The 9-to-5 workday is dying. That’s a fact. 43% of Americans spend at least some time working remotely, and of those who do, 31% do it four to five days a week.
What started as a socialist movement in the 1800s and has led to the abolition of child labor, minimum wage, and the 40-hour workweek is now fading away. As it does, it blurs the line between work and life, which, for many, is a fine balance they’re constantly trying to get just right.
Whether you like this change or not, it is one you will have to live with. That might mean learning how to join a video conference, answering emails on a Sunday, or using clunky remote access software. But it might also mean more time with your family, less pressure to finish on time, and getting a haircut on a Tuesday.
It’s not a good thing. It’s not a bad thing. It’s an opportunity. Especially because there was never a line to begin with.
The Impossible Edge at Work
A surprisingly instrumental figure in the rise of standard working hours was Henry Ford. Having had his fair share of trouble with labor unions, in 1926, he committed to a 40-hour, 5-day workweek. That was 14 years before Congress made it legally binding and thus sent a strong signal.
Ford is also a character in one of my favorite stories about the nature of work, though he takes a more passive role in it. A few years before he signed the above deal, Ford ordered an engineer named Charles Steinmetz into one of his plants. Smithsonian Mag describes the incident:
Upon arriving, Steinmetz rejected all assistance and asked only for a notebook, pencil and cot. Steinmetz listened to the generator and scribbled computations on the notepad for two straight days and nights. On the second night, he asked for a ladder, climbed up the generator and made a chalk mark on its side. Then he told Ford’s skeptical engineers to remove a plate at the mark and replace sixteen windings from the field coil.
They did, and the generator performed to perfection.
Henry Ford was thrilled, until he got an invoice from General Electric in the amount of $10,000. Ford acknowledged Steinmetz’s success but balked at the figure. He asked for an itemized bill. Steinmetz responded personally to Ford’s request with the following:
Making chalk mark on generator: $1.
Knowing where to make mark: $9,999.
Ford paid the bill.
I love this story because it shows that, even in a time when factory work was on the rise, creativity was more valuable. This isn’t just reflected in the fact that $10,000 in 1920 equates to $126,000 today, but in Steinmetz’s obvious edge over Ford workers. An edge he couldn’t possibly have attained spending eight hours a day at the assembly line.
So where did he get it?
Two Souls in One Body
Charles Steinmetz was an immigrant. After moving to the United States from Germany, he pushed alternating current theory to the point where wall sockets and domestic electricity could expand across the country. He also helped make electric motors available for industrial use.
Despite his worldly success, Steinmetz spent most of his humble existence in a small cabin in upstate New York, much like that of a painter or poet. It is only one of many signs that, besides a rational theorist, he was also a dreamer.
He gave himself a middle name, Proteus, after a character in Homer’s Odyssey, developed glider prototypes in his spare time, and believed in an abundant human future, enabled by machines. He experimented with photography, gathered all sorts of lethal animals in his greenhouse, and contemplated his equations paddling in his canoe.
In short, like most of history’s geniuses, Charles Steinmetz was as much an artist as he was a scientist. Around the same time he helped Ford and the tycoon surrendered to the 9-to-5, another member of this elite club figured out why lives like his led to such prolific results at work.
To this day, it’s an apt description of how creativity works.
How Creativity Works
In what would become one of the most cited works on creativity, Graham Wallas proposed four stages of control in the human thinking process. As outlined in The Art of Thought:
- Preparation. Get a comprehensive overview of the problem and attack it from several logical angles.
- Incubation. Let everything sit in your subconscious, either by turning to other things or refraining from work altogether. Procrastinate, if you will.
- Illumination. In an unexpected moment, a sudden flash of insight will hit you. It might be after waking up or in the shower.
- Verification. Apply the insight to the problem and see if it works.
It is the second stage, incubation, that is most essential to being creative.
“This second form of Incubation is often necessary for the severer types of intellectual production, which would be hindered either by interruption or by continuous passive reading.”
Once you’ve hit a certain threshold of information, no conscious amount of effort will get you past the obstacle. The best you can do is surrender, get some sleep, and take a long walk. They’re called stages of control, but once you kick off incubation, there’s no telling when illumination occurs. That’s why good things take time and Da Vinci needed over a decade to finish the Mona Lisa.
The concept of modern psychology incubation plays on is called the Zeigarnik effect. It is our brain’s tendency to remember all things unfinished and repeatedly float them back to the surface of our consciousness. Therefore, a life designed for maximum creativity is simply a life designed for maximum incubation.
That’s why people like Charles Steinmetz are never worried about work-life balance. Since they truly care about what they do, compartmentalizing their lives would only rob them of the beauty of discovery. Because they’d have fewer chances to look at old problems with fresh eyes and learn something new.
It’s also why Google offers all that free food.
What’s the ROI of BBQing?
Sergey Brin is said to once have demanded that, at Google, “no one should be more than 200 feet away from food.” Many assumptions have been made about the reasoning behind this decision. Some are more benevolent, like happy workers being good workers, others are rather dark, like sated employees having no reason to go home.
The truth, according to Laszlo Bock, former Senior Vice President of People Operations, is that each snack break is a potential source for Google’s next break-through innovation. When employees mingle with coworkers from other departments, a multitude of incubated insights comes bubbling to the surface. It’s a symphony of idea illumination.
Google does lots of other things to encourage creativity, like the famous 20% time for tinkering, or 10% of budgets going to experimental projects, but nothing comes close to this. There’s no way for us to tell whether Steinmetz had his eureka moment in the generator incident listening to its gears or BBQing in his back-yard. But to the modern employer, the smart employer, really, that doesn’t matter.
All they care about is giving their people as many chances for it to happen as they can.
Creativity Is a Full-Time Job — and It’s Everyone’s
So where’s the twist? Why should we all celebrate the death of the 9-to-5?
The first thing is that, to me, putting an arbitrary limit on how much you work only feels like a good idea if you either hate your job or like it way too much. Whether both are the actual fringe cases they should be is for another day, but most people naturally prioritize health and family. If you don’t struggle with working too much or too little right now, chances are you won’t in the new economy either.
The second, much bigger argument is that today, we are all Charles Steinmetz. Back in 2001, The Economist published a report on ‘the new workforce.’ Even then, less than a quarter of American workers made their living with their hands. Nowadays, almost half of all employees have a degree and only 10% start jobs before completing high school.
Jobs where creativity is optional simply aren’t around any more.
Unless you’re an accountant doing the same three calculations year-in and year-out, in which case your boss is already wondering how to best replace you anyway, coming up with ideas is part of your job. Project managers must strike the right balance between online and offline communication. Marketers are forced to transition their brands to the web. Even burger flippers can score tons of loyalty points with customers for creative, individual interactions. Just like those in Google’s cafeteria.
In a world where the determining factor of your output is how innovative you are, work-life balance is a moot concept. There is only your life and how everything in it connects. Sure, you could fight tooth and nail to keep clocking by the hour. But you can also stay home with the baby, open your laptop, and take this trend as a chance to unite all aspects of your life.
Like the curious scientist, pondering equations in his canoe. A world without 9-to-5 jobs sure would have fitted into his vision of the future:
“Some day we make the good things of life for everybody.”