Your Life Hack Is Just a Recruitment of Employees
I’ll pick the story I saw in the Wall Street Journal , but only because it is typical of a whole genre of advice offered by wealthy and influential people, mostly whites. This is a 2016 first-person essay by Brian Scudamore, creator of 1-800-GOT-JUNK, titled “Why Does This CEO Leave Every Friday.” Scadamor explains that he “recharges” on Fridays and “just thinks” on Mondays. He offers this as career advice:
Whether you choose Reflection Day or Free Day (or both), the future of intellectual work isn’t about people sitting in front of computers and tables in a conference room.
Glad it was resolved for everyone. Ask your boss about the three-day weekend and Reflection Day.
I don’t want to dump too much of Scamor here. He turns to his advice from “leaders,” so he doesn’t so much expect each employee to work four days a week as he suggests that the leaders deserve that privilege. (Scadamor says he only started taking Fridays off after he burned out, working twelve days a week.) A company spokesperson told me that employees have a five-week vacation a year and a “hide” vacation policy.
But Scadamor in his article does not address such secondary issues. He never mentions the employees who continue to work, as he leaves every Friday to “do what he loves: skiing with the kids, cooking, learning languages and cycling.” The article doesn’t say, “Give your employees more free time,” but says, “Give yourself more free time.” No matter how much free time he gives to his employees, he doesn’t try to spread it. He is trying to spread the habit of leaders taking days off.
Maybe Scadamor got Fridays. He worked for many years and now he can let the business run on its own 20% of the time. And he sounds like a good boss! But he does not tell people how to get to the top, but only how to calm down when you are already at the top. Only the most privileged people have the opportunity to follow his advice. Scadamor and the Wall Street Journal won’t tell you how to convince your boss to let you rest on Fridays. They will simply tell your boss to leave and your boss will rely on you to take the slack. Sorry sucker!
Scadamor did not invent such privileged advice. Business blogs and magazines have always held their breath to report the vacation habits of the rich and powerful . And they often fail to gain a deeper understanding of how many people need to work harder so that these leaders can “effectively” manage their time.
Privilege exploitation is at the heart of optimization guru Tim Ferris’ ultracapitalist book, The 4-Hour Workweek , which explains how to make your money work for you. But “your money is working for you” always means “some other poor fellow is working for you.” It does not scale globally or even nationally: a 4-hour workweek would not work if everyone did it, because it is not based on adding value, but on extracting it. Ferris mostly points to a mistake in the capitalist system.
But at least Ferris actually teaches people to move from less privileged to higher positions, often bypassing entrenched power structures. Many of the “leader’s” advice boils down to just getting the most out of the privileges you already have. It’s even worse than Ferriss’s advice. And it reads like an insult to the rest of us.
We at Lifehacker are not innocent of this. I currently maintain our How I Work column, which usually includes the people in charge of a team or an entire company. The way we phrased our questions prompted our subjects to attribute their productivity exclusively to themselves. So I added the question, “Who are the people who help you achieve results, and how do you rely on them?”
Unfortunately, many hacks rely on some kind of privilege. Many only work if you have enough money, time, or freedom. But we work hard to avoid giving advice based on whites’ privilege and pointing out cases where a hack could cause problems for a support worker . Because hacking doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game.