Now
it came to pass, as they went, that he entered into a certain village: and a
certain woman named Martha received him into her house. And she had a sister
called Mary, which also sat at Jesus’ feet, and heard his word. But Martha was
cumbered about much serving, and came to him, and said, Lord, dost thou not
care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? bid her therefore that she
help me. And Jesus answered and said unto her, Martha, Martha, thou art careful
and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen
that good part, which shall not be taken away from her (Luke 10:38–42).
Because managers feel compelled
to somehow measure work—and because in most modern workplaces anything related
to Taylor’s time and motion studies is irrelevant—they often simply measure
hours worked. Sometimes they divide up the hours and assign them to various
tasks. This measurement often has no direct connection to the actual product
being produced (because most work today is not the easy-to-quantify factory
work Taylor focused on), so managers end up measuring inputs in the productivity equation but not relating them in any
meaningful way to the output (often
because there is no way to mathematically connect the two). When this happens,
management is simply focusing on activity,
the more the better. And the message workers hear is that they should fill
their days with many activities, regardless of whether or not they are actually
productive activities. This
measurement approach rewards busyness. It also rewards people for working more
hours than they actually need to, creating a culture of workaholism, which is a
good description of our American economic culture.
In America we put a premium on
hours worked. American jobholders work more hours in a year, on average, than
workers in Japan, Canada, Sweden, or the UK, to name a few. We even work more
hours than the industrious Germans. According to statistics from the
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), in 2010
Americans worked on average 360 more hours than their German counterparts.
That’s nine regular 40-hour workweeks, by the way. The discrepancy is partly
due to Germany’s myriad holidays and legally guaranteed four weeks of vacation
time. By contrast, the United States is the only industrialized country with no
statutory minimum employment leave. Even the overworked South Koreans, who
regularly top the list of workaholic workforces, are guaranteed ten days of
employment leave per year. Australians get five weeks off. Most Europeans get
four to six. And which country works the least? The Netherlands. The Dutch work
400 fewer hours annually than Americans do.
A different OECD study compared
countries according to the combination of paid and unpaid hours worked. (Unpaid
work includes such activities as cooking, cleaning, and shopping.)
Interestingly, Mexico topped the chart and the United States came in ninth,
ahead of South Korea (perhaps because the Koreans are so exhausted by their
long workdays that they have little energy to work around the house). At the
bottom of this list came the Belgians, preceded by the Danes, the notoriously
hardworking Germans, the South Africans, and the French.
So Americans stack up fairly well
against other nations in the total hours they work. And American Latter-day
Saints, I think we could safely conclude, are probably above average in their
industriousness. I suspect, on the whole, that Latter-day Saints are probably
also more inclined than the average American to focus on activity for the sake
of activity. In fact, we even categorize members as being “active” and “less
active,” as if activity were the ultimate objective of our existence. If we are
not keeping up with Sister Bustle down the street—who is raising six straight-A
students, running a candle-making business out of her home, volunteering with
the PTA, baking bread three times a week, winning awards for her flower
gardens, taking in stray pets, and training for a marathon—we feel guilty. And
this is only the cultural side of Mormonism. Add to this all the organizational
demands that come from the institutional side of the Church (which adopted a
corporate management mentality as part of the Correlation movement of the early
1960s),1 and it could easily be argued that we Latter-day Saints are
among the busiest people on earth. We’ve taken the Protestant Work Ethic and
transformed it into the Mormon Busyness Ethic. We even use a beehive as one of
our most ubiquitous religious icons. What unspoken message does this send? Of
course we don’t want to be lazy, but the unfortunate consequence of our
emphasis on activity and busyness is that we too often confuse these with
productivity.
The
Power Nap
What is productivity anyway,
beyond the simple ratio discussed in the previous post? What does it mean to be
productive in your work, or in your life, especially in terms of your religion?
Does it mean putting in a lot of hours? Does it mean filling those hours with
activities intended to show management (or your fellow ward members) how
indispensable (or faithful) you are? Has productivity come to mean nothing more
than unfocused, activity-oriented deception, perhaps even self-deception?
A few years ago I worked with a
woman (let’s call her Ruth) who was the busiest worker I have ever seen. Ruth
was always on the go, always talked a thousand miles per hour, and seemed to
have her fingers in everything. If anyone appeared to be indispensable, it was
Ruth. Then one day she found another job. She left us. We wondered how on earth
we would replace her. Fortunately, she left us a long and detailed list of her
activities and responsibilities. It was an impressive inventory. But as we
analyzed it with the intent to divide up her responsibilities among the rest of
the staff, we gradually came to the conclusion that it was mostly a
smokescreen. As we waded through her lengthy job description, we realized there
was very little we really had to worry about. We ended up replacing Ruth, but
the new employee received assignments far different (and more urgent) than the
activities Ruth had been involved in. Most of her very busy activities simply
vanished into thin air, and we never missed them.
As I think about this experience,
I wonder what could disappear from modern Mormonism that wouldn’t leave a hole?
The General Authorities speak often of reducing and simplifying, but when push
comes to shove, we seem to be addicted to busyness. We somehow conclude that no
programs or activities, regardless of how peripheral, are indispensable. But
what cost do they exact in terms of stress and family dysfunction and mental
health challenges?
So, I ask again, what is
productivity? Let me give a couple of personal examples. I worked seven years
as a magazine editor. What if, on a typical day, I spent an hour thinking about
an important question, read a thought-provoking article related to the content
of the magazine, took a few minutes to study a language issue in my style
guide, visited with my coworkers about things that were happening in their
lives—and these activities took up my morning? What if, in the afternoon, I
then edited an outstanding article on raising a child with a disability? Would
you call that a productive day? Would you consider it more productive than,
say, sitting in a four-hour meeting in which no progress is made and no
significant decisions are reached, then spending the rest of the day answering
pointless e-mails, filling out bureaucratic forms, and putting out fires
ignited by managers who are busily trying to justify their jobs?
Or, for the sake of argument,
let’s say I spent four hours slipping in and out of consciousness while reading
manuscripts, because I was tired. Would that have been more productive than
taking a half-hour nap, then reading those same manuscripts in two very alert
hours?
What does it mean to be
productive? I think sometimes we worship appearances and forget substance. If
we look busy, that’s all that matters. And what
we measure has a great influence on how we spend our time. In 1948, President
J. Reuben Clark jotted in his office diary a concern regarding the consequences
of “appraising Church activities by business asset-liability procedures. [Can
spiritual development and achievement be measured statistically, or will the
use of statistical measures of success and failure in Church activities
actually undermine spirituality by glorifying external piety? . . . Could
efficiency become the end rather than spirituality?]”2 So, have we
learned anything in the past sixty-eight years? Or have we justified President
Clark’s fear?
So we might as well ask the
obvious question. What would Jesus measure? The story about Martha and Mary
from Luke suggests that he sees productivity in exactly the opposite places from
where we’d normally expect to find it. The Beatitudes mention being poor in
spirit, sorrowful, meek, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, being
merciful, pure in heart, peaceful, and persecuted for righteousness’s sake.
Nowhere does Jesus suggest a life crammed full of meetings, activities,
programs, or a regimen of organizational demands that distract from the essence
of the pure religion he preached, a religion focused on personal attributes and
interpersonal relationships.
All
Strung Up
Hugh Nibley once accused
Latter-day Saints of giving “young people and old awards for zeal alone, zeal
without knowledge—for sitting in endless meetings, for dedicated conformity,
and unlimited capacity for suffering boredom. We think it more commendable to
get up at 5:00 a.m. to write a bad book than to get up at nine o’clock to write
a good one—that is pure zeal that tends to breed a race of insufferable prigs
and barren minds. One has only to consider the present outpouring of
‘inspirational’ books in the Church which bring little new in the way of
knowledge: truisms, and platitudes, kitsch, and clichés have become our
everyday diet. The Prophet [Joseph Smith] would never settle for that.”3
And speaking of the Prophet
Joseph, Elder William M. Allred said this about him:
I
was with him in the troubles at DeWitt, Adam-ondi-ahman, and in Far West. I
have played ball with him many times in Nauvoo. He was preaching once, and he
said it tried some of the pious folks to see him play ball with the boys. He
then related a story of a certain prophet who was sitting under the shade of a
tree amusing himself in some way, when a hunter came along with his bow and
arrow, and reproved him. The prophet asked him if he kept his bow strung up all
the time. The hunter answered that he did not. The prophet asked why, and he
said it would lose its elasticity if he did. The prophet said it was just so
with his mind, he did not want it strung up all the time.4
Consider what the Prophet Joseph
accomplished in his very abbreviated lifetime. When I come to the end of my
working years, I certainly don’t want to look back on my career and say, “All I
accomplished was that I stayed busy for forty years.” I would like to think it
was a productive forty years. And I certainly don’t want to look back on my
life and say, “My, what a busy life I’ve had.” I would want to consider my time
on earth a productive sojourn. And no mathematical fiction will make me feel
better about my failure if I fall short of that goal.
_______________________
1. See Edward L. Kimball, Lengthen Your Stride: The Presidency of Spencer W. Kimball (Salt
Lake City: Deseret Book, 2005), 249.
2. D. Michael Quinn, J. Reuben Clark: The Church Years
(Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1983), 106, bracketed text in
JRC’s diary.
3. Hugh W. Nibley, Nibley on the Timely and the Timeless (Provo,
Utah: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1978), 270–71.
4. In “Recollections of the
Prophet Joseph Smith,” The Juvenile
Instructor 27 (1892): 471.
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