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Take a gander at the above. It is from here. We are indeed often forced into rigid and standardized routines that make no sense. For example, I dated a woman for a long time who did her best professional work at 2am. She’d be up with insomnia and crank out some amazing emails or decks, or what have you. The thing is, most people and virtually all bosses want you most productive sometime between 9am and 5pm, and in reality the real time they want you productive is “when they most need you for something.” 2am is usually not that time for people. So, what happens is … and definitely what happened to this former paramour of mine … is that she’s essentially viewed as “not a good employee,” even though the output is there, because the output doesn’t occur within the rigid box where “productivity” (a vague term in and of itself) is supposed to occur.
As for meetings being scrapped, that’s hard for a lot of managers — in large part because many meetings aren’t called to be productive, but rather to establish relevance for the meeting-caller. Invasive software? Some managers adore that stuff. Why? Because even if it’s an uncomfortable topic, we need to remember that work is about control, relevance, and status to many. When work is about those things, and it truly often is, tracking software and pointless meetings almost have to be part of the game. That’s what keeps managers feeling like they have a…
