Let your work do the talking not your CLOCK

Don't be this GUY ~ Just to clarify he is a donkey not an ASS, that you can be

Given a choice i would not have chosen to write on this topic but Can't help it. The allure of trashing established ideas is too scintillating to ignore. I will begin by accepting that i am not an expert of this subject. That i believe is not a prerequisite to pointing out alternative ways of doing WORK in our country.


I have a fair bit of experience with the booming or rather once booming IT industry of our country. Some senior citizens of the industry may consider my experience miniscule but as the saying goes you just need a grain of rice to know the state of the dish. Work specifically desk jobs with officially 9 hour shifts which stretch into 10,11, 12 sometimes even 14 hour shifts are unsaid norms of our system. Expressing any dissent about it is strictly frowned upon. It is believed that the amount of time you spend working is directly proportional to the amount and quality of work you do.


The basis to this stupidity is the ideology that Time is Money and Work leads to Money so Time is Work. Well yes and no, time is money not because of its monetary value but because its value is best ascribed as money. As Money gives you the ability to acquire and own things, depending on how much of it you have, Time well utilized will give you the means to all that you need. Money is for materialistic pursuits, Time is for all pursuits.   


Anyone with the faintest idea of Pareto principle will see that in all the time that you spend working only 20 percent of the time is productive and the rest of the 80 is insignificant. I have personally seen scores of resources spending huge amounts of time enhancing the aesthetic appeal of their work. This process actually consumes more time than it took to get the work done in the first place. Our managers encourage this. In a shroud of time management and optimization, resources are assigned menial tasks that are labour intensive, physical or mental, with huge appetites in terms of time consumption.


I am not encouraging you to sit on your bum and do nothing. All i am saying is just because your organization expects you to take 8 hours to get your work done you need to take 8 hours. You get paid to get the work done not to take 8 hours to get the work done. The time is given to you with buffer, nothing is limiting you to be faster, better and efficient. Challenge the dictum. Question your managers about the purpose of your assignments. As long as your targets are reached they don't control your time.


I am quite aware of the argument of  if you have finished your assigned work go the extra mile , take an initiative and do something other than what is expected. Well when i fell short of my deliverable was any such courtesy or support extended, was i told you have spent your 8 hrs, go home and get the work done later tomorrow. One may choose to go the extra mile but that has to be out of choice not because it is expected of him not because he will be ostricized if he doesn't. It is already bad enough that people in our country are expected to excel at academics, there is no sense in expecting people to drive themselves to the ground working chafing their asses off. I get the work done and with the rest of the time i do what i wish to do. So i am content , your work is on track , everyone is happy, i am more productive. You can only appreciate the effect of content employee only when you have had one under you.


A select few dance their way out of the system day in and day out. They understand the Pareto well enough to get their work done in a few hours and have fun or pursue a passion or take on more work in the rest of the time. This for me is actual time management. I don't agree with a lot of things Infosys does but i will take a leaf from the alleged mail that Mr. N.R. Narayana Murthy sent to his employees. Roughly summarized he said get a life. When your shift of 9 or 9.5 hours ends, get out of the office, stop kissing your bosses ass as your boss's boss's boss me am not impressed by idiots. Here i would make an exception to what i preach, work in the shift, the whole hours for here is a man who understands and respects your time so respect his PAY !

~ Time is Money, not Work !