I know I’m showing my age, but I distinctly remember growing up with the belief that American workers of my generation (yes, I’m a baby boomer) would be working only four eight-hour days per week by the time we joined the workforce. My father was a senior design engineer in the R&D division of a Fortune 500 company, and he worked 36 hours per week. (He retired at age 58 in 1981 after spending most of his career with one company.) He also had a huge amount of vacation time--something like eight weeks a year. Now, 20 years later, I’m working as an IS executive. I don’t enjoy the short workweek or ample vacation time that my father had, or that I grew up anticipating. On the contrary, I often spend 45 to 50 hours at work and at least another 10 hours per week in bumper-to-bumper traffic getting to and from my office.

The Myth Of Productivity

As I remember, new technologies and better business methods were supposed to make us more productive. The expectation was that the increased productivity gained by computerization, new process methodologies and better corporate organizational models would allow us shorter workweeks. Well, it didn’t happen! I recently discussed this unfulfilled promise with a fellow executive, and he mentioned that the shorter workweek didn’t happen for our generation because we now have PCs. He may be right.

PCs have raised the bar on the type, amount and quality of the output we can manage. Executives used to need administrative assistants to produce letters or memorandums. Today, we create and distribute our own correspondence without any support. We work with our own spreadsheets with little help from the accountants. We develop our own presentation materials, and we handle our own messaging via e-mail. Curiously, the colorful, capable PC has actually added to our individual workloads and made us forget what the promise of a better life meant.

On a larger scale, what else has happened to kill the golden lifestyle those in my generation were planning to enjoy? Having endured 26 years so far in IT, four years in the Navy and five years in college getting my degree in aerospace engineering, I have the right to know why I’m not worthy of having more free time without diminished fortune. I suspect that others of my generation want to know too. We’ve been told various plausible theories to explain why we’ve been deprived. The list includes the emergence of the world economy, loss of our manufacturing base, our own personal greed, the legacy of driven immigrants, the post-depression era and the focus on quality.