myself in a situation where it was not just me working a project given to me by a boss, and once complete, I stopped. It was, instead, me putting together my own lists of what needed to get done for us to grow. Even with the larger corporations. If I had time after completing a task, there were 32 other things on my own list to get to. So I did.
Things have changed. I like the change. It's a new era. Employees are more and more like free agents. They can offer up their work, their abilities in portions to other companies. Got a project that needs X? I can do X for you. Nothing else. Hire me to do X and I'll do that.
I think it's a good evolution for the workforce. It'll end up being more productive work time and allowing for better life-work balance.
Why be good at one job, ... when they can be mediocre at two?
The dirty little secret is that they are probably quite a better than mediocre at both jobs, depending on what sort of work they do. The back of one’s brain may continue to wrestle with the problems of one job while one is directly focused on another. In an engineering firm that is focused on projects, there are phases of projects where people can be successfully assigned to multiple projects simultaneously.
At the same time there are plenty of jobs that need full time attention. Plumbing comes to mind, and HVAC repair.
"don’t do too much work, either"
Actually, much work is ripe for automation.
"most people are not working 40 hour weeks anymore"
In fact, labor force participation is way down from what is used to be, for men certainly.
"no one knows how long it took you, and the time you save by working quickly and efficiently"
Actually, no one knows at the office either, not really. Of course, assuming minimal conscientiousness, smarter people work more quickly and efficiently--hire them.
This type of working two jobs is highly unethical. The other thing is that you are basically stealing pay from one company while working on the other company's project.
It is a white collar job, which can be project and deliverable driven. But if you have downtime, you are supposed to be doing something for your company. You have earned a little bit of self-management responsibility, so you should be self-managing.
As an employer, if I found out an employee had pulled something like this, I would begin to question everything this employee had done, as basically one unethical decision means there were probably others. From personal experience, we had a senior employee at my company that was spending his work day in the office running his rental property business on his mobile phone. While he met his deliverables for the company, it came out that this guy was running every scam in the book, manipulating his expense reports, double charging time to two clients, and finally trying to work out private deals with our customers to swipe our business for himself.
The somewhat obvious countermove here is for employers to move to piecework. Retain a small core of senior salaried staff and compensate them well. For everyone else farm out assignments on a piecework basis make make the outside contractors bid on each assignment. The companies save on overhead and fringes too.
It's not just private sector white collars gaming the system. Work-at-home state workers are doing it too and dreading having to give up their 20 hrs/week "fulltime" jobs. Just an observation.
If you have a job which requires you to be mentally engaged, then it is not time you will run out of, but juice. I almost never run out of time, but mental energy most days. By the time you actually engage in mental work for 5-6 hours, then at my age you are running low on steam. If you are trying to split your mental energy over two jobs, then you are in all likelihood doing neither justice.
The big drawback to what they're describing is that you evidently have to do this on the sly rather than be open about it. All that care and secrecy adds a layer of stress to the arrangement, and I would think it would also limit the possibility for developing friendships with co-workers. IOW, seems like something psychopaths would enjoy doing more than the average white collar worker.
The somewhat obvious countermove here is for employers to move to piecework.
Provided your particular government does not make such work illegal. In Washington Microsoft used to use a high percentage of contract workers. Now they have to hire them full-time. California passed a law barring gig work.
I think you are right though. The best thing for most workers and employers is full free-agency where they output is what is paid for. But it will leave a lot of limited capability people underpaid, and there will be cries of "living wages" that will dominate the scene. After-all, the minimum wage argument is not about whether the person performing the work performs enough to earn it but whether the person deserves that much pay for being alive. Separating pay from performance is the goal to utopia where we get from each according to his ability to each according to his need.
Retired from college employment last year. The President had over 25 people in his "cabinet" meeting. When I started 20 years ago, there was maybe 8. Get a micro manager for a boss and you are held up waiting for decisions for days or even weeks. Working from home freed up a lot of time that I normally spent dealing with the bureaucracy. My co-workers and I kept a running conversation going all day that you could jump in and out of as needed speeding up communication even further.
In the book “The Four Hour Work Week”, one strategy that was discussed was outsourcing report writing and other tasks overseas. Then
turning it in as your own. I remember reading at least one article where a person was fired for doing that.
I seem to also remember a story about someone working two jobs and going to jail for fraud.
I can pretty much guarantee such people do perform way above average on both jobs, otherwise they would get caught. However, the only caveat to this is that it may be the case that both of these jobs are not really productive jobs at all, so when they aren't being done or only done half-assed, no one actually notices. In fact, I think this is the big secret that WFH has probably revealed- that a great number of jobs don't actually have to be done to produce anything tangible.
Welcome to Hey Mon Airlines, where hard-working people figured out the more than one job thing some time ago.
Gotta pay the bills. My dental cleaning yesterday cost me $235, including the small x-rays they call bitewings. The dentist came in for a couple minutes. The bill was lower than what I was quoted as a new patient at a practice closer to my home, which would have been $400 for a cleaning, including full x-rays.
Get a second job as a dentist. There must be a virtual version somewhere.
The constant growth of administrative jobs is proof that most administrative jobs are nothing much more than make work.
Especially in government where a supervisor's pay isn't based on actual work or something that can be measured like profit, but by how many people are supervised. Compartmentalize the work so you can add some new workers- Voila! Everyone does less, but your pay goes up! Win win for everyone except the taxpayer.
Conflict of interest is another problem. For many individuals, that second employer would likely be a direct competitor of the first.
If there's a will there's a way.
But they must have pretty weak-sauce 'jobs.'
I had to do jobs that consisted of projects that produced a tangible product...hard to fake.
And my wife is an executive for a tech company and she is booked on Zoom for ten hours straight each day...you know, a real job.
As a piece of advice to the two-jobbed, get one job with an East coast and one with a West Coast or better yet volunteer to interface with Asian or European branches.
I have been a gig worker for a long time, but I was fortunate in having an employer for many years before that who was more interested in what I did than where or how long I took doing it and who compensated me based on the success of their projects. I agree with Temujin that the work of the company is never done and a good employee moves on to the next thing, but if your employer is indifferent to you and won't pay you what you're productivity is worth, I don't see an ethical problem with a side job unless you are being paid by the hour.
This is a great idea. Some suggest it is "unethical" but how is it less ethical than paying a person the same as you who does only half the amount of work? In person meetings were the worst waste of time ever, at least ten or fifteen minutes of every meeting would be occupied by small talk. I always tried to eliminate this and get down to business, which is why people thought I was a "bitch" LOL. I would just interrupt the personal stories and bring up the first topic on the agenda. My heartless approach also encouraged more people to actually show up on time.
At my last job, I was in junior management, but I still had to do "grunt work" like word processing & answering the phones. I could do about 4x the work of my average employee without undue effort. Of course I tried to help them to be more productive, too, but it was hard for them to learn new approaches (like using keyboard shortcuts rather than the mouse, which is an amazing productivity enhancer since you don't have to take your eyes and hands off the keyboard all the time).
Althouse writes: "Keep" is a funny word there. You can't keep time. But we all say "save time" and you can't save time. You can only use time, for good or ill, efficiently or wastefully, and it's going to flow by constantly, whatever you do.
Time flies, you say?
Ah, no.
Alas! Time stays,
We go.
Our daughter works for a major head-hunter service, trying to match tech workers with jobs. It's been difficult lately to place people in open jobs, and one reason is that many employers are still wed to the idea that the employee should be physically present 100% of the time. Her candidates, on the other hand, want work-from-home flexibility.
The most popular arrangement that the workers seek is a hybrid between maybe two days in-office and three days out.
The double pay only works if you're a salaried worker. If you're a consultant who bills by the hour, you should only be billing one task at a time.
I know someone who does this, but instead of working for two salaries, they work from home for a company and use recovered time (which includes things like commuting and waiting for meetings to start) to run a non-profit. It doesn't pay, but it would be difficult to do with a traditional office job.
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