Reading :: Counterproductive

Counterproductive: Time Management in the Knowledge Economy
by Melissa Gregg

Full disclosure: For some years now, I've been conducting a one-day workshop on time management, based in part on my own empirical studies over the last 25 years, and in part on sources in management, psychology, neuropsychology, sociology, and anthropology. The goal is to give people a broad view of why their time is more fragmented now than ever before, to provide some basic theory about how people mediate their own actions via texts and other representations, and to discuss how they might develop their own mediatory strategies at the individual, small group, and organizational levels. I've presented shorter versions of this workshop to academics, medical doctors, research groups, and various others. People who take the workshop generally find it rewarding. They single out aspects such as taking a step back to figure out their overall goals; exploring different approaches and strategies; learning how and when to say no to obligations; and understanding how their work and text systems interact with those of others.  More than that, they express relief: they come away from the workshop with a better understanding of why they feel pressures from work and home life, and they have a better sense of how to deal with these pressures beyond simply reacting to them. 

So I'm hardly a disinterested party when it comes to reading this book. That being said, I was disappointed in Counterproductive, which "explores how productivity emerged as a way to think about workplace performance at the turn of the twentieth century and its ongoing consequences for the administration of labor today" (p.3). "Counterproductive shows how time mastery became a defining quality of professionals over an extended historical period, remaining constant through successive waves of managerial discourse" (p.4). Gregg (correctly) notes that the focus on time management is related to increasing worker precarity (p.6) — although in my view she does not quite get the connection, as I'll discuss below. Gregg ultimately considers the focus on productivity to be pointless due to the weakness of labor organization (p.8). 

Let's review Gregg's argument first, then I'll discuss the problems I have with it. Ultimately, I found the book valuable, not for its insights per se so much as how it forced me to articulate things about time management for myself.

First, Gregg's argument. Gregg presents it in three parts. 

In part I, she "tackles the legacy of time-management methods introduced by turn-of-the-twentieth-century progressivists to optimize work in the office and factory," beginning with Lilian Gilbreth's time-and-motion studies. She calls out Gilbreth and others for their "covert reliance on delegated labor both in and outside the home" (p.12 -- Lilian Gibreth had servants). Also in Part I, Gregg notes the "gendered dynamics" in early management theory and productivity literature (p.12). 

In part II, she analyzes contemporary time management books and productivity apps, arguing that productivity became "a way of life for knowledge professionals seeking affective security amid job volatility" (p.13). She adds, "My reading reinforces how time-management instruction and adherence have become a necessary form of immaterial labor in an information economy, training workers to embrace their flexibility" (p.15). 

In part III, she examines "the infatuation with mindfulness taking hold in technology and corporate cultures in recent years" (p.15). She argues that "the turn to mindfulness can be seen as a response to the decline in collective opportunities to experience ritual in the workplace" (p.15). 

She concludes with "a set of recommendations for post-work productivity" (p.17). One specific example is that of coworking spaces, which "demarcate the move away from company life to something more playful and free" (p.133). 

Where to start?

Let's start with a methodological note. To grossly oversimplify, I tend to think of research in the social sciences as belonging to one of two basic stances. In Stance 1, we ask people what they think. In Stance 2, we tell them what they think. 

Personally, I do most of my research in Stance 1: I interview people to get their perspectives and have them articulate their motivations, I observe them as they do things, I pick up the specific texts and other artifacts they use, and I turn these into an integrated understanding of their work. Usually I conduct some form of member check—that is, I bring my conclusions back to them and see if what I've produced fairly represents what they are experiencing. 

Gregg is doing her research in Stance 2: She reads texts and analyzes apps, then characterizes these as having a coherent message that represents the ideas, concepts, and concerns of the people who read and use them. She does not ask these people whether her conclusions match their lived experience. Stance 2 is in many ways more satisfactory for the individual researcher, since it allows them to avoid collecting feedback and therefore to avoid having to deal with any pushback that might complicate their conclusions. But the limitations are obvious.

I think we see some of those limitations throughout the book. For instance, Gregg draws a straight line from time-and-motion studies (in which consultants observed manual workers, then reconstructed their motions to make them more efficient) to productivity texts (in which managers are given advice on self-structuring their time to make themselves more effective). These are two very different things: in time-and-motion studies, workers are micromanaged by someone else; in productivity texts, managers are given tools to structure their own time and work. 

Equating these two functions allows Gregg to claim a direct lineage between the two. But the 20th century is a story of great change in how work was organized, due in part to information and communication technologies, which drove organizational changes, as well as an explosion in education and increasing automation. Consequently, work became more fragmented (and, yes, more precarious), and more importantly, people began to own their own work—that is, we saw fewer jobs that could be micromanaged through time-and-motion studies, and more jobs that required self-structuring. The vanguards included executive management, of course, but also ... housewives, a group that Gregg notes without catching the import (p.23). We can add traveling salespeople and independent contractors, who similarly are given work objectives but are allowed wide latitude in how to achieve these (i.e., command, but not control). They have high discretion over how they conduct their time, and they consequently carry more responsibility. And although I have listed four specific groups here, due to work trends such as projectification and outsourcing (and the precarity that comes with these), this trend continues. This is why Drucker's classic The Effective Executive continues to enjoy readership, and a much broader readership than just executives. In a sense, even those of us who are not in an executive position are functioning as executives—that is, no one is going to structure our time for us, and we have to figure it out for ourselves. 

Incidentally, this point also suggests the solution to a mystery that Gregg brings up several times: why time management is so often compared to athletics. Gregg maintains that athletics is inherently competitive, and this competition orientation is reflected in time management, in which people assert their status by delegating difficult parts of their jobs to others. She warrants this reading with a reference to Sloterdijk (p.138). But athleticism is not inherently competitive (at least I hope not—every morning I run an exceedingly slow two miles, and I don't compare my times with others). Athletics, however, is one of the most common experiences in self-discipline in the US school system. (Is this how people read the athletics analogy in the time management literature? I don't know, I haven't asked them—but to be fair, this is a blog review, not a book in which I confidently ascribe views to people.)

One strategy for self-structuring is to figure out how to delegate. Gregg bristles at this trend, which she sees as judging value of tasks based on status. But one of the sources discussing delegation is The Effective Executive, in which Drucker (reasonably, I think) argues that the executive must figure out what they alone can do, excel at that, and delegate the rest. Just as most of us don't grow our own food or make our own shoes, most of us identify tasks that don't fit in our wheelhouse and delegate them to a specialist—or automate. When I ask an electrician to rewire a faulty outlet, it's not because the task is beneath me, it's because I know they can do a better job, keep the wiring up to code, and avoid getting electrocuted. The electrician will be more effective. And if I can delegate this work to the electrician, I can turn back to the tasks that only I can do, such as teaching my classes or writing my research articles. I'll be more effective too. This is not "elite" (pp.95-96) but commonplace—and, I would contend, common sense.

Gregg goes on to argue that time management is a recursive distraction from identifying a worthwhile basis of work as a source for spiritual fulfillment (p.96), and argues that time management is "an epistemology without an ontology," a way of life, "religious devotion" (p.98) with "spiritual valences" when taken to its "logical extreme" (p.99). Here is where I think she could have really benefited from interviews with actual people, who (at least in my experience and in my field studies over the past 25 years) are just trying to get through the day, be effective in their jobs, and save more time for their home life. Yes, they are grappling with precarity, but I don't see these knowledge workers as becoming devotees to a new religion or even considering time management to be an epistemology.

In the conclusion, as noted, Gregg sees coworking as a hope for the future. Unlike Gregg, I have actually interviewed coworkers and coworking space proprietors, and I keep up with the research literature on coworking — much of which emphasizes the inherent precarity in coworking spaces. Coworkers have not checked out of time management. They tend to be independent contractors, dependent contractors, small business owners, remote workers, and others for whom it is critical to structure their own work and manage their own time. Although the coworking movement has often claimed that it is changing work, coworkers are hardly saying goodbye to time management—quite the opposite. 

To sum up: I was not a fan of this book's argument or methodology. The book did, however, allow me to really think through  and articulate some of the things I have seen in the time management literature, so I still found it valuable. You might as well.