Camille Paglia in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Jobs, jobs, jobs: We need a sweeping revalorization of the trades. The pressuring of middle-class young people into officebound, paper-pushing jobs is cruelly shortsighted. Concrete manual skills, once gained through the master-apprentice alliance in guilds, build a secure identity. Our present educational system defers credentialing and maturity for too long. When middle-class graduates in their mid-20s are just stepping on the bottom rung of the professional career ladder, many of their working-class peers are already self-supporting and married with young children.

From: Rushed off my feet, shirking nine to five, Sophie Heawood can scarcely find the time to procrastinate
Sunday, 22 August 2010

And so it is with grim satisfaction that I read last week’s research, by a management consultancy firm, suggesting that junior council staff spend 68 per cent of their working time doing nothing remotely productive, and that managers are “uncomfortable confronting the poor performance of staff.”

Time-wasting accounts for two-thirds of the working day for these hapless folk who aren’t forced to spend their time more usefully, and so don’t. Of course, this is just a survey, to be taken with a pinch of salt – we have all met council staff who are overworked, underpaid, surrounded by despair and yet heroically grafting through it.

And yet, so many of us are also too familiar with that sensation of wasting our days away. You know, the creeping thought that, instead of sorting out that spreadsheet or writing those notes for the meeting, maybe you should just check out that website with videos of abandoned dogs who need adopting, or the property site for rundown farms in northern Portugal that cost less than a bedsit in Croydon. Or endlessly refreshing an ex-boyfriend’s Facebook page, to try to understand why somebody who once loved us with a blind poetic rage has now married a blonde who lists her interests as “goin out *music *drinks *stuff”.

Well, according to the consultancy, planning and management are the solution to this. Planning your time better, and planning your staff’s time better, is the only way through the temptation to slack. Is that really the answer? Or just another way of stacking yourself into the future without soaking up the present?

When John Lennon said that life was what happens when you’re making other plans, he didn’t mean that you should plan harder; he meant you should take a look around at what’s actually going on. Because endless planning is the worst procrastination of all, when life carries on apace, under your ink-smudged fingers, or your glowing screen. It isn’t something to plan through, or turn the other way through. It’s right here, right now. Do with it what you can.

Evening on Karl Johan by Edvard Munch

Louis MacNeice – Sunday Morning

Down the road someone is practising scales,
The notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails,
Man’s heart expands to tinker with his car
For this is Sunday morning, Fate’s great bazaar;
Regard these means as ends, concentrate on this Now,

And you may grow to music or drive beyond Hindhead anyhow,
Take corners on two wheels until you go so fast
That you can clutch a fringe or two of the windy past,
That you can abstract this day and make it to the week of time
A small eternity, a sonnet self-contained in rhyme.

But listen, up the road, something gulps, the church spire
Open its eight bells out, skulls’ mouths which will not tire
To tell how there is no music or movement which secures
Escape from the weekday time. Which deadens and endures.

via artofeurope.com

My love-hate relationship with working in offices | Technology | The Guardian

What technology has changed is the speed and density of the links that bind external workers into the social mesh of the office. The mixture of email, instant messaging, texting and just plain telephone calls mean that a mid-range mobile phone now offers much more computing power for journalistic purposes than the entire resources of a national newspaper could 10 years ago – and I can put it in my pocket. Laptops are nicer to read and write on, but this is still an astonishing development. If all that journalism needed were technology, then everyone in the western world could be a journalist now.

Yet there is still one huge advantage to offices which working at home can never approach. Just as you generate your own efficiencies at home, so do you generate your own inefficiencies: all the perfections of my software and hardware are the result of hours spent not writing. In an office, there are politics and gossip. Outside it, you have to make your own entertainment, but this is as easy as opening a new browser window. There is a law of the conservation of busywork that operates all across the universe. So it does not matter that we could now in principle work more efficiently on a desert island than in the most modern and impersonal office. In the end, technology can never supply the pressure towards productivity supplied by a room full of fellow workers, all apparently busy – even if they are just emailing gossip and YouTube links to one another.

The pressure towards productivity… hmmm some truth to that, but I think it’s more than a question of environment. Motivation, interest, meaning, habit. They all play a part.