Spending more time and ticking more boxes doesn't mean more value.

By design, other than my clients I have few people I need to answer to. I don't answer to a boss. I don't answer to employees. I don't answer to a landlord.

A digital nomad without the nomad part, and with as little of the digital as I can get away with.

Yet for nearly 20 years of my career that wasn't that case. For 20 years I had to be at x place, at y time, for z hours.

Of course I have nothing against this in principal. Like it not, it's how the world works. It's also an essential part of learning on the job as a young professional. Learning from people with experience, at the same place in the same time, is the best and sometimes only way to learn*. Further, some things just need to be done in person.

And it's the simplest metric by which an employer can measure their return on investment (your salary). Even if it's simultaneously the worst metric.

Something I didn't appreciate however is how indoctrinated such work culture would become in my current lifestyle. It turns out that 20 years of work-sleep-repeat is hard to shake.

Work Cult

Australian workers work some of the longest hours in the Western world.

Getting the side eye by turning up after 8am or leaving before 6pm is a pretty normal story among many employees. Leaving on time is considered a faux pas amongst salaried workers. Never mind what you're actually contracted for. Even taking holidays or sick days can be a drama. And when you're not at work, you're often still connected.

For Australians, work culture has been twisted in a such a way that we must care about our places of employment. Show we're dedicated to the cause, and commit ourselves bodily and temporally to the objectives defined by our employers. In the name of Productivity we sacrifice our families, our financial security, and our health.

You can't spell culture without cult.

Detox

I'll freely admit this was me, and ultimately one of the reasons I chose to chance my arm (as the Irish say) carving out my own niche.

One thing I didn't expect is how hard it would be to detox from this indoctrinated work culture. It sounds stupid, but I start at my desk fairly religiously at 8am (which is fine, this works for me), but feel guilty if I down tools any time before 4pm. Worse, despite the clear benefits of doing so, I feel guilty getting up from my desk and doing an hour of exercise (usually a quick MTB ride) every other day.

It sounds stupider when I factor in how much time I spend writing these things.

When I tell my long-term self-employed friends this they chuckle.

Yes, yes, it's funny and stupid. But it's also very real.

It's not just me. To drive home the point, we had a builder/handy-man guy here a little while ago fixing up some gates and portions of the fence around our house. His backstory was he'd worked a corporate job for many years, but his wife now made enough for him to give that up so he could pursue something he'd rather do.

As I work from home, I'd pop out and see how he's going, explain to him how I'd like something done, or whatever. He'd generally work with his earbuds in (as I would), and on one occasion it was clear on approach that he was engrossed in a video of some kind (YouTube, Netflix, idk).

When he finally saw me he scrambled to pause it and then unnecessarily make the point he was trying to pause his "tunes".

The fact is, we'd already agreed on a fixed fee for the work he was doing. I don't care if he takes a day or a week to get it done, as long as he does a good job. If he wants to spend half his day looking at memes on the Internet that doesn't bother me in the slightest.

Yet hiding his transgression was his automatic response. He may not have even consciously known what he had done, but I almost wanted to pat him on the shoulder and tell him I understand.

Productivity =/= Value

This isn't exclusively a corporate behaviour, but it's a common thread among salaried professionals. However, my issue (this time) isn't with corporations or professionals.

What I take issue with is the systemic cult of work and how it breaks the creative process. How it breaks the creative process long after the employee has been separated from the employment.

Instead of the quiet contemplation and space away from the grind necessary for creativity, we're pressured to be productive. Spending time at a desk ticking off tasks so we can rack up the numbers used as proxies for value. But productivity as we think of it isn't inherently valuable. More time and more ticks doesn't automatically mean more value.

Worse, the value of creativity can rarely be directly measured with numbers. And even when they can, those numbers materialise so far down the line they usually become merely an abstraction of the original creative process. This is part of the perennial problem with valuing creative work. And no, pumping out concepts or CAD models or presentations isn't necessarily creativity over productivity either.

However, only starving artists have the luxury of pure creativity without any such pressures. Creative professionals must fundamentally work within some framework of productivity. Especially within the constraints of budgets and deadlines. It would be idealistic of me to think otherwise.

However, using guilt as a mechanism (consciously or unconsciously) to incentivise productivity has questionable effectiveness. And I've discovered that the hangover of such culture long outstays its welcome. Rather than misguidedly measuring value by the number of hours sat a desk, value should be determined by the level of quality with which the outcomes are delivered.

By disbanding the time-based cult of work in favour of value-based outcomes, we may discover we become more valuable in the process.

* On reflection, it seems selfish that the knowledge and skills I've attained over the years I've deliberately made inaccessible to younger designers who will never have the opportunity to work alongside me. I wonder if there's an alternative solution there somewhere.