Our Culture of Efficiency Has Made Life Harder

We should have known trouble was brewing when the word “multi-tasking” began seeping into the vernacular. The fact that a word created to describe the actions of a computer is now a standard for human behavior is not a good sign, ever. Consider the term “meltdown” or “overload.”

Yet “ability to multi-task a must” is now a standard job description tagline, and seminars and workshops continue to appear like toadstools after too much rain.

Those who cannot use the word in a sentence with a straight face know the truth: that multi-tasking really means you’re trying to do too many things at once--something your mother always told you never to do.

“One thing at a time,” she would say, as you tried to minimize chore time by sweeping the floor with tea towels tied to your feet while doing the dishes and practicing your French infinitives.

Unfortunately, this advice was usually dispensed while she was on the phone, checking homework and folding the clothes, so the message was a bit mixed.

Because, bottom line, multi-tasking is a woman’s activity, born of historical necessity (“only 10 hours of daylight and I still gotta make the candles and the soap”) and later General Electric-inspired guilt (“Your new washer/dryer/radar range will do it all for you, leaving you free to catch up on all those other household tasks”).

Great. Thanks.

So when Mom took those first steps into the workplace, she was accompanied by that constant interior Mom-ologue about what kid has to go where and when; what appointment must be rescheduled, canceled, set up; and where the household stands on toilet paper, chocolate milk and bills outgoing. Add a dash of technology to this walking Research & Development committee and you’ve got a whole new work ethic--multi-tasking.

*

Unfortunately, in the macho atmosphere of capitalistic competition, it soon became an obsession rather than a solution.

Pretty soon everybody--men, women, management, interns--felt obligated to be doing at least two things at once. Eating lunch while taking a meeting. Taking a meeting while talking on the phone. Talking on the phone while answering e-mail. Answering e-mail while drawing up work schedules. Anything but sitting idly by, doing one thing at a time.

And not just in the office. Checking the voicemail, the e-mail, the fax machine are now part of the familial dance--is it any wonder that one of the most popular toys of the toddler set is a weensy cell phone?

“Technology makes a lot of things possible,” says Arlie Hochschild, author of “The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work” (H. Holt & Co.). “Women certainly brought a capacity to keep an eye and an ear on a lot of things--pots on the stove, children in the yard--into the workplace. But jamming 20 things into a moment prevents an emotional focus. And when women recycle their multi-tasking abilities at work and then bring them home again, well, that can be a problem.”

For example, she says, a parent taking a child to day care calls into the office to check messages while en route. “Yes, this is more efficient [for work]. But at what cost? That is time to talk to your child, and it’s lost.”

*

This was not how it was supposed to go down. Women in the workplace, men as full participants in family life, working together, finding common ground in their diversity, lending two sets of hands to each arena, which would undoubtedly result in more free time for all. To accomplish this, they would swap the very best of their gender’s stereotypical assets--men would learn from women the value of working together and the importance of spending time with their families; from men, women would reap the psychic and social benefits of greater independence and would quit worrying so much about cellulite and how perpetually sparkly clean the kitchen floor is. Utopia.

Unfortunately, human nature has never been on courtin’ terms with common sense.

Instead, we have women allowing weeks of unused vacation to accumulate, while complaining they never have any down time, and men getting liposuction and saying things like, “Am I the only person in this house who knows where the mop is kept?”

As geneticists and Dean Koontz are quick to point out, the problem with mutation of the norm is that it frequently creates mutants. And the mutant offspring of the great androgyny experiment are all around us. Because while multi-tasking, with its emphasis on efficiency, should result in more free time, and, consequently, a less stressed populace, it hasn’t.

A 1997 Times poll of Orange County workers found that more than half worked more than 40 hours each week and said they were working harder than they did five years previously. Well-publicized studies done by Harvard economist Juliet Schor indicate that Americans work 163 hours more a year than they did in the 1960s (a time frame, one could argue, that dovetails nicely with the entrance of large numbers of women into the professional workplace).

In a culture that defines itself by accumulation, overtime hours seem to have become the latest badge on the Eagle Scout sash. Once upon a time, it was the women who stood grimly over the dried-out dinner or the foiled vacation plans, cajoling their spouse to stop putting in quite so many hours. Now they’re just as often the ones proudly complaining about their overwhelming workloads, sighing over their beepers as they rush to return the call.

How much of this is born of necessity--the very real pressures of the workplace--and how much an endorsement of an unrealistic work culture is hard to discern.

“Working hard has always been a measure of success at the office,” Hochschild says. “Labor unions pushed that back, making it clear that you can be a success in eight hours. But unions have lost ground. For women, the cult of the supermom, and the determination to prove they were just as good as men, legitimized this. Now we’ve internalized it. So instead of the boss harassing you to work more, we do it ourselves.”

Which is a partial answer to the question so many asked when women entered the workplace en masse: Would they change it or would it change them? In the heady days of the ‘70s women’s movement, images of widespread flex time and on-site day care danced like sugarplums. But, for the most part, they never materialized. The reality seems to be a bit more subtle--the culture of efficiency has been used to buy us not more leisure/family time, but more opportunity to work, for both women and men. The problem, Schor says, is that employers are simply expecting more, and employees, cowed a bit perhaps by the recent recession years, are giving it.

*

This cult of efficiency, says Hochschild, comes full circle, controlling how things are done in the home as well. The DayPlanner mentality that keeps the workday running rolls on 24/7. At home, we map out play dates and soccer practice and payback dinners and Spanish classes with 15-minute margins. Any actual downtime, or family time, is almost accidental. The result is an emotional swelter. And yet, instead of slowing down, we just seem to go a little faster, do a little more.

“We have to learn to say no,” Hochschild says, “to draw our own limits. Efficiency is about getting certain tasks accomplished, that’s all. It is not always appropriate. Leisure is not simply unclaimed time, scraps of time. It is time that is planned for relaxation and things we enjoy.”

Another thing to add to the list: Learn to say no.

Mary McNamara can be reached by e-mail at mary.mcnamara@latimes.com.