Writes Cal Newport, in "To Cure Burnout, Embrace Seasonality" (NYT).
Strategies to vary pace, however, don’t need to be explicitly seasonal. The software development company Basecamp asks its employees to consolidate their work into cycles that last six to eight weeks and are focused on a small number of clear goals.... Organizations might consider adapting the idea of sabbaticals from academia.... This idea of paid sabbaticals is slowly starting to catch on in corporate settings. The email marketing company AWeber, for example, offers a four-week paid leave to those with a decade or more of service...."
Four-week paid leave? That's just vacation. The only reason not to call it vacation is that vacations have been so stingy. Sabbatical. Four weeks? Give me a break.
Maybe you won’t convince your boss of the value of seasonality. But not every strategy of this type requires buy-in at the organizational level. There are also more surreptitious ways to gain some of the benefits of this approach....
This is the idea of "quiet quitting," and the article warns you to be sneaky about it:
While permanent quiet quitting will almost certainly be noticed and frowned upon, temporarily keeping your head down and sidestepping more commitments than usual probably will not.
Most people are probably already deploying this strategy on occasion.... So why not make it a more regular part of your routine? You could, for example, schedule an intentional slowdown every July or in the month leading up to the Christmas break....
The suggestion is to put more structure — more "seasonality" — to your haphazard slacking and balking. And there's no hint that you're doing anything you should feel guilty about. You're improving your work, according to the author, whose book is called "Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout."
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A quality recession would help sharpen the mind.
Jesus H. Christ! Another intelligent idiot, who has never made a payroll or manufacture as much as a doughnut for a living. Here's an idea for you Professor Newport - how long a walk is it from "slow" productivity to "no" productivity? Want a sabbatical from work? How about take one without pay. I would love to see a manufacturing person write a book about how to improve universities. Say! Such an idea? Perhaps I will write that.
Holy shit- how did we get so Soviet? Thankless jobs are called thankless because nobody thanks you for doing them. Shitty jobs are called shitty because they are miserable and shitty. When we make rules and laws and regulations to ensure every job is above average in compensation and gratification we end up with fewer jobs…even when the central planners then demand you must create jobs.
Factory life may have been miserable, but it was also a community. Sitting on the line together, meeting delivery goals, sharing lunch and a smoke, union meetings -- these rituals made going to work bearable. And then the company would throw a Christmas party with work stoppage, alcohol, and karaoke -- you had a second family. No one did quiet quitting because your friends needed you.
There's less bullshit in what I just said than what this guy's peddling.
You want somebody who obsesses over the job's problems. Otherwise it's drudgework to them resulting in office politics to replace it.
They forced me to spend hours monotonous hours practicing scales and arpeggios, when all I wanted was to play awesome piano.
The good thing about factory jobs is that they are out of mind once you punch out.
You're improving your work, according to the author, whose book is called "Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout."
I put it down after page ten.
""We seemed to have forgotten that life in the mills and factories was miserable.... "
There are quite a few people, and not all of them older people, that have actually worked in the mills and factories, that did not come away from the experience feeling miserable. But this author was never one of them, I'd bet.
'We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us' - it sounds like the writer has the first part of this old Soviet axiom down pat, but - betting again, I'd bet that he would have a major problem with the second part.
Hard work is a grind - a mentally purifying grind, if you're doing it right, whether it's hard physical labor in the sun or a blue collar gig on an assembly line. The mental toughness doesn't come from the job, and it isn't a benefit underwritten by the employer. This is an unserious wish-caster trying to divine his next handout.
The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout."
This makes it sound like he’s urging us to return to a tried and true method that we abandoned to our detriment, but I’m having trouble thinking of the time he’s talking about. Certainly it’s not any point after the industrial revolution and I also can’t think of any work lessons from before that time that could be applied to today.
So when did we practice this art and how did we lose it?
Four-week paid leave? That's just vacation.
I have never, in my 35+ years of working, had a job where I could take four consecutive weeks off, with or without pay. I think our hostess' years in the ivory tower have obscured her perspective of the actual working men and women in this country.
This is the type of person that might work at a place like the LA Times and then whine to the world about losing their job. What they will never do is attempt to start their own business and certainly then run it the way they are claiming here it ought to be run. They'll suggest they can't start the business because no one will fund them while ignoring the many industrious people who have created businesses with far less.
Fani WIllis shows the way. In a seven month period she took six expensive vacations. This is the proper balance of work and leisure. Wine tastings in the Napa Valley help one become a fully balanced human being. And boffing a coworker lends a frisson of sensuality and romance to the dreariest job. Boffing a subordinate is even better. No need to ask how the balance of oral sex payments went in that relationship....We should all have jobs as meaningful and just plain fun as that of Fani Willis. That should be the aspirational ideal and Fani Willis has shown the way.
Next level/wave of robotics will take care of this.
"We seemed to have forgotten that life in the mills and factories was miserable.."
Not if you do it right. Aquiring skills is a large part of factory work.
Despite what people like Cooke will tell you. Once you've aquired a skillset you are no longer stuck in one place. Hence "journeyman". Going from shop to shop to hone and aquire new skills.
"Calvin C. Newport is an American nonfiction author and associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University."
So, he's never had an honest job, and certainly doesn't want one. He is paid handsomely, by people who would fire him if they only could. However, he does make a good point; "The email marketing company AWeber, for example, offers a four-week paid leave to those with a decade or more of service....".
Who could not wish for more leisure time, for the parasitical vermin operating a spam mill?
I worked my way through school as a construction laborer. Took more than four years - being poor has its own rewards - so it included some longer than semester stretches.
Worked my way up from newbie to good hand to lead man to foreman... because I tried!
Got in the best shape of my life and discovered something else. Finishing a long row of pipeline was more satisfying than having in inbox full in the morning and full in the evening, even if the papers are different.
That's why much of my engineering career was aimed at field work.
"Quiet quitting" will very much get your butt fired in many vocations as you're immediately offloading your work onto others. Your coworkers know damn well who's taking 15 and who plays all day.
I've happily set them up by making it look like I'm covering and at the next update meeting having every single one of my incomplete goals end with "I'm waiting for a response from XXX." I also make sure I'm called to report before them.
@Wince says: "I put it down after page ten."
Hahaha, goals met - Accomplishment without burnout
Many companies use software to track your productivity...as in knowing how many keystrokes you've made.
As for vacation, my wife's last company had unlimited leave, which is fine as far as that goes. But if you're not killing it, you won't be there long if you're spending all your time on vacation.
One of my favorite bosses had a great philosophy called 'get your work done.'
He'd give you a project (a box design, data sheet, logo design, etc.) for the week. If you finished those to his satisfaction, he didn't care what you did with the rest of your time.
Althouse:
Four-week paid leave? That's just vacation.
Just a point of fact: If you get four weeks in a row, it's because they don't need you as much as you believe they do.
Neither have I, tommyesq.
Jupiter:
"Calvin C. Newport is an American nonfiction author and associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University."
So, he's never had an honest job, and certainly doesn't want one.
LOL You and I agree so deeply on that one in all three senses of his career.
Hello, honey. Hello, baby. How are you doing?
How is school? Totally worth it.
This is why we enjoy labor arbitrage through outsourcing, insourcing, and other liberal labor modalities, with a side of shared responsibility through progressive prices, and psychoactive dissonance, particularly in the feminine gender-aligned cohort. A not so novel green/naive deal.
JAORE said...
"That's why much of my engineering career was aimed at field work."
Plus. The more bureaucratic types in the office won't go out there.
Worked in high tech. One company had a leave policy.. after 5 years you could take a month off, unpaid. We called it the “get a better job” policy.. lots of people never came back after the leave.
Unbelievable that you would say the part about "just a vacation" out loud. Only the tiny percentage of tenured faculty and K-12 school union grifters get 1/1, 2/1, sabbaticals, summers, a month at Christmas, and fall and spring break off. The vast majority of lecturers and untenured professors do not. The work 3,4,5 jobs at a time, never less than 4/4 class schedules -- usually at least 4/4/4 or more, no summers, no sabbaticals, just so the few can lounge half the year or write the occasional academic paper three people will read. Not to mention all the fun free utterly useless conferences at posh resorts.
Despite being worked to death with no benefits, an adjunct's work is often harder and arguably more important. If professors' unions had an ounce of ethics a generation ago, they wouldn't have destroyed the future of their own profession and the lives of their future colleagues so thoroughly. For what? To teach the same three classes for 35 years, with lots of paid time off? Union no shows have nothing on tenured professors.
The author has a point. I've long noticed that people who write furiously, non-stop, for hours on end tend to write shit.
Coming up for oxygen, and even better - emptying your mind of the past four hours doesn't only feel good, it makes for better quality. You see things with fresh eyes.
In coding terms, decades ago the turn-around (the time between submitting a program and then seeing the results) was measured in hours. That implicitly left plenty of time for water cooler conversations. Now turn-around takes seconds and everyone feels obliged to be seen to be typing. Some are trying to re-oxygenate, but look like they're working.
I recall a story of when Bell Labs was Bell Labs- all kinds of exciting new things and ideas came from them. They hire a time and motion specialist, because of course the bean counters said they had to, and he spent a few weeks there analyzing all the movements and what everyone was doing. And went to the lab director with hi final report- and questions about why they had one really lazy gut working there. Lazy guy? At Bell Labs? Yeah, he sits in an office all day reading. Gets up once in a while and wanders around to look at what others are doing. Asks questions, never puts his hands on anything, and wanders back to his office. Ah- him. His first idea made enough for Bell to pay his salary for the rest of his life. His second idea ten times that. We're waiting for a third idea. And those questions he asks? usually points the team that was sked the question in the right direction. Seems to cut development time down from where predicted. I don't know what he does myself, but we employ him to keep doing it.
But there are very few people like that, and very few jobs where that kind of creativity can be measured in any meaningful sense.
In jobs like millwork- the most productive worker may be 2-3 time more productive then the least productive- assuming competence at all in making a product. Same with many physical or production jobs. I'm a plant operator. The only measure is- does the plant operate safely during the 8 (or 12 or 16) hours I'm there? We all have our opinions on who the worst operators are, but it doesn't matter. As long as the plant is still running at the end of their shift- they did their job. No measure of productivity at all.
For programmers- what I've read is that the best programmers are 100X or more productive then the average programmer. They're simply wired differently then most folks, and can see things others don't. (Sort of like grandmasters in chess...)
Most competent intelligence organizations have a few people similar to the Bell Labs People with a job where they simply read newspapers and open source stuff from all over, and read that the "spies" and diplomats and other sources have gathered. Then connect dots that no one else has noticed or considered. There are a lot of unemployed - or other employed - dot connectors on the internet. Organizations that aren't looking at those people and feeding them info to see what they can connect for free aren't doing it right. I read some of them. With the censorship that has gone on the last few years the best ones have been scattered about and are hard to find. One truth about them is- those internet dot connectors had the truth out about Hunter's laptop long before 51 former intelligence professionals committed perjury and signed a letter stating it was Russian disinformation- allowing Twitter and Facebook and other social media to ban people for mentioning the laptop really did belong to Hunter. And should we mention the covidiocy censorship of the Truth?
The founder of Basecamp, one of the companies mentioned in the article, is an interesting character. He has been behind several quietly important tech tools and platforms without going down the creepy surveillance path that many of his peers have followed.
I suspect that a few members of the Althouse commentariat might enjoy his blog: David Heinemeier Hansson. While some of his posts are a little technical, most are written for civilians.
Nobody on their death bed ever regretted staying in bed, at least on that particular occasion.
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