How Does Your TEA Taste?
Where are your time, energy, and attention really going to?
One of the things that’s interesting about learning more about the history of time measurement is the understanding of just how much work people put into trying to shove time into the neat little boxes of like “business hours”, “weekdays”, etc.
In case you, like me, operated under the mistaken assumption that the eight-hour workday was created by Henry Ford, allow me to direct you towards a brief outline of the struggle towards getting a eight-hour workday. It was a lot more complex than just the assembly line, and in fact Ford was pretty radical in that he didn’t cut wages when he cut hours:
On 5 January 1914 the Ford Motor Company took the radical step of doubling pay to $5 a day (equivalent to $150 in 2022) and cutting shifts from nine hours to eight, moves that were not popular with rival companies, although seeing the increase in Ford’s productivity, and a significant increase in profit margin (from $30 million to $60 million in two years), most soon followed suit.
I can see the stockholders meeting now:
“We can double our profits in two years with just two simple steps!”
“Hurray! Let’s do it!”
“Great, we’ll tell the workers they have a 12% shorter workday and double their salaries.”
“…um…what? Not like that!”
To your employer, you are a human resource.
Capitalism is based on extracting as much value as possible from resources for as low a cost as possible (that’s not meant as a slam, it’s just a definition).
And that means you have time (along with energy and attention) that your employer wants to extract. And before you entrepreneurial types look down your noses because you’re not exploited by anybody.
Your business is still existing in a capitalist system — which means you are on the same field as other businesses with many more resources.
“Hustle culture” would have you believe that you should just spend more of that TEA (along with technology and usually some kind of productivity system someone is happy to sell you) you can level the field.
If, like me, you’ve fallen for that “bootstrap” myth, allow me to paraphrase the wisdom of DJ Khaled:
So If the Game is Rigged, Why Bother?
Honestly, I can’t say I know — I haven’t finished Jennifer Louden’s book yet — but I do think that the productivity mavens are right in that technology and systems can have an effect on your capacity for time, energy, and attention.
I’m just starting to explore the idea that those effects should be optimized not for output or profit, but rather for your own quality of life.
That may not sound like a novel idea — and it’s not. Every single productivity system or app I know of talks about how much happier and peaceful and predictable your life will be if you use it.
The thing is, when you scratch the surface, it’s usually coming back to the idea of “more” in terms of quantity — more money, more customers, more likes, more views, more engagement — and translates that into “better”.
It’s as if they forgot that more is not necessarily better, when “better” is measuring joy and satisfaction with your life. Those are much harder metrics to show on a balance sheet. It’s much more comfortable to stick to clicks and costs, hours and gps coordinates, word counts and content calendars.
How can we re-tool these systems and re-system these tools so that rather than getting more we’re getting better? I’m more interested, at this point in my life, at doing the harder work of trying to improve the feeling of life — too stretch a metaphor too far, I’m less interested in how much TEA I can brew and more in the flavor of the TEA I have.
This is part of an exploration of ADHD time management being done on the ADHD Open Space podcast — available at a fine podcast app near you!
