The dirty little secret of office life

Getting paid to kill time

What’s your recurring stress dream? Mine is being back at that job — you know, the one with the line manager in possession of the emotional intelligence of a Ford Cortina — sat around with nothing to do. Why the hell did I agree to return?

In his book Outliers, the writer Malcolm Gladwell (who once christened my grandpa and his Denis Healey-esque appearance “Grandpa Eyebrows”) suggested that for work to be satisfying, it must have three essential qualities: autonomy, complexity and a connection between effort and reward.

Willie Kessler/Grandpa Eyebrows back in 2017 (Credit: Jack Kessler)

And like so many Gladwellisms, it contains an essential truth. But it fails to encapsulate the one common denominator across my working life: how I’ve been functionally underemployed in every job I’ve ever had. And I’m not talking about surreptitiously checking the weather or paying the odd bill while on the job. I mean the kind of underemployment that leaves your brain idling in neutral for hours on end.

And sure, it’s perfectly common for work to arrive in bursts rather than on some constant assembly line¹. Meanwhile, many tasks are dependent on a Weberian hellscape of coordination and approval processes. But can my experience be normal?

Even in my busiest and by far and away most rewarding role — that of chief leader writer and newsletter author at the Evening Standard — I was routinely eying the melancholic clock at the bottom corner of the Windows desktop. Some of this comes down to my ability to hyperfocus.

At the Standard, I had two fairly hard deadlines a day: the leader column at 11am and the newsletter at 4pm. This is, by anyone’s metric, a decent level of productivity. Problem was, it didn’t take me long into the job to discover I could knock the first of these duties out in under an hour.

This is partly because much of the work in writing leaders is done in the leader conference beforehand, and also because the structure of leader articles is highly formulaic. State the problem, blame the government, suggest a completely unworkable and/or expensive solution. This was at least manageable — things were far worse at the Treasury.

Outside of fiscal events, most days were like boarding a transatlantic flight, except you didn’t even have random episodes of The Big Bang Theory and Brooklyn Nine-Nine to numb your brain cells into submission. If I could no longer handle the presenteeism, I might go for a little wander — the buildings that house the Treasury and HMRC are so vast I could hit my 10,000 steps without having to interact with a single taxpayer.