Just an observation I've noticed about myself, I'd love to know if this is actually a real psychological thing. I don't mind work, really. I mean, some jobs are fucking awful, retail springs to mind here, but as a general rule, most work is at least tolerable. I don't mind putting work into an assignment, or a task, whatever, as long as it feels like it has a point. However, it feels like most jobs are time based, not objective based. What I mean by that is, take a university assignment. You have until x date to achieve y task. How and when you do it is up to you, but as long as the job is done by the time is due, you've done your work. The important thing there is the task, not the time. Then take a job. You have to be there for x hours, wherein you may achieve any amount of stuff. I find this incredibly frustrating, because it never quite seems to sync up; working retail, there was always waaaay too much to do in the shifts I was given, so tasks were left unfinished by the time I clocked off. Conversely, at my current digs, sometimes there isn't enough work to last my shifts, so my supervisor and I discuss football and Diablo for 20 bucks an hour. I'm not bitching about the latter, but it doesn't seem like a great way to do business. Obviously contractors dodge this bullet because their work is almost completely objective based; they get paid x amount to do a certain job in a certain time period. Maybe I should be a contractor. A contract writer, writing pithy blogs about nothing for fat stacks of cash.
I don't really see a methodology wherein objective based work could be more widespread than time based work. Take stuff like fast food, how could you make that objective based? "You can leave when you serve 100 customers" or "when you make 100 meals" or something like that, but it's almost impossible to plan your life around that, and it kinda screws over anything resembling scheduling. So in stuff like retail, where there's a million tiny tasks that never finish, time based work is the only way you can make it work, realistically. At least, to the best of my knowledge, I could of course be wrong on this one.
What's left is my horrifically tiny attention span. I got laid off a retail job because I wasn't paying attention, and that's my own fault, but time based work seems to do that to me. I become more concerned with watching the clock than getting anything done. Fooling everyone around me that I'm useful until it's time to leave becomes my objective. I don't have this problem so much in my current place of work because, even though it's time based, orders come in, I pack them, send them out, job done. There's no sense of infinite, futile work until the clock just stops.
I watched a neat video on "gamification" by some guys called Extra Credits (check 'em out, they're on The Escapist) and this idea seems to be tied to that. People seem to respond better to explicit tasks to be completed in a certain amount of time than they do to doing as much as they can in a limited amount of time. It creates a sense of achievement, rather than making you feel like a rat on wheel. Most people would agree that work, by and large, isn't so much fun and that any way to make it feel a little more rewarding would be welcome, and this is just my personal experience weighing into the argument, but I would not be surprised if more people felt this way. And really, anything to make work less awful would be nice.
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