The Atlantic: Between 1853 and 1870, Baron Haussmann ordered much of Paris to be destroyed. Slums were razed and converted to bourgeois neighborhoods, and the formerly labyrinthine city became a place of order, full of wide boulevards (think Saint-Germain) and angular avenues (the Champs-Élysées). Poor Parisians tried to put up a fight but were eventually forced to flee, their homes knocked down with minimal notice and little or no recompense. The city underwent a full transformation—from working class and medieval to bourgeois and modern—in less than two decades' time.
7 comments:
Work, something we were called to do from the beginning. We all have to work in some form or fashion. What does it mean to work, what does it mean to put effort into something? Many people in my family would say they are workaholics. I would say for the last 2 years and for the year to come I would be considered by any definition a workaholic. This first week of school I have probably taken less then 10 hours for myself, out side of sleeping. In my brain there are things to do, decisions to be made, a dead line approaching, opening night, and on and on and on. So work less, do I see the possibility of working less? Managing over a dozen people and actually hiring a few more in the next week, doing school work, and finish my culmination project for my graduate degree I would like to work less.
After a summer of 40 hours workweeks, I could see myself getting bored eventually. I could see myself if that path would have continued filling up my time with other “work” I mean social events of sports, church, gathering, or any number of activities to take up your time.
Today I do not see a direct end to the idea of less work, one day I would like to not spend over 12 hours a day at a job/school. I will just have to remember that I do not Live to work, I live for much more then just a paycheck.
Adam Smith would have been right if we didn't expect our economy to grow constantly and at an unnecessarily high rate. And when I say "we," of course I really mean "they," the small percentage of people, many of them not even Americans, who make exorbitant amounts of money off of U.S. economic growth. "But Andrew," you might say, "don't all Americans benefit from a growing economy?" No. They don't:
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2011/09/mean-vs-median-income-growth.html
What this means for Smith's "Pin Theory," is that as technology allows us to make pins faster, we simply make more pins, GDP grows, and the worker keeps on chugging along at 40+ hours per week. getting paid basically what he or she made in 1976, the year I was born, when accounting for inflation.
The other variable thrown in here is population growth. With an annual population growth of just around .7% at last census (2010), we add about 2 million people to our population each year. Workforce participation fluctuates, of course, generally between 60% and 68% over the last 50 years. In very broad terms, that means about a million new people need jobs every year. This is why it takes unemployment so long to recover from recessions such as we've experienced over the past several years. Just to keep up with the population growth, our economy has to grow 3-4% every year if we are to maintain an economically productive population, only after that do unemployment rates start to drop. Population control is still a very unpopular topic, both nationally and globally, but it is a real problem. Maybe it's a good time to re-evoke Smith's theory and directly link in the American consciousness population growth to the quality of life and life-work balance issues that our children and grand-children will face if we go on madly procreating.
Something that this article doesn't quite answer is where does enjoyment in our work fit into this equation? What if you like working? What if you're passionate about your job. This really plays into the quality of work and I understand being more efficient with the time that we work allows us to work less and be more productive blah blah blah. But something to consider is enjoyment in our profession and how that plays into it. I imagine that someone who likes to go to work and spends 14 hours a day work produces just as excellent of a product as someone who works 10 hours. I think about myself in particular as an example. I like to read for pleasure. I also equally enjoy calling light cues for dance pieces. I don't see how reading more or having personal time allows for a better result with my work performance. Especially since my work performance is significant to me because of how much I love my job.
I think we would all like to work less. I definitely wouldn’t mind having a mandatory 31 day vacation during the year like is practiced in Paris. While this type of time of is not always conducive (or sometimes very much is) to the entertainment industry, I think there are things we can take away from this article.
It is definitely true that work always expands to fill the time allotted for completion. It is not usually true, however, that work will contract to squeeze into the completion window. Either way, finding a way to minimize the work and effort required to complete a task is basically what we do in theatre. It might sound lazy, but with the short turnaround times we have, we often try to find the ways to cut corners to achieve what we need just for theatre.
Sometimes we get off track, leading somebody to ask “Why isn’t that a 2x4?” But usually, we do tend to work less, which in turn makes us work better.
I think a main component of keeping your work productive is enjoying it, or at least having some sort of motivation to keep at it. By including a whole month vacation into a worker's time off, that's building in a motivational tool or a goal that you're able to work toward, keeping morale up.
I also like that they recognize that there's an inevitable point of diminishing returns where productivity can begin to decrease with more work hours. There's only so much a person can do in one sitting while maintaining a good quality level in their work. Less stress = more joy. More joy = more happy people willing to do their work. If people feel overworked, then other things in their life will turn for the worse like their health or relationships. Work shouldn't be an all-consuming aspect of a person's life. They should feel less like a cog in a machine and more like a human being that is personally benefiting from their job.
I think the main idea of this article is "Quality not Quantity". From my own experience, I was shocked on my first couple months that how people here work soooooo hard for a very long period of time in a day and feels like taking a break means something must be wrong.
I personally agreed in working less, but focus more in details rather than just keep working because I feel like 24 hours are not enough and I need to keep working just because that's what everyone does. Because I learned from the past spring that I push myself too hard working all the time, but end up I could not do anything as good as I wish too, and I felt like I wasn't very productive like I used to be.
After spring semester I had 10 days break and I stopped everything and just sleep and laying by the beach. And after that when I started working again I feel like my brain is more functional and I can be much productive than before.
The fact is people in general tend to push themselves too hard sometimes. I think it's very important to take a break every now and then. It can be something like take 10-15 minutes break after focusing one something for hours, go wash your face, take a short walk, get some milkshake! Yes, it's true that people value each other by how hard they work, but also we must not forget that we need to live our lives happily and there's always something out there waiting for us to find, to enjoy, to appreciate.
Post a Comment