Do You LARP Your Job
or why the idea of Visible Busy as productivity really needs to Just Freaking DIE.
I remember having to deal with the pressure to appear busy at a number of jobs. In fact, I had several where the biggest criticism against me was "you do excellent work, but you don't look like a good worker." And at my one and only full-time professional library job, my boss clearly viewed Visible Busy as the only way of knowing that he was indeed getting his money's worth out of me -- he was pretty clear on the idea when he was drumming me out, that he would replace me with someone who provided him with plenty of Visible Busy (but there were a number of other areas of serious dysfunction at that job, which I didn't pick up on except in retrospect, like how we were supposed to be salaried, but were only treated as such when they could get extra work out of us at the end of the day, but treated us as if we were hourly if it allowed them to nickel and dime us out of vacation time at the front of the day).
In fact, one of my biggest motivators to go back to grad school and earn advanced degrees was to get into a line of work where I would genuinely get away from the "we need to see you busy," where I'd never again be told "you're not done, there are three minutes left" (or some other number that represented a crumb of time too small to do anything useful). As it turned out, I ended up in a line of work that doesn't involve being "on the clock," but didn't really use those degrees.
I remember having to deal with the pressure to appear busy at a number of jobs. In fact, I had several where the biggest criticism against me was "you do excellent work, but you don't look like a good worker." And at my one and only full-time professional library job, my boss clearly viewed Visible Busy as the only way of knowing that he was indeed getting his money's worth out of me -- he was pretty clear on the idea when he was drumming me out, that he would replace me with someone who provided him with plenty of Visible Busy (but there were a number of other areas of serious dysfunction at that job, which I didn't pick up on except in retrospect, like how we were supposed to be salaried, but were only treated as such when they could get extra work out of us at the end of the day, but treated us as if we were hourly if it allowed them to nickel and dime us out of vacation time at the front of the day).
In fact, one of my biggest motivators to go back to grad school and earn advanced degrees was to get into a line of work where I would genuinely get away from the "we need to see you busy," where I'd never again be told "you're not done, there are three minutes left" (or some other number that represented a crumb of time too small to do anything useful). As it turned out, I ended up in a line of work that doesn't involve being "on the clock," but didn't really use those degrees.