Back to Work

Right. So your mind has started to wander a bit. The veal and espresso for lunch again did not cheer you up, what is it with veal, it never cheers you up, but makes you feel unmotivated and restless.

You should work, answer dozens of emails, write a report, and – Oh My God – even make one decision, but again you feel so, don't know, jaded.

And here we are again.

First, you have clicked one of the dozens of links you get showered with during the day, so many views on Whitney Houston's death, so many pictures of funny mammals. You then changed your Facebook profile picture, this time from the trip to Venice last summer; it somehow depicts a wall, Venice, or, well, something.

Next, browsing the news sites to find out what's up in the world, following up the world events, that's important for the job, too, and finally, of all the websites in the world, you end up here, on the WDC Helsinki 2012 pages, there's some sort of column which tells about something - or maybe not - and you've got time to read it before your work day is over.

How did this happen?
 
We lie to ourselves from morning until evening, day after day. The trust in our own abilities, the future and self-control is always bigger than what our personal history reflects.

A human's talent for self-delusion is a version of the cultural cliché where we all have a novel in our night stand drawer, although on the hard disk there's only a file named Novel and it contains two sentence fragments:  "Something about the economy" and "Uncle one of the characters?".

We work the same way, deceiving ourselves and letting ourselves down.

Often the days start well. You arrive at work bright eyed and bushy tailed, full of ideas and solutions to problems. You then open the door to your work place, turn on your computer, open your mouth, and everything stops: you will answer emails about topics which should be handled in some other way than by emails, sit through a meeting about a topic which should be handled anyway – without a meeting, and voilà, your dreams are destroyed, your time is stolen, and the meetings will only end at lunch time.

At lunch you will meet your friend who has lost himself in a similar workday. You will want to talk about anything but work.

And now you sit there. Absent-mindedly reading this text while attempting to rationalise your evening. Dammit, it's your turn to take your son to ice ballet practice. Perhaps you could work at the ice rink? Or in the car? Luckily, you will still be able to work after the practice for two or three hours, tired and susceptible to errors.
   
And so the days flow, from one failed self-management effort to another. Perhaps something should be done.

Redesigning 925 is a WDC Helsinki 2012 project that attempts to perceive and organise the work week in a new way. The results of the project will be published, for instance, in the form of books in the autumn. Before that, perhaps you could yourself think whether this is the right way to work, to spend the bulk of your waking hours. You could have skimmed through this text even at a traffic light. You shouldn't have wasted any work time on this.