"Extreme Commuting"
Apr. 24th, 2006 03:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fishsupremeI'm somewhat amazed by this Newsweek article (via MSNBC) about "Extreme Commuting" -- people who commute over two hours, both ways, to work. There are apparently 3.4 million of 'em.
That's a really long time. Specifically, it's 11.9% of the entire week spent commuting to work, or 17.8% of waking hours, assuming you sleep 8 hours per night, which I'm guessing these people don't. After you take out work and sleep, it's 22.7% of all uncommitted time, and an even higher fraction when you consider that a lot of "uncommitted" time is committed, to things like eating, showering, brushing your teeth, etc. And that's all for a two-hour commute -- some people in this article have commutes of 3 hours or more (186 miles into LA, for instance) they make every day.
Robert Putnam, author of "Bowling Alone," found that every 10 minutes added to your commute decreases by 10 percent the time you dedicate to your family and community. [...] And Georgia Tech researchers found that every 30 minutes spent driving increases your risk of becoming obese by 3 percent.
And what's their solution to this? Why, doing more during your commute, of course! Eating, applying makeup, talking on cell phones, checking email, and otherwise increasing your risk of dying in a car accident. Indeed, some even seem to want it:
One in five said they like their "alone time." Just don't try selling that to their spouses. "My wife hates my commute," says Sam Wyant, 27, who drives 60 miles to his job, "but I value that Zen time."
"Zen time"? Two hours sitting in traffic? This is incomprehensible to me. Doesn't he have anything to do? I can't help but think he must be one of the people who, when he does get home, watches TV for four hours. I can't imagine wanting to waste any time commuting. If I wanted to go for a drive, I'd go for a drive, and my destination wouldn't be work. I also can't imagine wanting that much time away from my wife every day, but that's because my wife is wonderful.
The number of big cities with more than a fifth of their households living 20 miles or more from the urban center has tripled since 1970, according to Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies. And even as jobs move to the suburbs, commuters continue to drive away from them. "It's a game of leapfrog," says commuting expert Alan Pisarski. "Jobs are moving out to the suburbs to be near skilled workers, which enables people to move even farther out."
The most common response to all this tends to be decrying "urban sprawl" and advocating "smart growth" measures (i.e. zoning regulations that essentially take people's property without compensation.)
But herein lies the problem -- people want the sprawl. Well, not precisely -- but they want to live in low-population-density areas. Every "smart growth" measure is an attempt to create higher population density -- this won't do any good if what people want is the lower density that the suburbs offer.
For $400,000 last year, he moved his family of five into a 3,000-square-foot home, twice the size of the place they used to have closer to the city. The trade-off: he now spends three to six hours a day on the road. "I love being out in the middle of nowhere," he says, "and seeing no people around."
"Smart growth" won't let him be out in the middle of nowhere.
So are we stuck with ever-lengthening commutes, rising gas prices, pollution, and gridlock, as people's irreconcilable desires to work in the city and live in the country clash? Well, we don't have to be -- but breaking out of it requires a cultural shift, not a government intervention.
Ten years ago, at the beginning of the .com boom (damn, that sentence makes me feel old), we kept seeing breathless prophecies (e.g. Free Agent Nation) that soon we'd all be self-employed businesspeople and telecommuters and web entrepreneurs.
It didn't happen. And there are a variety of reasons it didn't. For one, the technology wasn't ready. Videoconferencing over the Internet -- for that matter, audio conferencing -- was unreliable and cumbersome. VPN (remote access) was unheard-of. Security had not moved past the M&M stage (when an enterprise's security is entirely based on the perimeter firewall -- like an M&M, it's crunchy outside, but soft on the inside.) Opening up such an environment to any significant number of telecommuters would simply not work, from both a functionality and security/risk perspective. Second, people (managers) weren't ready for the idea of employees they couldn't check up on every day. And third, people were still attached to "organization culture" -- the idea of working at one company for years, even decades, and building your entire career in a single organization. Steady, predictable income was the order of the day.
However, I think it can happen now, and that we can see the elements that are capable of leading to it, at least in some limited spheres (however, they're the spheres I care most about.)
First of all, the technology is ready now. Audioconferencing is seamless -- VoIP services like Skype and Vonage are now nearly as reliable as the landline telephone system, and cheaper, too. Videoconferencing is not quite so seamless, but it's a stable enough technology that it gets used for porn -- and the software they use for porn is years behind the more advanced business videoconferencing software. Group collaboration tools (e.g. annotations in Word and Excel) are available, though most people haven't bothered to learn to use them. And Internet bandwidth has reached the point where widespread use of these tools will not choke the entire network with traffic. Businesses don't use dialup anymore.
Second, even if the "free agent nation" didn't happen, it did put itself into the national consciousness, especially among young people in the tech industry. Sure, not everyone can be a .com millionaire, but everyone knows it's possible, enough that people saying they operate a website as their occupation are taken seriously without a second thought. And the organization culture has been obliterated -- a generation that's spent the last ten years doing contract work with known termination dates, getting laid off during the .com bust, and changing jobs for personal advantage (the average time spent at a single job in the tech industry is only 18 months) has no concept of company loyalty. We are not loyal to our employers, nor do we expect them to be loyal to us. Now, that's not to say that we want to harm or betray them -- only that we're not all that attached to them if something better comes along. We don't feel that our employer "takes care of us" -- we feel that it gives us a check every two weeks, and each one buys our loyalty... for two more weeks.
The other major cultural shift is outsourcing. Managers have now gotten used to having some employees -- generally low-paid contractors -- working for them in entirely different countries, often time-shifted 8 hours or more, and sometimes with a language barrier. By comparison to that, an American working across town is outright convenient. At least the local telecommuter is in the same time zone, has a high-bandwidth connection, and if absolutely necessary can come to a meeting.
So why doesn't everyone telecommute? Well, some jobs are of course outright impossible to telecommute to (e.g. auto mechanic, hairdresser, retail sales.) And some people would never want to do such a thing anyway (either because they want the social environment of the workplace, or because they know that they are unable to be productive at home due to distractions.) But the stated reason managers don't want knowledge workers to telecommute is generally meetings -- they need you to be present for meetings.
I blame Microsoft Exchange. Back before Exchange and its precursor Lotus Notes, scheduling a meeting was hard. You had to call or email everybody, and try to find a time that would work for everyone. Alternately, you could autocratically declare a time if you had sufficient authority, and just accept that some people wouldn't show up. Meetings were mainly a periodic, scheduled thing -- you knew the project plan meeting was Wednesday at 2:00, the team meeting was Monday at 8:00, and your meeting with your manager was on Thursdays. There weren't many, and those there were tended to have pretty large groups at them. But now, thanks to groupware like Exchange (you probably know it as the Outlook calendar) and Notes, everyone can see everyone's calendar, so scheduling a meeting is quick and effortless. The result is not just more meetings, but the creation of the ad hoc meeting -- the meeting you can't plan around because nobody bothers to schedule it until the day or even the hour before it happens. This is impossible for telecommuters.
The technology aimed to solve a problem -- it was too difficult and inconvenient for people who needed to schedule meetings to do so. The failure is that it worked too well -- it eliminated the transaction cost for scheduling a meeting. I can now, in 5 minutes, take an hour of time from 10 people by scheduling a meeting with them. Since I can see their calendars, they're even robbed of most convenient excuses. If it took me two hours of phone calls to call all those people and arrange things, I might not even bother. What's more, I can now easily schedule meetings with numbers of people that would have been quite impractical the old way. Yet in my experience, the usefulness of a meeting is inversely proportional to the number of people attending it (yet its length seems to be directly proportional to attendees.) The technology has created a new problem -- too many meetings. This is one of the major reasons I actually get more work done in 5 hours at home than I do in 8 hours at work -- at home, I can work on things that are important, and when someone has a question, they send me an email I can answer in 5 minutes instead of scheduling an hour-long meeting.
To free workers from their commutes, we must kill the meeting. Now, while I imagine I could easily get a cheering mob of office workers to joyfully chant "Kill the meeting!" (I've yet to meet someone who likes meetings), actually doing away with it is more difficult -- constant ad hoc meetings have become a major part of company culture in the American workplace. One possibility is that the only way out is through -- perhaps technology can solve the problem it created.
The latest buzzword in groupware and office applications is "presence." Windows Messenger now integrates with Exchange, to connect your IM free/busy information to your calendar (i.e. IM marks you "Away" during meetings on your calendar, etc.) The idea is to make IM free/busy information a virtual indicator of if you're available or not. If you open a Word document in Office12 (the next version of Office) in an Exchange-enabled environment, the sidebar has the IM icons for the other people who have worked on the document, complete with if they're available or not. You can dispatch IMs to them right there with questions about the document, and they'll get the IM with links to the document so they can see what you're talking about. If they open it, they get the same view you're looking at. You can share the document and edit it simultaneously, while also able to IM chat (or voice chat, if you have PC headsets, or even videoconference if you have webcams.) In other words, you can have an ad hoc meeting without leaving your desk.
This is not without its share of problems. Just what we need -- one more way to be distracted by other people while you're trying to get work done. It'll probably lower productivity overall -- every context-switch kills about 15 minutes of productivity, and people being able to IM you about document questions results in constant context-switching. But... it does create virtual presence. This sort of system allows telecommuters to do the virtual equivalent of dropping into each other's offices carrying a printout. And since offices will blindly adopt it whether it's good for productivity or not -- just like they did with shared calenars -- it'll be out there in any case.
There are still some other problems that need to be solved. One is cost-sharing. When an employee has to commute to work, he pays the costs -- $5 or more of gas every day, $5-10 for parking, and $0.20/mile of wear on his car -- entirely by himself. Employers will sometimes chip in for parking, at best. A commuter is costing himself up to $300 a month in commuting cost, plus 10 or 20 or more hours per week, but all of this costs employers nothing (except unhappy employees.) Telecommuting, on the other hand, often does cost employers money -- while they generally pay nothing toward employees who do incidental telecommuting (i.e. working 8 hours and then signing in after work to do more work -- not that I can really comprehend doing this, but people do it), full-time telecommuters are often supplied with a PC and broadband connection. This seems more expensive to employers, even though it's cheaper overall, because they're paying a share of the cost.
The biggest problem, though, is that presence is easier to measure than performance. Managers have an easier time determining if an employee is "working hard" (i.e. has his butt in a chair for over 8 hours) than working well. In an office environment, often things are a team effort -- one person slacking is not obvious unless they do it a lot, and even then it's obvious to the coworkers picking up the slack, not the manager. The coworkers generally don't go to their manager and say "Bob's a lazy bum," because it looks like passing the buck, and Bob will just deny it anyway. This is the same (stupid) reason why college professors take attendance. I always thought that any college professor that took attendance was admitting failure -- they were showing that their class was so easy or so useless that the only way to get people to show up was to grade them on it. Managers who measure presence are doing the same thing. The problem is that they generally don't realize they're doing it -- they don't mean to measure performance by presence, but people working late sticks in their mind in a way that people producing good output does not.
It's getting better, but we're still not to where people thought we'd be by 1995.
I think I'll start a blog. Yes, I know this is a blog, but I mean a blog about something.
That's a really long time. Specifically, it's 11.9% of the entire week spent commuting to work, or 17.8% of waking hours, assuming you sleep 8 hours per night, which I'm guessing these people don't. After you take out work and sleep, it's 22.7% of all uncommitted time, and an even higher fraction when you consider that a lot of "uncommitted" time is committed, to things like eating, showering, brushing your teeth, etc. And that's all for a two-hour commute -- some people in this article have commutes of 3 hours or more (186 miles into LA, for instance) they make every day.
Robert Putnam, author of "Bowling Alone," found that every 10 minutes added to your commute decreases by 10 percent the time you dedicate to your family and community. [...] And Georgia Tech researchers found that every 30 minutes spent driving increases your risk of becoming obese by 3 percent.
And what's their solution to this? Why, doing more during your commute, of course! Eating, applying makeup, talking on cell phones, checking email, and otherwise increasing your risk of dying in a car accident. Indeed, some even seem to want it:
One in five said they like their "alone time." Just don't try selling that to their spouses. "My wife hates my commute," says Sam Wyant, 27, who drives 60 miles to his job, "but I value that Zen time."
"Zen time"? Two hours sitting in traffic? This is incomprehensible to me. Doesn't he have anything to do? I can't help but think he must be one of the people who, when he does get home, watches TV for four hours. I can't imagine wanting to waste any time commuting. If I wanted to go for a drive, I'd go for a drive, and my destination wouldn't be work. I also can't imagine wanting that much time away from my wife every day, but that's because my wife is wonderful.
The number of big cities with more than a fifth of their households living 20 miles or more from the urban center has tripled since 1970, according to Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies. And even as jobs move to the suburbs, commuters continue to drive away from them. "It's a game of leapfrog," says commuting expert Alan Pisarski. "Jobs are moving out to the suburbs to be near skilled workers, which enables people to move even farther out."
The most common response to all this tends to be decrying "urban sprawl" and advocating "smart growth" measures (i.e. zoning regulations that essentially take people's property without compensation.)
But herein lies the problem -- people want the sprawl. Well, not precisely -- but they want to live in low-population-density areas. Every "smart growth" measure is an attempt to create higher population density -- this won't do any good if what people want is the lower density that the suburbs offer.
For $400,000 last year, he moved his family of five into a 3,000-square-foot home, twice the size of the place they used to have closer to the city. The trade-off: he now spends three to six hours a day on the road. "I love being out in the middle of nowhere," he says, "and seeing no people around."
"Smart growth" won't let him be out in the middle of nowhere.
So are we stuck with ever-lengthening commutes, rising gas prices, pollution, and gridlock, as people's irreconcilable desires to work in the city and live in the country clash? Well, we don't have to be -- but breaking out of it requires a cultural shift, not a government intervention.
Ten years ago, at the beginning of the .com boom (damn, that sentence makes me feel old), we kept seeing breathless prophecies (e.g. Free Agent Nation) that soon we'd all be self-employed businesspeople and telecommuters and web entrepreneurs.
It didn't happen. And there are a variety of reasons it didn't. For one, the technology wasn't ready. Videoconferencing over the Internet -- for that matter, audio conferencing -- was unreliable and cumbersome. VPN (remote access) was unheard-of. Security had not moved past the M&M stage (when an enterprise's security is entirely based on the perimeter firewall -- like an M&M, it's crunchy outside, but soft on the inside.) Opening up such an environment to any significant number of telecommuters would simply not work, from both a functionality and security/risk perspective. Second, people (managers) weren't ready for the idea of employees they couldn't check up on every day. And third, people were still attached to "organization culture" -- the idea of working at one company for years, even decades, and building your entire career in a single organization. Steady, predictable income was the order of the day.
However, I think it can happen now, and that we can see the elements that are capable of leading to it, at least in some limited spheres (however, they're the spheres I care most about.)
First of all, the technology is ready now. Audioconferencing is seamless -- VoIP services like Skype and Vonage are now nearly as reliable as the landline telephone system, and cheaper, too. Videoconferencing is not quite so seamless, but it's a stable enough technology that it gets used for porn -- and the software they use for porn is years behind the more advanced business videoconferencing software. Group collaboration tools (e.g. annotations in Word and Excel) are available, though most people haven't bothered to learn to use them. And Internet bandwidth has reached the point where widespread use of these tools will not choke the entire network with traffic. Businesses don't use dialup anymore.
Second, even if the "free agent nation" didn't happen, it did put itself into the national consciousness, especially among young people in the tech industry. Sure, not everyone can be a .com millionaire, but everyone knows it's possible, enough that people saying they operate a website as their occupation are taken seriously without a second thought. And the organization culture has been obliterated -- a generation that's spent the last ten years doing contract work with known termination dates, getting laid off during the .com bust, and changing jobs for personal advantage (the average time spent at a single job in the tech industry is only 18 months) has no concept of company loyalty. We are not loyal to our employers, nor do we expect them to be loyal to us. Now, that's not to say that we want to harm or betray them -- only that we're not all that attached to them if something better comes along. We don't feel that our employer "takes care of us" -- we feel that it gives us a check every two weeks, and each one buys our loyalty... for two more weeks.
The other major cultural shift is outsourcing. Managers have now gotten used to having some employees -- generally low-paid contractors -- working for them in entirely different countries, often time-shifted 8 hours or more, and sometimes with a language barrier. By comparison to that, an American working across town is outright convenient. At least the local telecommuter is in the same time zone, has a high-bandwidth connection, and if absolutely necessary can come to a meeting.
So why doesn't everyone telecommute? Well, some jobs are of course outright impossible to telecommute to (e.g. auto mechanic, hairdresser, retail sales.) And some people would never want to do such a thing anyway (either because they want the social environment of the workplace, or because they know that they are unable to be productive at home due to distractions.) But the stated reason managers don't want knowledge workers to telecommute is generally meetings -- they need you to be present for meetings.
I blame Microsoft Exchange. Back before Exchange and its precursor Lotus Notes, scheduling a meeting was hard. You had to call or email everybody, and try to find a time that would work for everyone. Alternately, you could autocratically declare a time if you had sufficient authority, and just accept that some people wouldn't show up. Meetings were mainly a periodic, scheduled thing -- you knew the project plan meeting was Wednesday at 2:00, the team meeting was Monday at 8:00, and your meeting with your manager was on Thursdays. There weren't many, and those there were tended to have pretty large groups at them. But now, thanks to groupware like Exchange (you probably know it as the Outlook calendar) and Notes, everyone can see everyone's calendar, so scheduling a meeting is quick and effortless. The result is not just more meetings, but the creation of the ad hoc meeting -- the meeting you can't plan around because nobody bothers to schedule it until the day or even the hour before it happens. This is impossible for telecommuters.
The technology aimed to solve a problem -- it was too difficult and inconvenient for people who needed to schedule meetings to do so. The failure is that it worked too well -- it eliminated the transaction cost for scheduling a meeting. I can now, in 5 minutes, take an hour of time from 10 people by scheduling a meeting with them. Since I can see their calendars, they're even robbed of most convenient excuses. If it took me two hours of phone calls to call all those people and arrange things, I might not even bother. What's more, I can now easily schedule meetings with numbers of people that would have been quite impractical the old way. Yet in my experience, the usefulness of a meeting is inversely proportional to the number of people attending it (yet its length seems to be directly proportional to attendees.) The technology has created a new problem -- too many meetings. This is one of the major reasons I actually get more work done in 5 hours at home than I do in 8 hours at work -- at home, I can work on things that are important, and when someone has a question, they send me an email I can answer in 5 minutes instead of scheduling an hour-long meeting.
To free workers from their commutes, we must kill the meeting. Now, while I imagine I could easily get a cheering mob of office workers to joyfully chant "Kill the meeting!" (I've yet to meet someone who likes meetings), actually doing away with it is more difficult -- constant ad hoc meetings have become a major part of company culture in the American workplace. One possibility is that the only way out is through -- perhaps technology can solve the problem it created.
The latest buzzword in groupware and office applications is "presence." Windows Messenger now integrates with Exchange, to connect your IM free/busy information to your calendar (i.e. IM marks you "Away" during meetings on your calendar, etc.) The idea is to make IM free/busy information a virtual indicator of if you're available or not. If you open a Word document in Office12 (the next version of Office) in an Exchange-enabled environment, the sidebar has the IM icons for the other people who have worked on the document, complete with if they're available or not. You can dispatch IMs to them right there with questions about the document, and they'll get the IM with links to the document so they can see what you're talking about. If they open it, they get the same view you're looking at. You can share the document and edit it simultaneously, while also able to IM chat (or voice chat, if you have PC headsets, or even videoconference if you have webcams.) In other words, you can have an ad hoc meeting without leaving your desk.
This is not without its share of problems. Just what we need -- one more way to be distracted by other people while you're trying to get work done. It'll probably lower productivity overall -- every context-switch kills about 15 minutes of productivity, and people being able to IM you about document questions results in constant context-switching. But... it does create virtual presence. This sort of system allows telecommuters to do the virtual equivalent of dropping into each other's offices carrying a printout. And since offices will blindly adopt it whether it's good for productivity or not -- just like they did with shared calenars -- it'll be out there in any case.
There are still some other problems that need to be solved. One is cost-sharing. When an employee has to commute to work, he pays the costs -- $5 or more of gas every day, $5-10 for parking, and $0.20/mile of wear on his car -- entirely by himself. Employers will sometimes chip in for parking, at best. A commuter is costing himself up to $300 a month in commuting cost, plus 10 or 20 or more hours per week, but all of this costs employers nothing (except unhappy employees.) Telecommuting, on the other hand, often does cost employers money -- while they generally pay nothing toward employees who do incidental telecommuting (i.e. working 8 hours and then signing in after work to do more work -- not that I can really comprehend doing this, but people do it), full-time telecommuters are often supplied with a PC and broadband connection. This seems more expensive to employers, even though it's cheaper overall, because they're paying a share of the cost.
The biggest problem, though, is that presence is easier to measure than performance. Managers have an easier time determining if an employee is "working hard" (i.e. has his butt in a chair for over 8 hours) than working well. In an office environment, often things are a team effort -- one person slacking is not obvious unless they do it a lot, and even then it's obvious to the coworkers picking up the slack, not the manager. The coworkers generally don't go to their manager and say "Bob's a lazy bum," because it looks like passing the buck, and Bob will just deny it anyway. This is the same (stupid) reason why college professors take attendance. I always thought that any college professor that took attendance was admitting failure -- they were showing that their class was so easy or so useless that the only way to get people to show up was to grade them on it. Managers who measure presence are doing the same thing. The problem is that they generally don't realize they're doing it -- they don't mean to measure performance by presence, but people working late sticks in their mind in a way that people producing good output does not.
It's getting better, but we're still not to where people thought we'd be by 1995.
I think I'll start a blog. Yes, I know this is a blog, but I mean a blog about something.
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no subject
Date: 2006-04-25 01:36 am (UTC)As a semirelated note... we have this at work, in the form of the new Office Communicator MSIM replacement. Because of the high number of meetings that are scheduled to be weekly but actually held seminannually, or scheduled for a half-hour (the default Outlook meeting time) when they're actually five-minute tasks or zero-time reminders, people have learned to ignore the "meeting" marker. The only thing that actually prevents people from IMing is the "away" marker, which indicates your PC is locked, or the "do not disturb" marker if you have the status to make it stick. It's interesting how rapidly social structures evolve around such things.