Glorifying hardwork
How many hours did I work today?
As an Indian previously working in a bunch of Indian companies and now studying, I am often asked how many hours I am putting in my current job or in academia which apparently one of the parameters of how hard-working I am. Somehow, we Indians, take a lot of pride in the number of hours we clock. This is not something new, but has been running in our system since we were born.
If I see around, I see a lot of companies have this notion of dividing their employees into two categories:
- High productivity, less time consuming: The people who come in late and leave early but their tasks are on point because they are good at what they are doing.
- Low productivity, more time consuming: The people who slog at work, but complete their assigned tasks but also take a lot more time to do so.
I simply don’t understand why do we count hours to determine whether a person is capable enough to do a thing or not. As an example, if one is trying to solve a problem which involves lot more intellectual labor than manual labor and is not able to accomplish the job in say 2 hours, probably he or she won’t be able to do shit about it in 20. This is an 18 hours of fun time wasted. A lot of people believe that those 18 hours are an investment, but I still would argue that it is time wasted.
Does it mean I give up after two hours?
No, but take a break and do something that interests you and is completely different from your tasks. I usually go down, get a drink and hit the beach for an hour or so. It clears my head and occasionally gives me a different perspective of the problem I am trying to solve. Other times, I simply go to the gym.
My point is: The world is big and there are tons of things to do which we won’t be doing because we are busy working on an idea which will probably work when we will stop working on it continuously. So, go out and relax a bit and work on it some other time. It often works out.
Signing off,
Raghu
