White-collars showed a similar trend during the pandemic. A global survey of people in 27 countries released this year found that working from home saved him about two hours of commute time per week per worker in 2021 and 2022. .
What did people do with it? Research shows that they spent the largest portion of that (about 40 percent) more on work and less on leisure time and childcare.
Meanwhile, online calendars and remote meeting software seem to have helped people make each other’s days even more fulfilling.
“Nowadays, people generally look at their journals and look for 15-minute gaps first, and the time flies by,” one consultant told me. “My biggest challenge is finding time to eat lunch.”
I have come to think of this as the “suitcase principle” of white-collar work. Just as he always fills his suitcase whether it’s a weekend or his week outing, white-collar work always seems to extend to the next extent. Please fill the available time.
What happened after the invention of the spreadsheet is a instructive example of how time-saving technology can generate more work.
The days when accountants could sit back and relax didn’t last long. At the time Levy wrote, new technologies were already reshaping demand. People started expecting the job to be done faster because they knew it could be done faster.
More importantly, spreadsheets have greatly expanded the types of analysis possible. Businesses can suddenly track things that were previously unmonitored because the calculations take too long, such as the daily performance rankings of salespeople.
And now you can model all sorts of different scenarios with the push of a few buttons. What would happen to your earnings if you terminated the pension plan, sold the factory, or acquired this company in a hostile takeover bid?
These new capabilities have shaped the course of corporate history and created a plethora of jobs for people to do. Thousands of jobs as accountants are gone, as are today’s jobs, such as copywriting, which consist of tasks that AI can perform more cheaply.
But that doesn’t mean there will be fewer white-collar jobs overall. As different products and services become available, demand and expectations are likely to grow as well.
My “suitcase principle” isn’t a particularly original idea, after all. In an essay on economist In 1955, C. Northcote Parkinson described the same phenomenon in civil servants.
According to “Parkinson’s Law,” officials like to have more subordinates, and everyone tends to work for each other.
He describes the arrival of the documents as follows: “Official E determines that it is within F’s jurisdiction and submits a draft response to C, who substantially amends it before consulting D, who asks G to respond. However, , G goes on vacation at this point and gives the file to H, who creates a 1 minute draft, D signs it and sends it back to C, C amends the draft accordingly, and a new version is sent to A will be submitted before
Person A rewrote it, returning home as the light dimmed, “shrugging his shoulders and smiling wryly, reflecting that being late is one of the penalties of success, just like gray hair.”
With tools like email, spreadsheets, Slack, and Zoom, has the work life of most large companies and bureaucracies really changed today? And with the addition of generative AI, it really does. Is it?
I don’t know if I should admire or despair people’s ability to create their own jobs. But even in the age of AI, I think it would be brave to bet against it.
financial times
