The Chief Time Officer

We should take more seriously what is precious and productive

We measure our lives in time: how long we’ve been alive, married, divorced, in this job, that house, this neighbourhood, the years we’ve known each other and the hours it took to make the cake that was consumed in minutes. What’s so strange about this obsession is that we measure for quantity but not for meaning or value. No business would be without its Chief Financial Officer, but nobody has a Chief Time Officer. This strikes me as strange and perverse because companies are good at producing more money, they can’t create more time, for any of us. Even for the wealthiest, time is limited.

This is obvious in our perverse misunderstanding of productivity; Leslie Perlow’s mind-blowing study on the productive value of quiet time makes a powerful argument that it is better managed for its quality than its quantity. Yet for all that companies yearn for their workforce to be more productive, they’ve proved stubbornly traditional in resisting innovation.

In her most recent, and wonderful, book, The Work We Need: A 21^st Century Reimagining, Hilary Cottam makes another compelling argument for the need to rethink working time. She is one in a long line of radical thinkers prepared to do so. As she recounts, the eight-hour weekday was a mid-19^th century invention, applied to a six-day week. During the Great Depression, William Kellogg’s response to a national campaign to ‘share the work’ introduced the six-hour day which he hoped would increase productivity. He was proved right: Less exhausted workers meant a 40 percent reduction in accidents and 50 percent less absenteeism, while more leisure time boosted spending. Kellogg called it ‘liberation capitalism’ because it freed up workers to spend more time with their families.

More new thinking ensued: in 1938 Roosevelt’s Fair Labor Standards Act, mandated a 44 hour week; it was amended in 1940 to 40 hours. Around the same time, in the U.S. and U.K. the novelty of a paid weekend began to catch on. Henry Ford had introduced this in the 1920s and, in 1934, Boots the Chemist was the first to do so in the U.K. But the concept of paying for time when workers weren’t at work still took awhile to catch on. The American writer John Updike recalled his father, a teacher, who was laid off at the beginning of every summer and had to work building roads until his school recontracted him in September. Not until 1940 did our current model of a five-day week, with paid weekends, become the norm.

There has been precious little innovation since. Despite many encouraging trials of the four-day week, and inspiring examples of companies that have made the leap, political and managerial attitudes to time have proved stubborn and unimaginative. From many executives, we’ve seen a reversal: not just clinging onto a mere 40 hours a week but a passive submission to 60 to 70 hours of work that happens not just at the office but at home, in trains, during school plays and sports matches. The previous U.K. government’s eager embrace of the gig economy—on the grounds that it gave workers freedom—triggered the ridicule it deserved, because the lived reality of ‘flexible working’ too often means precarity, exploitation and fear. Working from home, in the meantime, has become a bitter source of mutual misunderstanding in many workplaces. Today’s working timetable doesn’t look all that different from 1940, except perhaps in demanding more time of everyone everywhere.

Hoping to shift to a more creative conversation, Cottam approached the question with a process called Imagining: asking workers what time means to them, what they want it for and how they value it. Pessimistic about Universal Basic Income (too expensive and a free pass for tech companies all too eager to eliminate jobs) she comes instead to the concept of Universal Basic Time. Criss-crossing the world to interview groups of workers, she asked: If they all had the same amount of time to ‘spend’, how would they choose to use it?

The answers were intriguing. Everyone wanted to work. The boss’s suspicion that, at heart, everyone is a secret skiver, was not proven. But neither did anyone, anywhere in the world, aspire to the latest Silicon Valley fad 996: working 9am to 9pm 6 days a week.* What people yearned for were different forms and intensity of work at different times in their lives. But the current design of work, its cadence across a lifetime, remains blind to the obvious and universal truth that people change. So why is the reward for a lifetime of work largely accessible only at the end? Whatever happened to sabbaticals? Why are gap years socially acceptable only between school and university? Why is the sum total of maternity/paternity leave made available only when a child is born? What about at other stress points in a young person’s—or an older person’s—life? Who will look after elderly parents, if not their children?

Ruefully acknowledging that ‘government always comes late’ to such issues, a group of local government workers wondered why there couldn’t be generic jobs allowing people to move smoothly from physically demanding work when young, to less arduous jobs when older: say from garbage collectors and gravediggers, then to drivers and then housing caretakers? They described this as ‘reweaving life’. A particular premium was put on time to ‘really learn’: to acquire new skills, to understand and take care of family, and time for personal creativity. What Cottam encountered weren’t slackers but people everywhere yearning to be free, not to do nothing—but to be human.

Theirs was not just a theoretical challenge. In one example, Cottam relates the story of a local council manager charged with reducing costs by 25 per cent. But instead of grabbing the spreadsheet and deleting jobs, she called an open meeting of council employees to ask who was happy at work. Not a single hand went up. Her first experiment introduced jobs that, instead of being eliminated, were redesigned to be simultaneously more rewarding to do and more productive in their results. New positions were introduced that were intended to evolve over time in response to the incumbent’s physical capacity. People can enjoy change when it is designed to synchronize with life. Redirecting purchasing to local businesses both created jobs and grew the local economy. Rethinking worktime, Cottam concluded, had simultaneously bolstered community cohesion, generated new economic activity and saved money.

At the centre of these imaginings is a bold and provocative question: why are jobs designed without the active collaboration of the people who are going to do them? Why is such a vast amount of money spent hiring and firing instead of valuing the investment of time which is made each time a new person is employed—and lost every time they are fired?

Cottam’s is a vigorous and salient challenge. Instead of looking at work entirely through the perspective of the employer, could we not better design jobs together? And might not thinking about work as a valued part of life, instead of as an enforced chore, be a better starting point? These are questions for the new Chief Time Officer who manages a costly and precious asset.

I couldn’t help but wish that Cottam had spent more time with her Imaginings, with more examples of what a life’s work could look like. But great questions are great contributions. Why have companies been so averse to addressing these? Perhaps because we have so rigidly bifurcated work and life. Or because we prefer to turn a blind eye to the obvious fact that, for all of us, time is always in short supply. Perhaps the combined threat and promise of AI will accelerate Cottam’s work and encourage employers and employees to address her questions together. There has never been a moment when it was more urgent, or desired.

If You Want to Go Deeper

Read Cottam’s book and ask yourself: What could I do at my workplace? If you’re a manager, ask the people who report to you. In my experience, most organizations are packed to the rafters with people who wonder ‘why do we do it that way?’ and who yearn for change and meaning in their jobs. They aren’t troublemakers: they are the creative minds every workplace needs and is most likely to lose early.

For the Joy of It

I went to London’s Serpentine Gallery to see Peter Doig’s House of Music. Combining his paintings with music (played on glorious analogue speakers) that he associates with his pictures, it’s one of those terrific surprises to which the response can only be: why don’t galleries do this more often? Obvious. Glorious. And deeply refreshing.

*The 996 culture is remarkable mostly for its determined rejection of over 100 years of productivity research showing that, as people work long hours, they grow tired, make mistakes and need the extra time to clean up the mess they’ve made. They clearly also don’t remember the class action suit against Electronic Arts and its culture of burnout. I wrote at some length about the impact of hours on thinking in Wilful Blindness.