I’ve become increasingly protective of my time as I’ve gotten older. There were two main factors that contributed to my changing attitude towards it.
The first was having a child a decade ago. Before that, staying late at work or giving up a few hours on a weekend didn’t necessarily feel like a big deal. It was my spare time. I might have preferred to be doing something else, but there was always more of it.
Having my son in 2016 changed that calculation. For the first time in my life, I understood the trade-off - an hour I gave to work became an hour I was potentially taking from him. He was only going to be little once, and there was no way to bank those hours and claim them back later.
The second “aha” moment around the value of my time arrived when I left corporate five years ago and started my own business.
Working for yourself gives your time a very obvious economic value, particularly when you’re a provider of any professional services. My time is one of the things my business sells. If I spend five hours doing something for someone for free, that’s five hours I can’t spend doing paid work. There are no magical extra hours in my day.
Somewhere between becoming a parent and starting a business, I became much less comfortable with something I’d accepted for much of my corporate career - the idea that companies are somehow entitled to our time beyond what they actually pay for.
Even more recently, it’s become clearer to me that this is about more than boundaries and respect for other people’s time. I think that fundamentally, companies simply don’t value our time in the same way we do.
When someone else’s time becomes free
Unpaid overtime and asking employees to go “above and beyond” is one thing. However, you can see a clear posture of time being devalued before someone even joins a company.
Many recruitment processes now require candidates to invest a significant amount of time just to be considered for a job. That might look like an initial screening call, multiple interviews, assessments, psychometric testing, presentations and take-home tasks.
For the person who gets the job, some investment of time is reasonable. What about everyone else?
The funny thing is that companies certainly understand the value of their own people’s time. Senior executives have carefully managed diaries, and recruiters have to account for the internal resources required to run a hiring process. And yet candidate time sits outside that calculation, and it’s rarely considered.
I suspect recruitment processes would become dramatically shorter if candidates collectively started demanding compensation once they passed a reasonable threshold. The moment candidate time carries a price, there will be an immediate incentive to use less of it.
But underneath all this behaviour, what’s going on structurally? Why have we become so comfortable with giving up large quantities of our time to companies for little or no compensation?
The work day has lost its boundaries
The historian E.P. Thompson explored the relationship between work and time in his 1967 essay Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.
Before industrialisation, much work was organised around tasks - something needed doing and people organised their labour around completing it.
Industrialisation changed that relationship. Factories needed people in particular places at particular times, because machines operated to schedules. As a result, work became increasingly organised around the clock.
The employment bargain that emerged makes intuitive sense in that environment - you sold your employer a defined block of your time, then eventually you clocked off and went home. You weren’t expected to work once you left the premises, and indeed you couldn’t.
Modern corporate work has inherited much of that model, even though many of the conditions that created it have disappeared. Today, we have laptops and phones. We have email, Teams and Slack. We can work from an office, our kitchen table or an airport lounge.
While that flexibility has brought genuine benefits, it’s also created a fairly large problem. If we can work from anywhere, we can work everywhere. At any time. For many knowledge workers, there’s no physical moment when work actually ends.
In other words, we’re still working under an employment model based on companies purchasing blocks of our time, while progressively dismantling many of the boundaries that once contained the time they purchased.
There’s no such thing as reasonable overtime
In Australia, we often see phrases like “reasonable overtime” appear in our work contracts. I have a major problem with this wording. If I’ve signed a contract saying I work 38 hours a week, surely 38 hours has to mean something.
Of course, urgent things happen. I run a business, and I understand that sometimes a client needs something faster than expected or circumstances change. The difference is that in business, we have mechanisms for dealing with that. We change the agreement, or we swap deliverables. We charge a rush fee or add the additional work to the scope.
If you’re running your business properly, you never give away that work for free. I’d be surprised if your company was comfortable with giving away free time, services or products to its clients or customers. Yet that’s often exactly what many employers seem to expect from their employees.
Doing more with less has a cost
Consider what’s happening in the corporate world right now. Many companies are cutting roles, and people are leaving and not being replaced.
Perhaps some of their work disappears, or some of it may be automated. However, in many cases much of it gets redistributed among the people who remain. Senior leaders then report increased productivity and celebrate “doing more with less”.
Again, I have a problem with this scenario. We need to be careful about what we’re measuring and reporting. There’s a significant difference between productivity improvement and work intensification.
If some improvement in the business allows me to produce the same amount of work with less effort, that’s a genuine productivity uplift. On the other hand, if you remove two people from my team and I have to work harder or longer to absorb a significant proportion of their work, the organisation has achieved something quite different. My personal time has become the buffer between the amount of labour the company purchases and the amount of work it wants completed.
If a role routinely requires 45 or 50 hours of labour every week, we need to stop pretending it’s a 38-hour job. When this happens, the company needs more labour than it’s purchasing, and employees are supplying the difference.
Who gets the AI productivity dividend?
We hear constantly that AI will make corporate workers significantly more productive. What does that look like in practice?
Imagine AI allows me to complete in 30 hours the work that previously took 38. What happens to those eight hours? Do I receive some of that time back through greater flexibility? Does the company receive eight additional hours of output? Do we share the benefit?
I suspect we know what will happen in many organisations - the space will simply be filled with more work. Which leaves us with the question… if becoming more efficient means someone immediately increases my workload, why would I advertise the fact that I can now complete something in half the time?
It also raises a much bigger question about the productivity gains we expect AI to create: who gets them? Particularly when so much of our shared resources as a community are going towards allowing AI to run at scale in the first place?
If AI genuinely allows society to produce the same amount with substantially less human labour, we have a choice about what we do with the time it saves. Companies can capture all of it through increased output; or workers can receive some of that productivity dividend through greater ownership of their time.
What needs to change?
Perhaps the future of flexible work isn’t really about whether we spend two or three days in an office. Maybe we need to think about what we’re actually selling to our employer.
For some forms of knowledge work, we could move towards a model that places greater emphasis on outcomes. The organisation defines what needs to be achieved and establishes genuine requirements around availability, deadlines and collaboration. The company and the employee then sign a contract to that effect. Employees have greater control over how they organise the rest of their time.
Whichever model we use, there’s one question we can’t avoid forever:
What’s a reasonable amount of work for one human being?
Do companies really value our time?
There’s a common thread running through these themes of lengthy recruitment processes, unpaid overtime, workforce cuts and the productivity gains promised by AI.
Companies value time differently depending on whose time it is and who bears the cost. Waste 100 hours of executive time and the organisation has a problem. Waste 100 hours of candidate time during recruitment and it’s not really seen as an issue to anyone bar the candidate.
If a company needs another 500 hours of labour each month after cutting its workforce, hiring people to provide those hours creates a visible expense. If existing employees absorb those hours through heavier workloads or unpaid overtime, much of that cost disappears from the company’s accounts. Meanwhile, the time hasn’t become free. Someone else is paying for it - the employee.
I understand that more acutely now than I did when I was younger. Money comes and goes. So do jobs and clients. Time with the people you care about does not.
Whether you’re an employee or a candidate, the next time a company asks you to donate time it hasn’t paid for, please don’t treat it as insignificant. And perhaps most importantly, we should never view someone’s willingness to give that time away as a measure of their commitment or ambition.
If time is the employment bargain, the boundary around that time needs to mean something. If outcomes are the bargain, people deserve much greater control over the time they use to achieve them.
Perhaps that’s going to be the true definition of flexible work in the future - a move towards giving people greater ownership of the one thing they can never replace. Their time.
One thing I’m thinking about this week
I’m glad I became protective of my time when my son was younger, because at 10, apparently I’m now deeply embarrassing.
My social media content is “cringe”. My mugs “suck”. Everything I do seems to be met with the particular disdain only a 10-year-old can deliver.
Then, every now and again, something happens that reminds me I’m still very much required. Like getting a call at 10am on a random Tuesday to tell me my son had parked himself on the ground in the middle of a street in busy North Sydney on the way to a school excursion to the library. He was refusing to go another step without me. So being the dutiful mother that I am, off I went.
It made me think about all those hours I protected when he was little. The times I chose him over staying late or decided that whatever was happening at work could wait. I’m so glad I did.
Yes, the version of your child who wants all of your time and thinks you’re amazing does eventually disappear. Eventually they’re replaced by someone who thinks your mugs suck.
Then the phone rings on a random Tuesday morning and you remember they still need you. Even when you’re totally cringe. (He’s right, by the way. I probably am.)
Things I’ve made (and you can buy)
If you enjoy my content and would like to support my work, here are a few things I’ve created.
🛒 Track Changes On Shop - Coffee mugs and drinkware for corporate rebels
📖 Do Give Up Your Day Job - Guide to corporate exits and transitions to self-employment
