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6 min read

The Book is Out Tomorrow (and an essay)

Is This Working? The Jobs We Do, Told by the People Who Do Them is out tomorrow (Thursday 6th March)!

I think that’s everything. Thank you so much for all of your help and support. It’s been a long old slog!

I’ll leave you with an essay, a version of which appeared in this month’s edition of the Idler Magazine. Do subscribe to the Idler’s newsletter. It’s always interesting.

Illustration by Otto Ubbelohde to the fairy tale Sweet Porridge or ‘the Magic Porridge Pot’ (1909)

The Magic Porridge Pot

A registered childminder tells me about the paperwork involved in her job. “I had to get three filing cabinets installed”, she says, “big, monster units in my kitchen.”

I ask what she keeps in those cabinets. “A policy folder for each child and each family, their accident bump forms, medication forms, observations… every bit of paperwork. And we have to keep everything for a minimum of twenty-one years. Can you imagine the amount of stuff in my attic?”

She feels worn down. “A slightly older lady asked me about how to get registered. I says to her, ‘I don’t mean this awful, but if I was starting out, I wouldn’t enter the industry, simply because of the paperwork.’”

The childminder is one of a hundred strangers­––from an investment banker to a warehouse worker––who have agreed talk to me about their jobs. Each interview usually lasts for a couple of hours. I ask them: what exactly do you do for a living? Why do you do it? And do you like it?

As I go, I gather these interviews into a book (Is This Working, The Jobs We Do Told by the People Who Do Them). It’s not a work of social science. It contains no empiricism or hard truths. It’s just people talking about their jobs. The more interviews I do, the more I hear variations upon the childminder’s theme: too much of my working day is taken up with reading and writing things that aren’t that relevant to the job I signed up for.

A hospital matron, almost fifty years in the NHS: “Things you did routinely but never wrote down now take five pages on a computer. Things that were done because it made common sense you now have to write a ten-page report on.”

A town planner: “If you were to compare today with six years’ ago, in terms of both the amount of documents and the length of documents that are submitted in support of planning applications, you’d find that people are submitting so much more today.”

An advertising copywriter: “In the modern world of advertising, data is tearing creativity apart… what’s happening a lot of the time is that simple things are being said in very difficult ways through jargon and data.”

And on and on and on. I hear the same things so often that I begin to worry that the book will be an unhappy one, a long chronicle of administrative complaint. I suppose I can’t do much about that, but I can at least ask: why are they saying these things? Why does everyone seem so run down by administrative work?

Each complaint has its own peculiar causes. From what I’ve heard, the paperwork in childminding began to get worse in 2001 when Ofsted replaced the Local Authority as the childminders’ regulatory master.

But crouching down and peering at these specific causes blinds us to the larger forces at play. When you consider all these administrative complaints together, you see a rough kind of pattern:

  1. a magical new form of information technology is adopted by an industry. This new technology makes it easier to store, process, create, and distribute information.
  2. The new technology saves time, making your work feel easier.
  3. But one day you look around and you realise that the saved time has disappeared. Gone. And you are back where you started, spending just as long on the information-processing parts of your job as you did before you’d heard of that bloody magic technology.

What if we hold this pattern up against the experiences of my interviewees––the ad man, the planner, and the matron? They all describe, at least implicitly, some form of technological change. Ad agencies are bringing in data analysts to make use of new data collection and processing software. The people who advise on planning applications—lawyers, traffic-management experts—are writing their reports on computers. Hospitals, too, are using computers on the wards.

In theory, each of these changes should speed up and improve the work in question. The nurse can file and access patient notes more quickly. The planning advisors can work on their part of the application with all the benefits of modern productivity software—collaborating on documents, copying over past work, inputting new data into existing models, sharing files instantly, and so on. And the ad agency has more information open to it when making decisions.

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But the world of theory is not the world of practice. The world of practice is stalked by unintended consequences. And in practice, these technological changes have little time-saving effect because human behaviour has an anxious habit of adjusting to new realities: for every increase in our technical capacity to process and store information, there is a corresponding increase in the amount of information that is held to be ‘necessary’ for the performance of our jobs.

Ad agencies and their clients won’t commit to an idea unless it is supported by hours and hours of data analysis and testing. In the planning world, long applications have become the new normal, applications with hundreds of pages of supporting documents, with impenetrable expert reports that claim to model every aspect of reality. In the hospital wards and in childminders’ homes, more detailed notes are expected: ‘As it’s so easy to do them on the computer’, says the hospital trust to its nurses and Ofsted to its childminders, ‘could you make sure your notes include...’.

The time freed up by new technology exists only for a brief moment, a moment when our jobs feel easier, before it is swallowed up by an inevitable rise in expectations. We can only hope that this pattern does not apply to generative AI, the latest of the magic information technologies. If it does, then don’t be surprised if documents get even longer (but still take the same number of working hours to write).

Perhaps the work involved in meeting these raised expectations is worth it. Perhaps the adverts are more persuasive, the planning decisions fairer, the hospital systems more efficient, the childminders kinder. That may sometimes be the case, but—looking around at Britain’s wheezing productivity and state capacity—I don’t think it is always the case.

It isn’t anyone’s fault. The more that our work has become about solving the abstract problems of the post-industrial services economy, the harder it has become to judge the usefulness of tasks, to judge when enough information is enough. I interviewed someone who built kitchen units. He could tell when he was finished: ‘I have a big pile of metal on the floor and by the end of the day I’ve built a big frame and put sockets on it’. But there is no comparable standard for questions like, ‘Are we sufficiently protected from litigation risk?’ or ‘Is this pitch deck good enough?’

When it comes to answering those questions, so long as the organisation can afford it, there will always be more work to be done, more information to be generated, more tasks to be conjured out of thin air. What was it that the little girl said in the story of the magic porridge pot, as the porridge overflowed and flooded the town? ‘Stop, little pot, stop.’

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Published by:

Charlie Colenutt