University of Chicago social services professor Susan J. Lambert points out that sales associates and restaurant servers only learn about their weekly schedules a few days in advance, and those schedules are always in flux. They may work seven hours one week and thirty-two the next. “Hotel housekeepers might work Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday one week, and then Sunday, Thursday and Saturday the following week,” she says.
This kind of flexibility translates into radical unpredictability, which is a nightmare for caregivers. High-income lawyers, bankers, or consultants who work at the whim of a client’s demand experience such stress all the time but typically buy their way out of it by having full-time or live-in childcare. The majority of workers without that luxury must face the drama of having to find child- or eldercare on a moment’s notice, week after week. Workers who live with extended families can sometimes manage, but they are also the most likely to have eldercare as well as childcare responsibilities.
New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor brought this experience home to millions of readers in August 2014 with her heartbreaking front-page story about twenty-two-year-old Starbucks barista and single mom Jannette Navarro. Thanks to scheduling software, which allows chains to use customer data to inform its day-to-day staffing, Navarro rarely knew her schedule more than three days before the start of the workweek. This wrought havoc on her ability to find consistent childcare for her four-year-old son, which in turn put immense strain on her familial and romantic relationships. Her aunt became frustrated with having to pick up last-minute babysitting duties due to Navarro’s erratic schedule; her boyfriend broke up with her because she was too worn out after work to keep her promises to him. She and her son lost two homes within six months, and her schedule—which some weeks required her to close the store one night at eleven P.M. and be back the next morning to open it up again at four A.M. the next day—left her so sleep-deprived she napped on the sidewalk outside the store.
The day after Kantor’s article ran in the Times, Starbucks executives vowed to revise the scheduling software for their 130,000 employees, giving local managers more discretion and preventing employees from having to close up shop one night and then open it back up again in the predawn hours the next day. But individual fixes like this aren’t a cure for the larger problems that retail and hourly workers all over the country have to deal with every day.
For millions of American workers, then, flexibility is not the solution but the problem. Women and men at the top cannot advocate for more flexibility without insisting that these policies be implemented in ways that help workers rather than hurt them. The kind of flexibility we need is about making room for care in all our lives, not an additional excuse to stop caring about the human impact of our policies.
HALF-TRUTH: “HE WHO WORKS LONGEST WORKS BEST”
“TIME MACHO,” AS I LIKE to call it, is the relentless competition to work harder, stay later, pull more all-nighters, travel around the world and bill the extra hours the international dateline affords you. One of the paragons of time macho was Ronald Reagan’s ferociously competitive budget director Dick Darman. According to one story, “Mr. Darman sometimes managed to convey the impression that he was the last one working in the Reagan White House by leaving his suit coat on his chair and his office light burning after he left for home.” (Darman claimed that it was just easier to leave his suit jacket in the office so he could put it on again in the morning, but his record of successful bureaucratic warfare suggests otherwise.)
In my younger years, I was an active participant in this game. Gene Sperling, who rose to become director of the National Economic Council under President Obama, was a legendary workaholic. I used to meet him at two A.M. at the vending machines in the tunnels at Harvard Law School when we were both staying up all night working on cases for different professors. And indeed, when my parents came to visit for my law school graduation, they wanted to see the big armchair in my professor’s office where, I joked, I had spent more nights than in my own bed.
My patterns continued when I worked for a big New York law firm in the summer. But even as I prided myself on my ability to stay at my desk round the clock, I was uncomfortably aware that one of my close friends who was a fellow associate with me always managed to leave by six or seven P.M. and did just as much work as I did. She was simply far more efficient, spending less time procrastinating, reading the paper, talking with the guys down the hall. She later made partner at a top New York firm and explained to me that when she saw a pile of work on her desk she immediately thought about what was the most efficient way to get it all done: what she could delegate to others and what she had to do herself. I was reminded of her work habits in the fall of 2014 when I heard Virginia Rometty, the first woman CEO of IBM, explain that the key to her efficiency was doing work “that only I can do” while leaving to others all the work that could be done by someone else.
That was the first inkling that perhaps my habits were evidence not of dedication but of inefficiency. My suspicions grew shortly after I turned forty. With an infant and a toddler at home, a full load of courses to teach, research to be done, and articles to be written constantly hanging over my head, I routinely tried to get by on five to six hours of sleep, which left me short-tempered and with a constant blurry feeling that Andy used to describe as “skin-crawlingly tired.” I would call meetings with my research assistant at nine or ten P.M. at my house after the kids were in bed and not even be able to remember what it was we were supposed to be working on. One day I decided I had had enough, that life was too short to go through it in a haze of fatigue. I quickly discovered that when in fact I let myself get seven or eight hours of sleep I was happier, pleasanter, and unquestionably more productive.
That is the revelation that inspired Arianna Huffington’s book Thrive, where she describes literally collapsing from exhaustion and cutting her eye and breaking her cheekbone as she fell. “I was lying on the floor of my home office in a pool of blood,” Huffington writes, when she finally had a moment of clarity. Since then she has become a self-proclaimed “sleep evangelist,” urging women and men alike to “sleep their way to the top!” She reports that more than 30 percent of people in the United States are not getting enough sleep. The cost of that massive sleeplessness is reduced cognitive functioning and lower levels of emotional intelligence, empathy, and impulse control.
Let’s be clear. Many jobs have crises or deadlines where round-the-clock presence really is necessary to get the job done, where being there and doing your best really does matter more than some abstract measure of performance. I have had plenty of times in my life when I needed people working for me who would be willing to go the extra mile and do whatever it took to get the job done, including staying up all night. When I was in the State Department and was responsible for a massive review laying out a strategy for reorganization and reform, I and a team of six Policy Planning staff members essentially worked around the clock for the better part of a month to get it across the finish line. Secretary Clinton wanted it by December 15, and given the slow and obstacle-ridden interagency approvals process, as well as the inherent difficulty of getting something done when many people with differing views had to sign off on it, that is just what it took.
I also counsel many of my students and mentees that they should divide their work lives into those phases when they can travel anywhere, anytime, and work long hours and those when they will not be able to, either because of caregiving responsibilities or because they want to slow down and do other things that are important to them. Working really hard for something and someone you believe in is exhilarating and often necessary. But it can and should be punctuated with periods where you take far better care of yourself. Under normal circumstances, valuing face time over results—measured by the quality and promptness of work that actually needs to get done—is just bad management.
Less Can Be More
DURING THE 2014 SUPER BOWL, Cadillac ran an ad that was meant to be a celebration
of American workaholism. It showed a clean-cut fifty-something white man with blazing blue eyes walking and talking his way through his mansion while extolling the virtues of the American work ethic. “Other countries, they work, they stroll home, they stop by the café, they take August off. Off. Why aren’t you like that? Why aren’t we like that? Because we’re crazy, driven, hardworking believers,” says the guy, who looks like a cartoon version of a one-percenter, to the camera. The moral of the ad: If you just work hard enough, avoiding vacation and “creating your own luck,” anything, including the ownership of a $75,000 car, is possible.
The ad drove me crazy. The man was so smug and so completely out of touch with what I consider to be the real values that Americans have traditionally proclaimed and tried to pass down to their children. Yes, Europeans and others often criticize American culture for being materialistic, but when Thomas Jefferson described humankind’s “unalienable rights” in the Declaration of Independence, he took English Enlightenment philosopher John Locke’s “life, liberty, and estate” and substituted “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” And as the behavioral psychologists tell us, happiness is more likely to be found in the pleasures of human connection and experience—a good meal, a play or movie or sporting event, a bouquet of flowers or a bottle of champagne—than it is in an endless catalogue of possessions.
I wasn’t alone in my reaction. One reporter wrote, “You know what really needs attention? What working like crazy and taking no time off really gets us[?]” It gets Americans to the grave earlier, it’s made us more anxious than people in other developed countries, and it’s created a group of people more disengaged from their jobs than in countries with more leisure time.
In the end, it was New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin who made the most damning argument against the commercial. As we were talking about it, he pointed out that Cadillac was disparaging the vacation-loving Europeans in an effort to sell luxury cars to a wealthy U.S. audience who prefer German BMWs and Mercedes. Last I checked, German workers get a mandated minimum twenty days of vacation every year.
It’s that simple. German workers work at least two weeks a year less than American workers do and yet produce better cars. Perhaps that is because German managers still subscribe to the empirical findings that led Henry Ford to establish an eight-hour workday in 1914. When Ford looked at in-house research, he realized that manual laborers were finished after eight hours of work a day. After he cut hours, errors went down, and productivity, employee satisfaction, and company profits went up.
We actually have a growing body of data in support of the proposition that working less means working better. According to much more recent research, people who work principally with their brains rather than their hands have an even shorter amount of real daily productivity than manual laborers. Microsoft employees, for instance, reported that they put in only twenty-eight productive hours in a forty-five-hour workweek—a little less than six hours a day. Futurist Sara Robinson found the same thing: knowledge workers have fewer than eight hours a day of hard mental labor in them before they start making mistakes.
This relationship between working better and working less holds particularly true in any job requiring creativity, the wellspring of innovation. Experts on creativity emphasize the value of nonlinear thinking and cultivated randomness, from long walks to looking at your environment in ways you never have before. Making time for play, as well as designated downtime, has also been found to boost creativity. Experts suggest we should change the rhythm of our workdays to include periods in which we are simply letting our minds run wherever they want to go. Without play, we might never be able to make the unexpected connections that are the essence of insight.
Understanding this relationship between time on and time off also requires us to rethink leisure. Timothy Keller, a Christian theologian, laments the Western obsession with work as a cultural phenomenon. Americans think about leisure as merely “work stoppage for bodily repair” rather than a time to “simply contemplate and enjoy the world.”
The Declaration of Independence notwithstanding, the United States comes fifteenth in the World Happiness Report, an index published annually by three distinguished economists that measures happiness as both an emotional state and a measure of life satisfaction across the globe. Switzerland came in first in 2015, but Denmark took the top spot in 2013 and 2014 and came in third in 2015. Observing this phenomenon, Brigid Schulte set out to discover the secret of Danish happiness and found it in the concept of hygge, which essentially means being and thriving in the moment.
After Schulte’s book Overwhelmed came out, New America sponsored an evening reception and panel in our New York offices. We invited the Danish consul general, thinking he could expand on why the Danes are so happy. He said, very simply, that the Danes think people who work all the time are boring. They don’t have time to read a book, see a play, or engage in athletic or charitable activities. So why would you want to have a conversation or spend time with them?
Risky Business
FOCUSING ON HOW LONG YOU are at work rather than what you actually get done is part of a larger set of assumptions about what it takes to do a good job when you are on the job. Bankers and consultants describe their work, often with a note of pride, as “24/7,” meaning that they are “always on.” And ambitious professionals of all varieties are increasingly tethered to their iPhones, responding to emails at all hours of the day or night. We have just seen that switching off will mean you will shine that much brighter when you turn back on, but the 24/7 mantra is also meant to capture an attitude of complete and total devotion to the task at hand.
In April 2013, women in the financial world got a rude example of the discrimination they face due to this issue. Hedge fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones told a symposium at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce that mothers will never rival men as traders because babies are a “focus killer.” Speaking about one of his own previous associates, he added, to illustrate his point, “As soon as that baby’s lips touched that girl’s bosom, forget it.”
Jones should not be seen as some kind of chauvinist dinosaur; during the firestorm generated by his remarks a number of women spoke up for his overall character and others said they were grateful that he put out in the open what they knew many of their male colleagues thought but would not say.
Moreover, Jones explained his reasoning in a way that encompasses some men and that is open to reasoned challenge. In his view, “macro trading requires a high degree of skill, focus, and repetition,” which is why he also rules out “men going through a divorce,” which he says will automatically reduce their trading results by 10 to 20 percent. Similarly, with respect to women, “The idea that you could think straight for sixty seconds and be able to make a rational decision is impossible, particularly when their kids are involved.”
Here Jones is simply wrong; several studies demonstrate that over the long term women traders outperform their male peers. He is locked into the world of floor traders, who require quick reflexes and intense concentration to make snap decisions in a chaotic environment. That world requires a kind of focus that allows a trader to be hyper-rational, immune from emotional turbulence of any kind. That’s why he equates women with babies with men going through a divorce. He wants to rule out any kind of emotion that might separate a human being from a machine: the perfectly rational creature we know as Homo economicus.
Another name for that kind of focus is tunnel vision, a decidedly bad thing for high-level decision makers. Indeed, in a book entitled Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir and Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan have demonstrated how the scarcity of either money or time leads to decisions that are rational in the short term but irrational over the longer term. People under the stress of having to perform when they don’t have enough time tend to focus intently on the problem right in front of them, in a way that allows them to meet their immediate d
eadline but gets them in trouble over the long term. Less stress, on the other hand, means broader vision and better long-term decisions.
People liberated from the stress tunnel may also have a different but equally profitable attitude toward risk. Financial expert and neuroscientist John Coates examined all the data he could find on men and women’s trading patterns and identified a difference in the way that men and women trade. He finds that they are equally willing to take risks, but they take them in different ways. Men like to take them quickly, thrilling to the rapid-fire pace of the trading floor (think modern-day battlefield), whereas women prefer to take more time to analyze a security and then make the trade. Coates makes it clear that successful financial traders should be judged by “their call on the market and their understanding of risk once they put on a trade; and there is no reason to believe men are better at this than women. Importantly, the financial world desperately needs more long-term, strategic thinking, and the data indicate that women excel at this.”
Coates then, as a man, is not afraid to identify and point out differences between the way men and women behave. For him, different does not mean inferior, it just means different, and quite possibly better. Assuming that the best way is the way things have always been done is hardly a prescription for success in a fast-changing economy. Men who are focused 24/7 on the present are likely to miss the future.
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I started teaching law in 1990, when most law faculties still had very few women. One of the consequences was that even as an assistant professor I was asked to serve on the faculty hiring committee almost every year. That committee, like all faculty committees, needed diverse representation, and schools simply did not have enough women to go around.
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