Why does your boss pay you? A respectful and motivational boss might answer that question by saying they pay you for your experience or skill set. Or perhaps for “all of your hard work day-in and day-out.” And those are nice sentiments, but I put forward that they are also mostly bullshit.

Why does any company pay any employee for anything? It’s for what they produce.

Amy Poehler has a great quote that I overuse (and will continue to do so now) about the importance of doing. 

“You do it because the doing of it is the thing. The doing is the thing. The talking and worrying and thinking is not the thing.”

I think about it every time someone posts about going to the gym, or talks about starting a new side hustle. Don’t talk about it, just do it. Do the thing. 

To bring this back to the workplace, your output is the thing. The quarterly report is the thing. The audience persona is the thing. The six-second-optimized-for-social-teaser-ad is the thing. Yes, the skills you bring to the table and the sweat you pour into your craft are critical to how you produce, but at the end of the day, what your boss needs from you is the thing.

What isn’t the thing? The first, second, and third drafts aren’t the thing. The 24 bad ideas that precede the one good one isn’t the thing. Writer’s block and IT issues and annoyingly vague emails from your coworker aren’t the thing.

And the eight hours from 9:30 am until 5:30 pm definitely aren’t the thing.

Value not duration

So here’s the point that the rambling first 200 words were working up to. If I pay you $40 to mow my lawn, do I care if you do it with a 28” self-propelled Yard Obliterator™ or with a literal pair of scissors? Nope. You probably care because you don’t want to spend the night on all fours in my backyard, but as far as I’m concerned I have a trimmed lawn and I was happy to pay forty bucks for it. Lawn care, an oil change, digital advertising--it’s the deliverable that has value, not how long it took to make it.

So if the value of a project is in the thing and the hours to make that thing are largely irrelevant, then why does our working culture put so much emphasis on timesheets, billable hours, and utilization metrics?

The billable hour became a defacto unit of measurement for work output that is difficult to quantify. When you built a fence or laid a length of railroad track, it was pretty straightforward to pay you by the job. But then the work outputs became more abstract. Even before the advent of the modern work office, employment became a contract to spend your time in a certain place, doing a certain thing and that was how your salary was earned. 

But this is the lazy way out. It fails to accurately capture the value of a work output, it incentives the wrong work culture, and in the age of information, it reduces the working class to a quantity of time spent in front of their work computer. 

There are better ways to measure and get compensated for work output. But I’m already way over the character count for a LinkedIn SEO Optimized Think Piece, so we’ll dive into that later. In the meantime, remember to do the thing more than you talk about doing the thing. The world remembers the doers.