Downtime

As you may know, I launched the news­stand magazine What Laptop & Handheld PC (as it was ori­gin­ally called) back in the day — 1999, to be exact. And I have grave mis­giv­ings about the whole affair.

One of the most popular mar­keting messages that advert­isers were pushing then about mobile tech­no­logy, and they still are now, was ‘max­im­ising your downtime’. This meant — in their examples — your senior exec is trav­el­ling some­where to meet a pro­spective client. If they were equipped with a laptop or a PDA, they could still be doing other stuff. Because, of course, employees are machines that can churn out 40 hours of work a week. If they are not at their desk, hard at it, then they can do it some­where else with a laptop.

Total bullshit from the start, then. If you have ever been in these situ­ations, you’ll know that meetings require a lot of pre­par­a­tion. Undoubtedly, more pre­par­a­tion than you have allowed, unless you’ve done the same thing a million times. Your train ride is spent bricking it and pre­paring, one way or another.

In 2001, or there­abouts, mobile com­mu­nic­a­tions got thrown into this. “Out of Touch -  I don’t think so! with Communicotron 2001″. This was about the point that Blackberries started to appear on commuter trains. Nokia had their 9000 series and Palm and Microsoft were waking up to the idea of smartphones.

More bullshit. A Blackberry is poison. I have had two on extended (6-​​month) press arrange­ments. They have made me more responsive to emails, sure. But also more worried, less creative and less pro­ductive. What’s your priority?

In 2003, the first Centrino pro­cessors meant laptops could run on battery power for — meh — in my exper­i­ence 3–4 hours, but in the mar­keting parlance ‘all-​​day’. They’ve got a little better since then, and 6 hours isn’t quite such a stretch to the imagination.

Cool — I can actually ignore the con­fer­ence and do emails instead. Thanks for the £700 or there­abouts spent on my presence, but I learned nothing, because I wasn’t paying atten­tion or thinking about the topic under discussion.

In 2006, the first ‘all you can eat’ data packages started to appear, meaning that, yes, if you had coverage, you could do normal things on the Internet while you were out and about, and not worry too much about the charges.

I don’t want to even start on why this is not going to make you do more work. It isn’t, OK? There is no way on earth that people are going to do more work. Stop it.

In 2008, none of that extra pro­ductivity and con­nectivity seems to matter a stuff. What were all these exec­ut­ives up to with their high-​​powered com­mu­nic­a­tions gadgets? Certainly not bringing home the bacon or making sensible decisions. If the credit crisis does anything, I hope it explodes this myth.

Mobile tech­no­logy is great — it lets you put in your four hours a day of real work — proper, excited, creative, won­derful stuff, from anywhere. But don’t expect extra anything.

As anyone who knows me will attest, I am an enormous fan of downtime: skiving-​​off, fucking-​​about, pissed-​​up after­noons and all the rest of it. Extra pro­ductivity is an evil myth designed to make us buy more stuff because we’re con­tinu­ally so guilty about having achieved a normal amount of work. Having been given (or — the real kicker, bought ourselves) these toys to improve pro­ductivity, it gets even worse.

But get real. There is no extra pro­ductivity. People (even me) like work — we like having a purpose and getting down to the real nitty gritty. But I reckon there’s about 20–40 hours a week* of that in all of us, depending on how creative, clever and original you are supposed to be. You are nat­ur­ally pro­grammed to create a certain amount of real work. After that, you do busy work, “research”, find work for other people, do point­less admin shit and piss about.

AND, this is why downtime is so important: stay in the pub, wander off to the other depart­ment, go to net­working events in work time: that’s when you make new rela­tion­ships, connect dif­ferent things together, come up with the new approach.

Fucking hell. Downtime is gold.

No links or proof in this post. Sorry. But true. Here’s to the value of downtime — see you in the pub.

(* Many clever, creative people put in 80+ hours a week according to the time clocks. But creative, clever, real hours…?)

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