One thing that employers crave is consistency. This employee consistently delivers, consistently shows up on time, never misbehaves, is regularly productive.
Many things that other people crave, we learn to crave as well.
I’m not going to use this post to say what things are and aren’t consistent. Those concepts are relegated to complex physics, math, biology, etc., problems. At this point in history, humanity has a deep enough scientific understanding to know certain common truths about the world (such as the common cellular or atomic components that form the human body, and we are slowly mapping the brain,) without really being able to understand their implications (hard to time the market, hard to read people’s minds, to know with certainty the next card that will be revealed from the deck.)
As a global society, we’ve divided time up into sections that are consistent and mathematically and physically secure (i.e. the atomic clock), but do society no real justice other than being able to keep track of things.
I’m not saying abolish time, that would be ridiculous. We use it everyday to do really incredible things.
Humanity has a habit of creating crude tools to capture an idea and then changing the current cultural narrative to fit said tool. America has a car addiction, because some cities and townships were built with the intention that every resident would own one. The entire world runs on standard time, even though the average length of day and night-times differ based on latitude as much as longitude.
The structure which has been created upon standardized time is one in which every person within a section of a workforce is expected to show up at the exact same time. Rush hour is a problem created by this expectation. Different parts of the workforce then must accommodate other workforces’ standardized times (i.e. housecleaners generally must work during the day while the home owners are away, while office or school janitors often work before and after school hours. The profession is very similar, but the time requirements are the complete opposite.)
In business, we tend to measure projects in terms of days, hours, months, weeks. We expect consistent results, fueled by deadlines. However what we’re doing is asking people to just show up, work and leave. I do advocate working over not working, because if you never try something, you will never learn anything about it, and sometimes, when you’re feeling like you can’t do anything more, you can just show up and work on something anyways (lo and behold, you may make a breakthrough.)
What I advocate against is expecting consistency without really understanding the process of group of people you have asked to be consistent. This argument expands to the workforce, but honestly, the place we really see it most is with ourselves.
We ask ourselves to be perfect parents, employees, artists, thinkers, listeners, spouses/partners. When we set a goal, we say “Now I am going to do this thing X times for X amount X days.” Instead of saying “I’m starting this new thing, and I may have a week where I’m really excited and overachieve, a week where I get bored and stop, two weeks of nothing, and then reinvigorate myself and pick it back up, however it will take a year of struggle before I finally adopt this new habit. That said, all of the struggle will be worth it because I will then have a skill for life that I will be able to improve upon.”
We divide our life into years we can never predict. We divide our years into seasons, our seasons into months, into weeks, into days. Doesn’t it seem a bit silly to turn your life into a grid? Have you ever felt like your life behaves in a patterned and orderly manner?
In accordance with Medium lore, this would be the part of the article where I would inspire you with personal growth stories, and prescriptions for success.
But life doesn’t work like that. If you needed me to tell you how to live it, are you really living, or are you seeking the same trap of consistency from the advice you consume to escape it?
