Desk Lite

I once had a pretend job.

And when I say pretend, I mean I was hired for a role that did not actually exist. On paper, I was a project coordinator. In reality, the project had not been signed off. The position had been approved, but the project itself was sitting under a pile of a million other things, waiting for the person in charge to finally give it the green light.

So, this meant I showed up to work every day and earned a pretty penny to do sweet nothing.

Every morning, I would arrive and my manager would say, “The project is nearly approved. Don’t worry. We’ll get you to do another task in the meantime.” The task in the meantime was always something odd. Checking off team timesheets. Alphabetising a column in an Excel sheet. Or, and I kid you not, saying hello to the director of the business. “Mallory can you just go to the Director and say hello? Ask how he is”

These tasks took up a very small amount of time. There was no way they filled an entire eight hour day. So, I took it upon myself to wander up and down the hallway, drink far too many cups of tea, listen to podcasts, and apply for other jobs.

This business honestly had so much money it did not seem to know what to do with it. Maybe I should have held onto that job because it was the easiest money I have ever earned. But holy moly, it was boring as heck.

I would be on my eighth cup of tea thinking, well I have definitely killed five hours of the workday, only to realise I had actually wasted an hour and a half. It was as though the clocks had stopped working. Time stood still. It was the most mind numbing existence.

How many of us are in jobs simply because someone, somewhere, decided the workday should be eight hours long, despite there not being eight hours of work to do?

A dear friend of mine works for a large global company and their workload is genuinely about three hours a day. Conveniently, their boss works in a different timezone. This means they can take a three hour lunch and no one is any the wiser. The work still gets done.

I also once worked with a woman who I only ever saw reading celebrity gossip, walking back and forth to the one and only vending machine, and drinking what felt like fifty cans of Coke a day. To this day, I have no idea what her actual job was. For all I know, she was getting paid to do market research on celebrities and the effects of Coca Cola. That would be weird. But maybe. Either way, her role clearly did not require eight hours.

This lack of actual work does not seem to be limited to these small examples. Go out into the wild and observe what happens during the so called workday. Even a quick scroll through social media will show people doing things that I am fairly confident are not in their job descriptions.

Some of the things people do on company time either in the office or working from home:

•             Internet shopping	•             Having a chat with Barbra in accounts
•             Scrolling social media	•             Watching TV
•             Texting friends	•             Doing laundry
•             Extra tea breaks	•             Meal prepping
•             Walking the dog	•             Exercising
•             Sleeping	•             Showering
•             Going to the dentist	•             Getting a haircut
•             Dropping the kids at school and then getting coffee with other parents	•             Picking the kids up and having afternoon tea with them

Now, do not get it twisted. I am not saying people are slackers, cheating the system, or bad employees. That is not what this is about.

What I am saying is that the modern corporate workday does not appear to need to be eight hours long. What is the point of chaining someone to a desk if their work can be completed in an hour or two? Or perhaps the workload is simply not distributed evenly amongst the team.

We pretend eight hours equals productivity, managers pretend not to notice, and employees pretend to look busy. Everyone knows the deal, but no one wants to say it out loud. The issue is the fact that we are still pretending the workday needs to look the way it did decades ago.

Looking back, that pretend job taught me more than any busy role ever has. It showed me how much of work is theatre, how much of our time is spent doing busy work, and how uncomfortable it is to sit in a system that values hours over actual work outcomes. The project was never approved, but the lesson was.

If the work gets done in two hours, forcing someone to sit there for six more does not create value. It creates boredom, resentment, and a very strong tea habit.