How To Cut Work Week by a Fourth

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Younger people have a hard time realizing that it wasn’t that long ago the World Wide Web was a novelty, accessed with painfully slow dial-up modems. Widespread use of the medium now taken for granted arrived within the past two decades. At the outset, access required one to be tethered to a computer, but no more, of course. We can check email, Facebook and use Google to settle bar bets on our phone, sometimes by using voice commands.

Teenagers take all this for granted, of course, in much the same way some folks of my generation believed that color television was an inalienable right and that our parents ought to get with the program and dump that old black-and-white monstrosity. Yes, children, many people watched television in black-and-white back in the day — even movies and programs originally produced in color! It was a real hardship.

Although this old-school curmudgeon still prefers real books to reading on a tablet, will always savor the tactile sensation of fingers turning a page, would rather play a CD than listen to my iPod, I readily admit that I have no desire to return to pre-Internet days. I love having both a universe of information available with such ease and being able to watch stupid cat videos on YouTube. Nope, you can have my Macbook when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

A thought occurred the other day that could revolutionize the American workplace in this post-Internet era. I have figured out how to reduce the workweek in white-collar America by 25 percent. This only applies to people who spend most of their days starting at computer screens. According to the sources I found using (of course) Google, that is somewhere around 60 percent of American workers. It is an admittedly radical concept but one that could increase productivity, offer folks more leisure time, and even free up seats at computers in crowded offices for possibly putting more folks to work — without expensive capital costs for more cubicles and computers.

Here’s my idea: People who make their living doing something on a computer — customer service, data entry, newspaper reporters, whoever — would agree to forgo all non-work related use of the Internet. No answering personal email, checking out one’s Facebook page to see what silly saying someone has posted, or where your “friends” are headed to lunch, no checking the box scores from last night’s Ranger’s game or bidding to buy a 1956 National guitar on eBay.  The computer would only be used to do the work that brings in the paycheck.

In exchange for forgoing all non-work use of a computer, employees would work a 32-hour week for their previous 40-hour pay. How those hours were carved out would be up to the employer, who would also use lockout devices created by computer geeks far smarter than me to ensure there was no surreptitious web surfing, to find out the line on the next NBA playoff game. Some folks might work four eight-hour days and get an extra day off, while others might work other variations.

By now, some of you doubtless believe I have turned into some type of French-loving Socialist. But I base my proposal on years of observing people at work in white-collar settings. My longtime hunch has been that folks with Internet access spend about a fourth of their day looking at sites that have nothing to do with work. It is a few minutes here, 10 minutes before and after lunch, or the last hour of the day since the boss left early to play golf. A business professor named Dominic Thomas agrees, saying surveys show that white-collar workers are productive only 65-75 percent of the time.

Still, the work gets done. It is not as if most white-collar workers aren’t producing enough of whatever it is they are charged to produce. If they weren’t doing the work required, likely as not the boss would find someone else to do the job. It is a buyer’s market for employers in these days of high unemployment. So if productive folks can spend a fourth of their time buying Christmas presents on amazon.com and still get their work done, why not have them work fewer hours without web-surfing and go home?

Some argue that people need that down time during the day to play Angry Birds on their desktop before opening another Excel spreadsheet. Fine. Those folks can keep on working nine-to-5, furtively clicking the “minimize” icon each time the boss strolls by.  But employees, who would like to go home a bit earlier, or maybe take off Friday afternoons, would be able to do so. This would require flexibility in the workplace that might be a stretch for some employers. And workers would have to park their cell phones as well. Otherwise, they would just keep on tweeting and checking in on Foursquare and still get to leave early.

I am quite certain that none of you reading this “waste” a fourth of the workday cruising the Internet, but I bet all of you know folks who do. I am also sure my proposal will go nowhere.

That’s fine. I have to go check my Facebook page now.

 

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