Work as a gas, and the hunt for slack
Why do working hours stay the same even after we become more efficient?
In theory, if IT, AI and better processes let you finish faster, you should get to go home earlier by exactly that much.
Messages go out faster than they used to.
Making documents is faster.
Searching is faster.
Sharing is faster.
Calculating and crunching numbers is faster.
With AI, even writing, summarizing, planning, coding and building slide decks have gotten a lot quicker.
And yet most people don't feel any lighter.
If anything, they're exhausted.
The reason is simple, and a little brutal.
Work isn't managed by output. It's managed by a container of time.
In other words, it's not that
you work eight hours because there's work to do.
In a lot of workplaces, what actually happens is
you're supposed to be there for eight hours, so eight hours' worth of work appears.
That's why working hours don't go down.
Work Is Not a Liquid. It's a Gas.
Work isn't a liquid.
A liquid stops at the amount you pour into the container.
Once you've handled a set amount, you're done.
But in many companies, work behaves more like a gas.
A gas spreads out to fill whatever container it's in.
If the container is eight hours, work swells to eight hours.
If the container is a 5-day week, work swells to five days.
If headcount drops, work pours into the containers of the people who are left.
If efficiency opens up a gap, work pours into that gap too.
This is what I call
the gasification of work.
Work doesn't end because it's finished.
It keeps growing as long as there's a container to put it in.
So even if efficiency frees up 1 hour, that hour doesn't become rest.
Usually this is what happens:
"Great, then can you take this too?"
"While you're at it, do this as well."
"If you have time, join the improvement project."
"If you've got some slack, come to the meeting."
"You've still got time before closing, right?"
And so the freed-up time becomes a place to park more work.
Eight Hours Was Supposed to Be a Ceiling, but It Became the Standard Container
In Japan, the basic legal working time is eight hours a day and 40 hours a week.
Originally, this was a cap to keep people from being overworked.
But in actual workplaces, it's often treated as the standard container.
Instead of "you must not make people work more than eight hours,"
it becomes
"eight hours is what you work."
Something odd happens here.
What used to be a limit quietly turns into an obligation.
As a result, instead of
adjusting the workload so it fits within eight hours,
it tends to be
arranging work so that it fills the eight hours.
With that mindset, efficiency never turns into free time for workers.
Efficiency gets treated as newly available capacity.
In other words,
the reward for getting faster isn't a break. It's the next task.
Parkinson's Law and the Reality of Companies
This is close to what's known as Parkinson's Law.
Roughly speaking, Parkinson's Law is the idea that
work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
If the deadline is 2 weeks, it takes 2 weeks.
If the deadline is 2 hours, it gets done in 2 hours.
Give work more time and it swells to match.
Working hours at a company are much the same.
There's an eight-hour workday.
So work swells to eight hours' worth.
On top of that, modern work has no obvious finish line.
A document could always be more polished.
A report could always be more detailed.
Checks can always be added.
More meetings can always be scheduled.
Improvement projects are endless.
Data analysis, training, manuals, hiring and PR can all be done if you really want to do them.
So the work never ends.
Unless someone draws a clear line and says "this far," work just keeps growing.
This Isn't About "Things Were Easier Back Then"
I want to be clear that I'm not saying "things were easier in the old days."
The old days had their own hell.
There was the culture symbolized by the slogan "Can you fight for 24 hours?" (from a 1980s energy-drink ad in Japan): the corporate warrior, endless hours, grit, drinking parties, client entertainment, giving up holidays, long commutes and business trips, and pure physical endurance.
So glorifying the old way of working is wrong too.
The old days were pretty unreasonable in their own way.
But the old kind of unreasonable and today's kind are different in nature.
The old hardship was
long hours, travel, grit, stamina, and going all-in on your life at the company.
Today's hardship is
filling even the tiniest gaps, instant replies, high density, visibility, monitoring, and zero slack.
The old message was "fight longer."
Today's is "cram more into the same eight hours."
So you could say
the Showa and early Heisei eras were the "Can you fight for 24 hours?" type.
The present is the "eight hours of pressurized gas" type.
That's the difference.
In the Old Days, Physical Friction Capped the Amount of Work
Work used to come with physical friction.
You'd carry a floppy disk or paper documents to a factory or another department.
You'd deliver slips.
You'd print things out.
You'd wait for a signature stamp.
You'd wait until the phone call went through.
You'd wait for the person to come back to their desk.
You'd go and look at the physical thing.
You'd wait for the mail.
You'd travel.
You'd kill time in a coffee shop.
You'd go to another site.
From today's point of view, it looks very inefficient.
But that inefficiency had another side to it.
Physical friction naturally set an upper limit on how much work there could be.
If you were walking a floppy disk over, you couldn't cram in other work in the meantime.
If you were heading to the factory, your number of finished tasks didn't grow while you traveled.
If you were waiting for paper to arrive, you couldn't move on to the next step.
If the phone didn't connect, an instant reply was impossible.
If you had to go meet someone, time was physically used up.
In short, back then slowness and hassle ended up lowering the density of work.
That friction was inefficient, but it was also a buffer.
Today, the Less Friction There Is, the More Work Gets Packed In
Now it's different.
You don't need to carry a floppy disk; a file arrives instantly.
You don't need to pass paper around; you share it in the cloud.
You don't need to go see anyone; you talk on Teams or Zoom.
Even if the call doesn't connect, a chat message lands.
Documents come from templates.
Numbers get totaled quickly in Excel or BI (business intelligence) tools.
Writing is fast with AI.
So are translation and summarizing.
At first glance, it's wonderful.
But what happened as a result?
Each individual task got faster, but the gaps that opened up now get filled with the next task.
In the old days, going to the factory and back took 30 minutes.
Now a chat message takes 3 minutes.
So do you get to leave 27 minutes early?
In most cases, no.
Those 27 minutes get filled with another chat, another document, another meeting, another report, another improvement project.
In other words, technological progress didn't reduce work. You could say it
raised our ability to pack work in.
Same Eight Hours, Different Contents
8 hours back then and eight hours now are not the same.
Eight hours in the old days included
- travel
- waiting
- handing things over in person
- paper processing
- waiting for replies
- checking physical items
- small talk
- coffee shops
- preparation and logistics
- idle time
That doesn't mean all of it was good.
There was plenty of inefficiency.
There were long hours.
There was unfairness.
There was grit-over-everything thinking.
Even so, in terms of work density, there was a lot of natural empty space.
Today's eight hours, on the other hand, is packed with
- instant replies
- chat
- online meetings
- document creation
- task management
- data entry
- reporting
- improvement projects
- monitoring
- training
- handling inquiries
- extra duties
- the time saved by AI, immediately reinvested into more work
In short,
the working hours are the same, but the density of work has gone up.
This matters a lot.
If you only look at the shape of 5 days a week, eight hours a day, it looks the same as it did before.
But the contents are different.
The old eight hours was a sponge with air pockets here and there.
Today's eight hours is a compressed, high-density block.
Slack Isn't Slacking Off. It's a Buffer.
Companies tend to dislike slack.
It looks like people are idle.
It looks wasteful.
It looks inefficient.
It looks like a waste of labor costs.
But slack isn't necessarily slacking off.
Slack is a buffer.
It's what lets you deal with unexpected trouble.
Avoid bad decisions.
Teach others.
Double-check things.
Prevent mistakes.
Recover.
Come up with new ideas.
Coordinate with other departments.
Switch your head from one task to another.
All of this takes slack.
If you cut all the slack, things look more efficient in the short run.
But in the long run,
- mistakes increase
- fatigue builds up
- people quit
- training gets sloppy
- knowledge ends up locked in one person's head
- the ability to improve things disappears
- nobody has room left to think
follow.
In other words, if you hunt down too much slack, the organization's resilience drops.
This is efficiency in appearance only; in reality it's overloading the density of work.
Who Gets the Efficiency Dividend?
When you become more efficient, a dividend is created.
Say a job that used to take eight hours now takes 6.
Then the efficiency dividend is 2 hours.
The question is who gets to take those 2 hours.
There are roughly three options.
1. Return it to workers as time
Go home early.
Rest.
Move to a 4-day week.
Cut working hours.
2. Return it to workers as money
Raise salaries.
Increase bonuses.
Pay for results.
3. The company takes it back as workload
Add extra duties.
Reduce headcount.
Hold back on hiring.
Increase the number of cases handled.
Raise quality requirements.
Add more management, reporting and meetings.
In reality, it tends to be the third.
In other words, the efficiency dividend tends to flow not to workers' free time but to the company's throughput, profit, labor cost cuts and tighter control.
This is what I call
the efficiency-dividend heist.
Of course, companies have their reasons.
There's competition.
They have to make a profit.
Labor costs are heavy.
Customer demands keep growing.
Passing costs on in prices is hard.
Other companies are becoming more efficient too.
Even so, here's how it looks from the worker's side:
We got faster, but it didn't get easier. We became more efficient, but the slack never came back. Only the density went up.
The More Capable You Are, the More You Lose
In this structure, capable people are the ones who tend to lose out.
Take someone who works fast.
Where an average person needs eight hours, they finish in 5.
That should open up 3 hours of slack.
But in the workplace, this is what usually happens:
"You're quick. Then can you do this too?"
"You seem to have room, so have a look at this as well."
"While you're at it, train the new hire."
"Come up with improvement ideas too."
"Make the slides as well."
"And join the meeting."
So the fast worker gets extra work instead of a reward.
If that's how it goes, the more efficient you are, the more you lose.
A capable person gets work done quickly.
Then work flows into the freed-up time.
They process it too.
More flows in.
I call this
the slack-absorbing system for capable people.
And organizations tend to call it "initiative," "teamwork," or "a chance to grow."
It's a zoo with holes in the fence.
Why Do Companies Fill Slack With Work?
There are several reasons companies fill slack with work.
1. Because they see labor costs in terms of time
They're paying a monthly salary, so they want to use that time.
To the worker it's their own life, but to the company it looks like a resource it has already bought.
2. Because it's easier to manage presence than results
Managing by results is hard.
What counts as a result?
Where does "done" begin?
How do you judge quality?
Who decides?
Deciding all of that is a lot of work.
Time, on the other hand, is easy to manage.
What time did you arrive?
What time did you leave?
How many hours did you work?
So management leans toward managing time.
3. Because work can be created endlessly
More reports.
More checks.
More meetings.
More improvement projects.
More training.
More dashboards that make things visible.
More polishing of documents.
If you want to create work, you can create as much as you like.
4. Because there's no system for returning slack as a benefit
If there's no system that lets people who became more efficient go home early, the slack turns into work.
"If you finish early, you can go home."
"If you deliver results, shorter hours are fine."
"The time saved from efficiency goes back as pay or time off."
Unless there are rules like these, the slack gets taken back.
Look at "Work Density," Not Just "Working Hours"
If we're thinking about how we'll work in the future, working hours alone aren't enough.
Of course, long hours are a problem.
But even with the same eight hours, different density means a completely different level of fatigue.
Eight hours that include travel, waiting, small talk and preparation.
Eight hours packed solid with chat, meetings, documents, decisions and instant replies.
These are not the same eight hours.
On top of the debate about working hours, we should also look at
work density.
How much concentration is demanded?
How many instant replies are expected?
How many decisions are required?
How often are you interrupted?
How much emotional labor is involved?
How much slack is there?
How much can you recover?
Without looking at these, we can't explain the fatigue of modern work.
The "Can You Fight for 24 Hours?" Type and the "Eight Hours of Pressurized Gas" Type
If I had to sum up the old way of working in one phrase, it would be
the "Can you fight for 24 hours?" type.
Long hours.
Grit.
Travel.
Drinking parties.
Client entertainment.
Loyalty to the company.
Physical endurance.
The feeling that the company takes your entire life.
The current way of working, on the other hand, is
the "eight hours of pressurized gas" type.
It tries to stay within the legal working hours.
But what's inside is high density.
IT shaves away the gaps.
Instant replies arrive by chat.
Meetings are sliced into fragments.
Work is made visible.
Slack gets hunted down.
In the past, people were made to fight for longer.
Now they're made to fight compressed.
Both are problems.
So if we only talk about whether it's better than before, we miss the point.
What we really need to look at is
not only the length of time, but how much work is packed into that time.
The Real Reason Working Hours Don't Shrink
The real reason working hours don't shrink isn't the amount of work. It's that the container of time comes first.
You're there for eight hours.
So eight hours' worth of work comes in.
You're there 5 days a week.
So 5 days' worth of work comes in.
You become more efficient.
So work comes into the freed-up time.
Headcount drops.
So work comes into the time of the people who remain.
That's how work spreads like a gas.
So efficiency alone isn't enough.
What we need, along with efficiency, is
a rule for giving the slack back.
If you finish early, you can go home.
Efficiency gains are recognized and rewarded.
There's a cap on the amount of work.
Meetings and reports aren't piled on excessively.
Before cutting staff, the load is examined.
Slack is treated as a buffer.
Work density is measured.
Differences in stamina are taken as a given.
We need this kind of design.
Label Ideas
- The gasification of work
- Slack-hunting labor
- The efficiency-dividend heist
- A society that pours work into eight-hour buckets
- Work turning into pressurized gas
- The "Can you fight for 24 hours?" type
- The "eight hours of pressurized gas" type
- The slack-absorbing system for capable people
- Frictionless overloaded labor
- The problem where IT only raised our ability to pack work in
- The "look at work density" problem
- Slack is a buffer, not slacking off
Summary
The reason working hours don't shrink after efficiency gains is less that companies are simply bad, and more that the basic unit of labor is "time" rather than "output."
And as long as there's a container of time, work spreads to fill it.
The old days had their own harshness of the "Can you fight for 24 hours?" kind.
Today has its own harshness: IT removed the friction, and work is packed densely into the same eight hours.
So efficiency alone isn't what we need.
Who gets the slack that efficiency creates?
Until that's decided, workers won't get any relief.
Work is a gas.
It swells as long as there's a container.
So what we really need is not only to make work faster, but to
make the container smaller,
protect the slack,
and lower the density of work.
Reference Notes
- Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (Japan), "Working Hours and Days Off"
https://www.mhlw.go.jp/stf/seisakunitsuite/bunya/koyou_roudou/roudoukijun/roudouzikan/index.html - C. Northcote Parkinson, "Parkinson's Law" / The Economist
https://www.economist.com/news/1955/11/19/parkinsons-law - Regain official site, CM gallery / history of Regain (the energy drink behind the "24 hours" slogan)
https://www.daiichisankyo-hc.co.jp/site_regain/cm/
https://regain-suppli.jp/stc/about/default.aspx
