Category Archives: Writing

I’ve been haunted for years. I’m still haunted. By the ghost of Frederick Winslow Taylor and the acolytes of reason divided by time, all multiplied by will. This equation, with its brutal logic, has caused strains that I’d rather not recount, not for their brutality, but for their banality. Papers, presentations, spreadsheets, races, decisions, interactions, all under the thumb of the all too visible hand of the Ghost of Year-Round Efficiency. It might be a different matter if merely once a year was the reckoning: how much did I do in the 365 days prior? It’s a less rapacious cadence for engaging a still-rapacious poltergeist. “You only live once” is the kind of nonsense created by a marketing agency for a human resources management consultancy. “You only get to work for forty years and you only have sixty hours a week to do it! Get going.” Seems reasonable, doesn’t it? Your mind and body will only be sharp enough to contribute to something for so long, so choose that something and the contribution lever wisely, right? Otherwise you’ll end up in a political cartoon in the Wall Street Journal, a non-contributing member of a society that’s falling apart, except for the diligent managers holding it together by the skin of their time. The most absurd variable here isn’t energy, it’s time. Why should the race be timed? Just to meet the definition of the word “race”, it seems. If I need to go a hundred miles to get where I’m going and it takes me a hundred years, have I failed? Only if McKinsey did an analysis on your paces per hour and you didn’t heed their precise recommendations. The key is to keep these arbiters of efficacy out of the building and craft one’s own viewpoint on how time operates, what rhythms and tides might be at play, and whether destinations are worth going after in the first place.