Shady Statistics and the Status Quo

Frank Butler  0:17  
Hello Busybodies, welcome to another episode of The Busyness Paradox. I'm Frank Butler here with Paul Harvey.

Paul Harvey  0:23  
Good day.

Frank Butler  0:25  
And on today's episode, we're gonna be talking about something fun. In particular, this Forbes article had the title of “study shows people working from home are having sex, dating, taking naps, and doing side hustles on company time.” So, let's dive into this.

Paul Harvey  0:47  
Let's dive in. We're taking a page from the Macalope here for any other Apple nerds, by way of finding a Forbes contributor article and go to town on it. This one in particular, because Frank noticed it getting a lot of attention on Twitter. And it's almost as if it was written as an affront to The Busyness Paradox.

Frank Butler  1:12  
I agree with the "affront" statement

Paul Harvey  1:15  
So we’re fighting back.

Frank Butler  1:16  
He goes against everything we try to discuss and talk about.

Paul Harvey  1:19  
Right. So Jack Kelly's the author, I’m sure he's a nice guy, but uh…well, we'll do our best to be objective and

Frank Butler  1:27  
He's one of those people who probably has grown up and goes “Well, we always work 40 hours a week. And so I expect everybody to do it the same way.”

Paul Harvey  1:35  
It comes across that way, yeah.

Frank Butler  1:39  
Oh, goodness

Paul Harvey  1:40  
We will go through this article and give our commentary.

Frank Butler  1:44  
Well, we'll try to be objective. Let's just start sort of with this idea that…the article gets into a whole thing about - what was it, the idea of hustle porn was the quote?

Paul Harvey  1:56  
Hustle porn. Not a term I'd heard before this, but apparently people were using that term…at some point. 

Frank Butler  2:03  
Oh, and the whole idea of this hustle porn is basically, we discussed it in another episode of people who are trying to say, “Hey, you got to be busy all the time,” right? grind, grind, grind, always grinding, always grinding. And what was interesting about it is, as you said, in there, it's a Twitter quote, and it says, (this person posted on Twitter), Jeremy Haines, “if you don't come out of this quarantine with either one: a new skill, two: starting what you've been putting off, like a new business, three: more knowledge, then you didn't ever lack the time you lacked the discipline.” Oh, Mr. high and mighty right over here. Yeah.

Paul Harvey  2:45  
I get where he's coming from. I do kind of roll my eyes when I, you know, hear whoever talking about how they don't have time to do this or do that. Yet, they have a very in depth working knowledge of like 27 different TV shows. I think you do have a little more time than you say you do. I get where he's coming from. But this may be true for some people, but it doesn't say for some people, if you don't come out of the quarantine with either a new skill, blah, blah, it's addressed to everybody,

Frank Butler  3:11  
Right

Paul Harvey  3:11  
All of us. If at this point in our lives a year plus into this pandemic, according to this criteria, you've, you've now failed as a human if you haven't done one of these three things. And I don't think that's really true. If you're a single mom with three kids or are one of these essential workers who had to actually go to work this whole time. As with everything, it depends on the situation.

Frank Butler  3:35  
That's absolutely right. And that's why I struggle with some of these in this article in particular, made my I guess, the hair stand up on the back of my neck a little bit, once I started to dive into it, and Paul and I have been discussing this a little bit. And we started to dig in. And the first thing that this Forbes article pulls from is a poll done by a company called econo light. And e-conolight is a company that sells light bulbs, yeah, lighting and light bulbs. And already, that to me becomes sort of red flagy in a sense, because these types of organizations are not necessarily going to go and do rigorous survey. And by that, I mean, they're not necessarily going to probably capture all the information you need. We're not seeing demographic data in here, for example, very, or at least, we don't know of it, necessarily, even though they do allude to millennials in one of them.

Paul Harvey  4:35  
That's true.

Frank Butler  4:35  
They don't tell us about data that is captured the type of jobs whether they are hourly or salaried. They don't…they don't explicitly say these are work from home jobs, even though we're pretty sure that's what they're implying.

Paul Harvey  4:51  
That’s the implication, yeah.

Frank Butler  4:51  
You're right. So that's sort of what this Forbes article is built around. Because this was done, I think it was in March of last year. Near the start of the pandemic. 

Paul Harvey  5:02  
I think so. That is a little bit vague also.

Frank Butler  5:06  
Right.

Paul Harvey  5:06  
And all this is fine. You know, we don't expect a lighting company to be out there doing methodologically rigorous survey data collection. But the Forbes article reports their findings as such.

Frank Butler  5:18  
Right

Paul Harvey  5:19  
He does also give some numbers from Nielsen, who is a well known methodological survey company like that's what they do. The…their data is going to be a lot more rigorous, almost certainly, than that from a lighting company, but they are presented as equally valid sources of information in the Forbes article. Like you said, red flag.

Frank Butler  5:39  
So let's dive into this econolight survey. Now, one of the things he said is that 23% of people have called a friend or family member during a quick break. Now, I don't know about you guys, but I'm sure everybody's done this, whether it was work from home or at work, or nearly everybody, job dependent.

Paul Harvey  5:59  
Every job I've ever had, I have made a quick phone call to a friend or family member, whether it was fast food back in the day, working in finance, certainly as a professor. I guess I have not stopped in the middle of class for a quick phone call. But that is a valid question. What would that number be? If we weren't looking at assuming we are looking at work from home? People exclusively in this? What would that be? Are those same individuals before or after the pandemic? I actually think 23% would be a little bit low. If 23% of people at a normal office job or working at a gas station or whatever. If only 23% had ever taken a quick break to call somebody. I'd be surprised by that.

Frank Butler  6:47  
I wonder how many is just texting while on the job instead? Right?

Paul Harvey  6:51  
That's true.

Frank Butler  6:52  
We're not making phone calls quite as much. But texting could be the reason why these numbers have changed a little bit

Paul Harvey  7:00  
They’re  doing zoom calls with friends instead. That's why it's so low. [laughter]

Frank Butler  7:04  
A lot of it’s FaceTime. I would imagine a lot more FaceTime and the next one was 42% have been on a date. Now keep in mind this is during company time, right? This is during work hours. 42% have been on a date. That's fascinating.

Paul Harvey  7:18  
Hmm. I do wonder, how did they define a date? 

Frank Butler  7:23  
Yeah

Paul Harvey  7:23  
First of all, you're in a pandemic. So it's unlikely that 42% of people are going out for dinner or something or…what is a date in general? And what is considered a date during a pandemic?

Frank Butler  7:37  
Yeah. And how does that differ really, from maybe regular work? Non-pandemic, right? Because think about it, people would probably go on dates during lunches they have, if they know they weren't close to somebody or what?

Paul Harvey  7:49  
I actually did that once, come to think of it.

Frank Butler  7:51  
Oh yeah

Paul Harvey  7:52  
Yeah. I was going to say “That's weird, people don't do that.” Oh, wait, I totally did that once. Yeah.

Frank Butler  7:56  
I mean, but if you think about in the city, you both work in a similar location, but you might live in opposite ends of a city, especially like in New York or something. It would make sense that you would have a lunch date to see how you get along.

Paul Harvey  8:07  
Yeah, sure.

Frank Butler  8:09  
I don't know. I, again, I think a lot of these are going to come down to

Paul Harvey  8:12  
Yeah.

Frank Butler  8:12  
What would it have looked like before the pandemic? And during the pandemic? Is it, are we seeing trends here? I think that's the key. The next one: 40 percent have had sex during company time. I would certainly think that that's probably higher than not pre pandemic. But actually, who knows?

Paul Harvey  8:32  
Who knows

Frank Butler  8:33  
Almost half have said they've taken or have had an alcoholic beverage during company time. That doesn't surprise me.

Paul Harvey  8:40  
It does and it doesn't. I wonder how much of that is, “Yeah, it was 430 on a Friday and I popped open a beer.”

Frank Butler  8:49  
But again, how many companies are we seeing doing that nowadays? 

Paul Harvey  8:52  
That’s true 

Frank Butler  8:53  
I know, for example, that one of those, it's kind of like a WeWork, but it's not WeWork. They they have an office here in Chattanooga, and they do have a keg in their break room.

Paul Harvey  9:04  
Mm hmm.

Frank Butler  9:05  
And that's one of the perks that they're they're obviously encouraging people to have a beer on a Friday if they want. Another company I know has Margarita Fridays. So in the afternoon, they make margaritas and they have margaritas at the office. There's another I was talking to another guy the other day. And at his company, they have keg party basically on Fridays. Wait, these are cults aren't they?

Paul Harvey  9:27  
Ah, cults

Frank Butler  9:29  
Hmm…

Paul Harvey  9:31  
You know, as we discussed a few episodes back it’s…it’s a fine line there. It's…you know.

Frank Butler  9:36  
Yeah. But you know, so half of ‘em said they had an alcoholic drink and I'm with you. Is it a four o'clock kind of thing? Or are they getting up and cracking a beer in the first in the morning? If they're doing that they might have to look at themselves a little bit.

Paul Harvey  9:50  
They were probably doing that before if they're doing that now.

Frank Butler  9:52  
Right. Yeah. 

Paul Harvey  9:53  
Yeah, and this is such a stereotypically American thing to be like, [gasps] 60% or whatever you said, half 50% have had a drink at work? You know, we've both worked in Europe. 

Frank Butler  10:03  
I was gonna say, you were required for your birthday to bring champagne

Paul Harvey  10:06  
That’s right,  Yeah.

Frank Butler  10:07  
And, you know, pop the bubbly with your coworkers in Germany to celebrate your birthday. And so yeah, we had champagne at work during the day, to celebrate a birthday.

Paul Harvey  10:20  
They sold beer in the building and wine where I was teaching in Hungary, like in the classroom building. downstairs, there was like, a lobby in some old mini food court. It wasn't, like, a bar there. Well they did have like keg parties for students sometimes, but just you know, the lunch stand, one of the options would be some kind of beer.

Frank Butler  10:43  
It's actually really cool. But that's sort of true in Europe right. Their approach to alcohol is very different than ours here in the US. Especially when you don't get free refills. I really feel like part of its that you're not drinking to get drunk during the work hours. It’s something that is normal, you have a beer with colleagues, but you're not going to drink 12 of them during work hours, you know, you have a beer, or maybe a glass of wine.

Paul Harvey  11:13  
So, now, I've never had free refills of alcohol in the US either. But…

Frank Butler  11:18  
I'm talking about soft drinks, right? So you

Paul Harvey  11:20  
Oh, oh, I gotcha. Yeah, that makes sense.

Frank Butler  11:24  
My head and what comes out don’t always line up. No, but you know, in the in Europe, you don't get free refills with your soft drinks, right? So beer and coke tend to cost about the same.

Paul Harvey  11:37  
Yep.

Frank Butler  11:38  
So yeah, anyway. This one I like, about 60% of people have taken a nap. I love this one.

Paul Harvey  11:46  
If true, I say good for them

Frank Butler  11:48  
Yeah, why not? That's that idea of that niksen that we've talked about in the past. The art of doing nothing, that a nap in itself is almost like meditation, it's a refresher. And if you can take a nap, if you're able to do that, it actually makes your day better.

Paul Harvey  12:05  
For some people more than others. If I sleep during the day, the rest of my day’s kind of shot like I just can't get back. Everyone's different. But I mean, we've had data for at least a couple decades saying that people are, on the whole, more productive if they’re (surprise, surprise) not overly tired while they're working. Both a psychological kind of resetting, as well as the rest period. That's a good thing.

Frank Butler  12:29  
Yeah, I've always been a fan of the idea of the siesta time too

Paul Harvey  12:32  
Yes

Frank Butler  12:33  
That the Latin countries have had, the Spaniards. You know, it makes sense. You've got this time that after your meal. I mean, how many of us feel tired after eating? It's just how your body works. Your body is, especially depending on what you eat, your body does slow down and you get sleepy. And it's hard to be productive during that post lunch time. So I like it. This one doesn't bother me. 

Paul Harvey  12:58  
Yeah, no, I agree. That's…this is a good thing. Not being presented as such in the Forbes  interpretation, but in econolight’s defense, they don't really say this is a good or bad thing. They just say this is what our survey showed.

Frank Butler  13:13  
Yeah, I think the Forbes article takes that and is saying, “Hey, we got a problem.”

Paul Harvey  13:17  
Yes.

Frank Butler  13:17  
And it’s

Paul Harvey  13:17  
very much.

Frank Butler  13:18  
And I don't think that's the case. Now. The next one doesn't surprise me. But the wording that they use an overwhelming so they're saying an “overwhelming”, an overwhelming 77% say that they shop online, while on the clock at least once a week. I think we all have done that. In the classroom, obviously. But yeah, I think we've all literally have been shopping online at some point during our workweek,

Paul Harvey  13:47  
If you have a job that can be done remotely, that doesn't involve you know, operating heavy machinery or something where you would not be working from home anyway, then almost by definition, you have the ability to shop while you're working. And Who in the world doesn't take advantage of that? And I shouldn't say take advantage like it's a bad thing. Certainly the same technology allows us to answer work emails at nine o'clock at night and do all kinds of work off the quote unquote, clock. So sneaking in an Amazon order in the middle of the day,

Frank Butler  14:18  
Or your grocery order. I mean,

Paul Harvey  14:20  
Whatever

Frank Butler  14:21  
these days, why not? I don’t…this one, it just doesn't surprise me. And I would be surprised if it Was actually less.

Paul Harvey  14:27  
Yeah

Frank Butler  14:27  
Pre-pandemic

Paul Harvey  14:29  
I would too

Frank Butler  14:29  
Now this next one made me go “Hmm.” And it said that around 50% of the respondents have worked for another company while on the clock with their employer. Hmm. Now, the thing that stood out to me is, what kind of people are they interviewing? Like, what kind of work are these people doing? Because I think about it with regards to when I would go to another city. Oftentimes you see that a person who's driving for Uber is also driving for Lyft

Paul Harvey  14:59  
Hmm

Frank Butler  15:00  
Are these kinds of people who are saying, Hey, I'm driving for somebody else while on the clock with Uber or what's going on here? And that's something that I'm curious about not to say that they're doing that or that this is what we're talking about here. But that was sort of the first thing that jumped in my head.

Paul Harvey  15:16  
Yeah, this is a statistic that really begs additional detail. More information, because on its own, it can be interpreted so many different ways. But I think one thing that it does sort of tell us, whatever form this moonlighting or whatever work is taking on the quote, unquote, clock, this is telling us that these employees have slack resources, extra time that they can and would apparently like to use to earn more money. So you've…presumably these are, perhaps, at least some of them, the same people who would be doing busy work in the office to look busy. Now they're using their excess time more productively, that's not necessarily a bad thing. First of all, if they're still doing the job that you've hired them and are paying them to do, then, isn't that what matters at the end of the day? Could they be doing more for the company that they're working for? Yes. And so I think that brings to mind this internal uberization idea that we've talked about before, where perhaps your own employees can be doing more for your company outside of their officially designed, officially…delineated? I don’t know what the hell word I'm looking for…from their official job, someone who is an accountant maybe is really good at coding web pages, and does some of that on the side. Maybe your company could use that. Basically, hire your own employees to do kind of side gigs for you. If they're going to do it may as well harness the talent you've already got.

Frank Butler  16:41  
Exactly. And I love that I really liked that idea of leveraging your employee talent, and giving them every opportunity to have growth in your own company to make more money instead of giving their services to somebody else. Now, again, going back to your example of a CPA who can code what's to say the CPA is and also providing CPA duties for another company. Right? And that gets interesting in its own right, because I think there might be some laws even against double billing, in essence, I mean, you might be salaried with one. And then you're billing somebody else.

Paul Harvey  17:14  
That’s interesting 

Frank Butler  17:15  
But I…I don't know. Again, this is one that we have more questions on, like, how do we define this on the clock was one that came up? And how many of these people will have done work off the clock already? And what are we defining is that is it somebody who's working at McDonald's part time, and also doing the regular job just to make a couple extra dollars? Or there's just a lot here that I'd like to know a lot more about in this particular data point.

Paul Harvey  17:43  
Yeah, exactly.

Frank Butler  17:45  
Now, this next one is 56% of millennials have taken a personal day without telling a manager. Now this is our first cue that they have demographic data that they didn't share, as we kind of mentioned early on, but they say 56% of millennials have taken a personal day. Now I'm curious as to what that means, is it I'm not going to have my computer open and just sit there and they're on the couch instead of watching TV with their phone in the hand responding to emails, because they're not working, but they're still making sure that they're giving the appearance that they're working. And so though they're claiming that's a personal day, because they're not giving them the quote, unquote, eight hours at a computer?

Paul Harvey  18:28  
My guess would be they just didn't do work one day, even the appearance of it, and didn't tell anyone they were doing that. I don't know. There's a lot we don't know about this, like the usual question. How do you define a millennial? Contrary to popular belief, there is no like official time frame that delineates one generation from the next. 1980 to 2000 tends to be like the most common range, you'll see a few years before and after on either end, but say to 1980 to 2000. So we're talking about people who are somewhere between 21 and 41. That's a lot of people like that's probably half the workforce right now.

Frank Butler  19:04  
It's actually the largest group right now. Yeah.

Paul Harvey  19:06  
Well, yeah, you're talking about 20 years of people. I mean, I could make up my own generation, uh Generation Q was everyone born between 1950 and 2000, it’s huge! It’s the biggest generation ever. Because I defined it as such, but…so I don't know what to do with that information. Okay, so people between 20 and 40 did something along the lines of not working when they were supposed to be working for a day?

Frank Butler  19:31  
Well, and they're predominantly the, I would say younger members of the workforce. I think I wanted to say it was like 2004 because I think that millennials were starting at 24. So they've been well into the workforce

Paul Harvey  19:43  
If you...

Frank Butler  19:43  
and you got this “Z”

Paul Harvey  19:45  
If you want it to be 2004

Frank Butler  19:47  
Yeah, we'll make it 2004

Paul Harvey  19:48  
You can call it, you can say Millennials were born up until 2004

Frank Butler  19:51  
We're gonna go with whatever I know that Generation Z that the new one is the one hitting the workforce now, but yeah, I think this is an interesting one. And that begs the question as well is, if they're getting in trouble for this, or if anybody notices, if not, what's the big deal? Again, we take the stance, that output is what matters. And if they're getting their job done, then they decided to just take a personal day and not,

Paul Harvey  20:15  
They still got their job done.

Frank Butler  20:17  
They got the job done.

Paul Harvey  20:18  
Now, I'd say, if you have a work relationship with someone, where they can just not show up in any capacity for an entire day, and nothing really comes of it, you probably need to revisit the scope of that job, because apparently, you've got someone there who's being underutilized, and it’s probably very boring for them. Again, we don't know, what is…were their consequences? Like did things fall through because of this? These personal days, unauthorized personal days, we don't know.

Frank Butler  20:46  
Now, this next one, 44% have been reprimanded at least once for getting off task. And 39% of the people have been let go from their jobs, for doing non-work related activities. Now, this is saying, in essence, that four out of 10 people, and now this is a survey of about 1000 people, four out of every 10 have been dismissed for doing non related, non-work related activities. This just doesn't seem right

Paul Harvey  21:14  
Ok I'm just gonna have to call bs on this. I do not think 40% of any population has been fired for doing non-work related activities while working from home during the pandemic.

Frank Butler  21:27  
Now, here's my caveat, I could see this being true because one, I've never heard of econo light, for example, and maybe there's a particular group that has heard of econolight, and maybe it's call center workers. And these call center workers were sent home to do work from home. And these are highly monitored jobs quite often, if you've ever called customer support, or something says this call will be recorded, or this call will be monitored or something along those lines. I could see that being a much higher case here, especially during a pandemic, they're not getting the same social interactions at the end of the day, and maybe they get a little too socially interacted on a phone call just because they're lonely, bored, or what have you, or I don't know, maybe they're not answering the calls effectively, or maybe their call response times have gone down. They're not taking as many calls. Who knows. So if this is a certain group, I could certainly see this being potentially accurate.

Paul Harvey  22:28  
I mean, if all that is the case, then that really should have been clarified. Like then this is not a generalizable study or survey. It's presented as a cross-section of Americans. If in fact, we're talking about this very specific type of Americans doing a very specific job, that's something we need to know about.

Frank Butler  22:47  
And I think this is where I take the most issue with this Forbes article, using it and saying it basically like gospel. And it is not

Paul Harvey  22:57  
Like “this is the truth.” Right.

Frank Butler  22:58  
And this is the real standout point here, I guarantee four in 10 people have not lost their jobs across all industries. Now, here's another one, they could be if it was people working in the hospitality segment, that would probably be closer to accurate. But again, that becomes non-generalizable to the greater workforce. And a lot of these jobs you can't do working from home, can't go and clean a hotel room from home.

Paul Harvey  23:24  
Right. So it wouldn't be relevant anyway, they would have lost their jobs for other reasons.

Frank Butler  23:28  
Right

Paul Harvey  23:29  
Now, maybe it is: of the people who did lose their job during the past year, 40% of those people lost it for that reason? That could be where the number’s actually coming from. But that…there's nothing in here to indicate that that's the case.

Frank Butler  23:44  
Right. There's no clarification to that. And again, this is why a site as reputable as Forbes is taking something that, while interesting, can't be used as gospel when they don't even put any caveats in the article saying, hey, you've got to be careful how you use this data. And I think this is a general challenge we face with a lot of stats we see out there. Oh, this that says this. And then when you start diving into it, you're like, well, they only assessed carpentry workers.

Paul Harvey  24:14  
Mm Hmm.

Frank Butler  24:14  
And that job has no application to some-

Paul Harvey  24:17  
Who were born on Tuesdays. Yeah.

Frank Butler  24:18  
Yeah. Right. So there's a lot of challenges with that. I think the the lesson here is be careful with seeing data and numbers that are there. We want people to be aware that there might be some issues with how that data is presented.

Paul Harvey  24:33  
Yeah.

Frank Butler  24:34  
And to always question it, right? There's more to it

Paul Harvey  24:37  
always dig beneath the surface. Reminds me of that listicles post that I wrote a few months back, talking about the the five secrets to this the the four best ways to do that. How, you know, if we're being honest, most of the people involved with this kind of journalism, whatever you want to call it, they know what they're doing. And they're they're getting people to click on the links and talk about it and we're doing a whole show on this. “We'll put the link in the show notes.” And probably some people will click on it, they’re getting eyeballs on their ads, and they're achieving what they want to achieve with it.

Frank Butler  25:07  
Right

Paul Harvey  25:07  
So it's not like we're telling them anything they don't know. But the average consumer reading these articles is not always aware of that. 

Frank Butler  25:15  
And we want to make sure that the managers and people who want to be managers are more aware of how to use this data. I think that's something that's important, because Forbes is targeting the same audience we are.

Paul Harvey  25:26  
Yeah, good point.

Frank Butler  25:27  
We want to make sure that you're making informed decisions based on good data, not necessarily data that has questionable content.

Paul Harvey  25:35  
Informed decisions based on bad information.

Frank Butler  25:37  
Right. You don’t want the garbage in garbage out thing going on.

Paul Harvey  25:40  
We should make that a recurring segment of the show, maybe like

Frank Butler  25:44  
What kind of bad data we've seen

Paul Harvey  25:45  
This week’s garbage statistic

Frank Butler  25:47  
Actually sounds pretty good.

Paul Harvey  25:48  
That might be fun.

Frank Butler  25:50  
The last one. Well, there's a couple more here. But “despite 76% of respondents spending more than four hours each day focused on work. 40% of the participants said that they spend four more hours away from their computers.” So basically, three fourths of everybody say that they spend at least four hours or more on work. But yet 40% say they spend more than four hours away from their computer. But again, I think that's your computer, not your phone, not your tablet, you can be mobile and still answer emails or take calls. So I could see this being basically a useless stat.

Paul Harvey  26:25  
And what if, bear with me here for this hypothetical, what if your job involves periods of thinking, and you don't necessarily have to be sitting in front of a computer to think? In fact, maybe you think better if you're walking around? You've gotten up and left your computer, haven't you?

Frank Butler  26:40  
Mm Hmm. Yeah, that's

Paul Harvey  26:42  
You're one of the 76% that's a problem.

Frank Butler  26:45  
That's the problem. Now, this one is very interesting. It says “Worst of all,”

Paul Harvey  26:51  
Okay stop right there “Worst of all”

Frank Butler  26:53  
Yeah.

Paul Harvey  26:53  
Yeah, rule number one of any…anything even trying to resemble research: no value-laden statements in the interpretation of your results, you don’t say, “Worst of all, blah blah blah” you say, this is what we found.

Frank Butler  27:06  
Now, I will, I will caveat this by saying this was taken straight out of the actual econolight posting, this quote.

Paul Harvey  27:13  
Sorry, thank you for clarifying that.

Frank Butler  27:15  
But it does say “Worst of all, 28% of people say doing non-work activities, while clocked in has had a negative impact on their work performance.” Now, lets take that for another way of looking at and saying what 72%…haven’t?

Paul Harvey  27:31  
72% may…maybe said doing non-work activities while clocked in had a positive impact on their work performance.

Frank Butler  27:39  
Right.

Paul Harvey  27:40  
That's how I choose to read that.

Frank Butler  27:41  
Yeah, I like that a lot better. And it kind of fits, I guess, our…

Paul Harvey  27:46  
Yeah, we should do a headline on that. Study finds 72% became more productive from doing non-work related activities while clocked in.

Frank Butler  27:57  
Now, take take that for a second. And you guys can see how we can manipulate something like that, that seems like it's bad and turn it into something that's favorable. Without it really

Paul Harvey  28:09  
To fit our narrative

Frank Butler 28:15  
Right. It just fits our narrative. So again, I think overall, these things sort of stood out as being interesting yet at the same time, I wouldn't want to make significant decisions based off of this data for the very reasons we've already addressed.

Paul Harvey  28:25  
I think it's quite likely someone sees that Forbes article and makes a decision for their workforce that okay, this is bad. Alright, we're bringing everyone back into the office once it's pandemics over.

Frank Butler  28:34  
Yeah, no. And I've seen some headlines already, in some articles, talking about how people are quitting their jobs, for example, because they're being brought back and they'd actually rather quit their job than go back to the office. So again, you're seeing this data going, “Oh, they're doing all these bad activities. While they're working from home.” The Nielsen data, for example, from that Forbes article was going into like people how much pot people were buying in those countries or in those states that marijuana is legal. They were talking about alcohol, what was it, it was wine sales, rose, 66%, beer sales, 42%. And online alcohol sales grew 243%. With these alcohol sales, it just shows that sort of what we quote unquote, call sin activities certainly went up.

Paul Harvey  29:26  
That's his interpretation. Like, “look, as soon as we were working from home, everyone started buying pot and booze”, party started, right? But you know,

Frank Butler  29:34  
Quite a party.

Paul Harvey  29:35  
Do you remember - Yeah, seriously - to the extent that this was being bought, in the way that the Forbes article is saying it was, I don't think it was because people were slacking off because they were scared and depressed. But you know, if you remember march of 2020, so all these numbers, he's comparing from March 2020 to march of 2019. He's not as explicit about that as I think could be, you read the article and it kind of sounds like he's talking about right now, numbers, not the very beginning of the pandemic. But if you think back to the start of this whole thing here in the US, people want a lot of everything. So we thought it would be fun actually, just to compare these numbers, wine 66% increase in March 2020, beer 42% online alcohol sales 243%. What else did some other products increase by during that time of hoarding and whatnot? Most famously, of course, was toilet paper, up 845%. So I wonder what uh, what the author's interpretation of that is, “look at all these slackers, they needed nine times as much toilet paper!” Bread sales up 100%. And I think that's probably limited by the fact that, you know, bread is something… you can only make so much of that. Bakeries can't really ramp up production by that much. Beans. 400%. 

Frank Butler  29:51  
No, I mean

Paul Harvey  29:55  
I mean, I party with beans, personally, but I

Frank Butler  31:00  
I mean I love beans but you know

Paul Harvey  31:03  
To your point, you really can't read much into these numbers for a lot of reasons. But this article is reading into these numbers and saying, as soon as people started working from home, we became a nation of drunks and potheads. And ate a lot of junk food, too, according to this. Okay, so what about the huge spike in sales of Apple computers, famously had these record, probably all computers webcams, are we all like suddenly uh…I'm not going to go down that road. Instead of “doing slacker only things with webcams”, like, why not mention those things? those indicators of huge work from home productivity, why only focus on the numbers that are taken out of context, support his narrative of people slack off when they're not working? at work?

Frank Butler  31:51  
Yeah, I think the webcam one and the increase in computer sales, both very telling, because these are the things that people needed when they were working from home. So they were buying this so they could get their jobs done from home

Paul Harvey  32:04  
With their own money, for the most part,

Frank Butler  32:07  
Right?

Paul Harvey  32:07  
Not everybody, but

Frank Butler  32:09  
Now there is something that they do bring up that is more recent, in terms of the numbers, but it says that March 16, Nielsen said that US consumers streamed 156.1 billion minutes of content, which was twice as much as last year. And 30% of that was Netflix. Now, don't get me wrong. When I'm working from home, and I'm doing some mindless work. I actually like to have background noise. And I tend to stream something like law and order or something where I've seen the show, and I just want some background noise going on. But I don't want it to be something that I have to pay attention to. And I think a lot of people like that.

Paul Harvey  32:48  
Yep.

Frank Butler  32:48  
So if you're working from home, we're gonna have an expectation that some of this goes up. And what if people are watching more? Who cares, really, if they're getting their jobs done,

Paul Harvey  32:56  
but at no point does he say this is being done on company time, right?

Frank Butler  33:00  
That's right. It's just says in general

Paul Harvey  33:01  
Just, those are just the total numbers. So given that, you know, movie theaters have been closed, restaurants been closed, all the other things you might go out and do have been closed. I'm surprised it's only 30%. Because what the heck are you going to do during a global pandemic?

Frank Butler  33:16  
Well, it's twice as much as last year in terms of the minute streamed.

Paul Harvey  33:19  
Oh, sorry. Yeah.

Frank Butler  33:20  
But 30% of its Netflix, but yes,

Paul Harvey  33:22  
Right.

Frank Butler  33:22  
That's still I mean,

Paul Harvey  33:23  
That’s still double

Frank Butler  33:24  
So we're going from 80 billion roughly to 160 billion, just shy of…That's a lot. But yes, you're right. You're not going to theaters, you're not going to restaurants. So yes. How are we filling up that time? And not only that, if you look at what Disney has been doing, Netflix has been doing that through HBO, Max has been doing, they've all been releasing movies directly to their platforms,

Paul Harvey  33:46  
And coming out with new new services, new packages, like they've been made. They've the whole streaming industry has really been upping its game. I think that was in motion before the pandemic started. But

Frank Butler  33:58  
It is accelerated. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I think at the end of the day that, yes, you can spend these numbers to make it sound like we're becoming less productive. But you're absolutely spot on. This is insane that this is stuff being done in the work hours. This is just Nielsen's numbers that they've found based on doing their studies.

Paul Harvey  34:14  
And this is the problem. You know, we say over and over that this is a unique moment in history, that we have a once in a century opportunity to change how work gets done moving forward, something like this comes along. It's a very strong kind of tug back to the status quo. “See, we try this new thing and look what happened. Everyone got drunk and high and watched Netflix.” Like, you could interpret some of these numbers that way if you don't ask any questions and ignore a lot of other pertinent information. But I would argue there's at least as much statistical data out there that can be used to tell the exact opposite story.

Frank Butler  34:54  
And the comments on Twitter will also highlight some of the anomalies is I guess, to use that word loosely, with this article, “this article is certainly taking the stance that we're spending too much time being unproductive in the work from home environment.” But one person uses this quote of time theft  they say that “I always find it fascinating,” quote, unquote, “time theft is a concept that only works against the worker” in response to this article, than another person comments “40 hour work weeks don't make sense nor do offices. The other day, I had my work done in four hours, and had to sit at my computer doing nothing for another four. Why? Because I'm contracted for eight hours, regardless, per day, please.” Now,

Paul Harvey  35:40  
Probably minimum eight hours, I bet it's totally fine if he does 10 hours, right? Without being paid for it. But yeah,

Frank Butler  35:47  
Yeah, I agree. That's probably what it is. But now, I will give a caveat. I don't particularly care for this person saying “nor do offices”, offices do make sense.

Paul Harvey  35:55  
Of course, yeah,

Frank Butler  35:56  
You have to have some level of interaction with people in different working environments. Now, maybe not for this person's particular job. But if you're starting to get into anything r&d intensive, or you need the team to be able to work on something very complex, it is better to have some of those activities go on in a face to face environment and you, you do need to have an office for that country, some people need to have an escape from their home, so they can be productive somewhere else to so they need an office. I know I have colleagues who are not very comfortable working from home, they don't feel like they really have the same level of productivity. And I'm talking about people who don't have any other distractions at home. They just don't, it's a mindset, right? They go to the office and a mindset clicks in that is I'm at the office, I'm going to work

Paul Harvey  36:45  
Yeah I felt that way for at least for portions of my career. I felt when I lived alone had no distractions, but still felt I got more done when I went into the office.

Frank Butler  36:56  
Right. So I think the idea of an office not being needed is focused in on this person. Now, I do tend to side with the idea that the traditional idea of a 40 Hour Work Week doesn't make sense. Again, different jobs, have different time requirements, different people take different amounts of time to get things done. But generally, I agree that the arbitrary idea of 40 hours is wrong.

Paul Harvey  37:22  
Right

Frank Butler  37:23  
I think it's the idea of can you get your job done? Are you getting your workload done? And are we compensating people appropriately to do that work?

Paul Harvey  37:31  
These are good questions to ask, this is a good good conversation to have, it's just a shame that it has to be brought to light in this way, by someone taking a very slanted perspective, causing people to come out and argue against it. Like, we should be really having a much more productive conversation about this. In the form of a podcast hosted by me and Frank. Just sayin’

Frank Butler  37:52  
Just sayin, Now, this is one that I felt was interesting, this person just simply posted a an image and a link. And it was addressing this notion of wage theft. Now wage theft is not something that's new, we've all heard of it before. But it's usually focusing on when employers take advantage of employees. So to give an example, there's a list and this was posted on the Economic Policy Institute site, they did a study now this is a little bit older, studies 2014. But to give to give an idea of what we're talking about with wage theft, there's this one that happened in California with this psyker carwashes. And it was eight car washes. And basically, they had several violations of wage theft, the first one being that they required their workers to wait on standby. So they had to be basically at work but not working. And they weren't being paid for this tide. Ouch. And it was they were claiming that as so if they needed additional staffing, they would have them ready to be there. But again, no additional pay. Now, if you're expected to be at the office, and you're hanging around, even though you don't have to work, there need to be paying your butt for doing that. Because you're not able to do something else that could be benefiting you in some other way. Like including or going to a doctor

Paul Harvey  38:58 
Can't even be earning money. You have to sit there not earning money, in case you’re needed.

Frank Butler 39:10
Yeah and That's crazy.

Paul Harvey  39:22  
That's crazy. All of which is to say, why is anybody out there writing articles, saying that the America average american worker can't be trusted to work from home, here's some fishy statistics to prove my point, when there's much bigger problems going on in the world in general, and specifically in the world of work. We've got other types of employee crimes that are a much bigger deal. We've got employer crimes that are a much bigger deal. Spend your time writing about that don't make up clickbait that's going to set the American worker back based on these false premises and I sound like a socialist, like “Stand up for the American worker!”

Frank Butler  40:03  
I don't even know you anymore Paul. Now, the reality, though, is that this is the time that we fix these issues. If you're an employer, think about your employee and think about what their lifestyle is like. I think this is a biggest problem that a lot of people have, as CEO making a million dollars a year, is not living the same life as an employee making $50,000 a year. And I think this is something that we are obviously struggling with. This is a bias that a lot of people have, they think about what they would do in a situation, and they can't put themselves in the shoes of others. This is something that we have to do better is trying to put ourselves in the shoes of others to understand why they might have done something they did. It doesn't matter what you would have done. You're not them. They're not you.

Paul Harvey  40:48  
And not everybody going to be like you was Elvis Presley's quote, or was it Johnny Cash? said, don't you judge that man, you've never walked a mile in his shoes or something like that?

Frank Butler  40:58  
Yeah, I think that was Johnny Cash. Yeah,

Paul Harvey  41:00  
Sounds like Johnny Cash. I might look up the actual quote, good point. So much of the world's problems, misunderstandings could be avoided, if we just did exactly that. Just say you're not in their shoes, try to put yourself in their shoes. But know that you can't, unless you've literally been in the same exact situation, which is unlikely.

Frank Butler  41:22  
Right. And that goes back to the episode we recorded on perceptions. And just altogether, I think at the end of the day, there's a lot of what I would call exploitation of the average American worker,

Paul Harvey  41:35  
I actually have a suggestion, if I may, a quick diversion that just occurred to me. Yeah, while we're still many of us still working from home, this might be a good time to ignore these statistics in these articles like this, and measure your own productivity and performance. You know, there's any number of time tracking apps for your smartphones or computers that do almost all the work for you. And if you use those, honestly, this is for yourself, to see what do you actually do with your time while working from home, and try to have a baseline of how productive you were not how much you remember, you were a year from now. But baseline data say this is how productive I really was both for future job plans. And just for your own information. As to to know if you like working from home want to continue doing so now's a good time, if you haven't already to really fine tune yourself management, and technology. Thankfully, I've been playing with some of these time tracking apps recently. And I find that just doing that keeps me a lot more on task. Back to our year of structure. It's a good way of putting some structure and into your life. So while we still have the opportunity, many of us to work from home, this is a good time to get that information on yourself.

Frank Butler  42:50  
Yeah, I believe on the iPhone, for example, there's screen time or something like that, that tracks

Paul Harvey  42:56  
Screen time is notoriously inaccurate. And I don't know why I've been using one called time Murray, di m er y based on another service called toggle. And toggle is a free service for individuals. There's a whole bunch of other ones like that. Some are made more for like lawyers and people who bill by the hour others are more for just general time tracking. But I think it's good to have data about how productive we are at home managing ourselves to push back against those like Mr. Mr. Kelly here, writing articles to make it sound like we're all a bunch of slackers who need to be in monitored at all times, or we get fat and drunk all day, I guess.

Frank Butler  43:36  
And if you're like me, and you'd like to go a little older school, pen and paper and write things down, just spend a couple days tracking yourself. It's not a terrible idea to do that. And it will help you at least understand how much time you're spending on work. But also you need to associate or attached to what you're getting done. Right? And track that as well.

Paul Harvey  43:56  
Yeah, that's a good point. Don't say you're working on blank. In what way? Like, what were you working on what got accomplished? And that's a good point.

Frank Butler  44:04  
So with all of that, I guess, really,

Paul Harvey  44:07  
HR tracker, I think also makes

Frank Butler  44:10  
HR tracker, if you're an employer, reach out to us, we'll hook you up with HR tracker, and at the same time, we'll teach you how to start a call and write. But I think with all of that, I think we I think we've probably gone a little long on this one. We've said our piece and we'd love to hear from you all reach out. Thanks for listening. And until next time, keep working, stay busy, or take a nap smoke some weed or whatever,

Paul Harvey  44:36  
Whatever it is. They're saying that you're doing that anyway, you may as well do it.

Frank Butler  44:40  
Watch Netflix, watch Netflix, or watch the tea steep and think about nothing but the tea. Like what?

Paul Harvey  44:48  
What's the How to show a T actually Steve I gotcha. And think about nothing that's what I'm gonna go do.

Frank Butler  44:55  
That's right, the art of niksen 

Paul Harvey  44:57  
Practice some niksen. Forget to pick up my daughter. 

Thanks for listening. 

The Busyness Paradox is distributed by Paul Harvey and Frank Butler. Our theme music is adapted from its business time by Jemaine Clements and Bret McKenzie. Our production manager is Justin Wuntaek. We hope you enjoyed this episode, and we'd love to hear from you. Please any questions, comments or ideas for future episode topics to input at Busyness paradox.com or find us on Twitter. Also, be sure to visit our website, dizziness paradox. com to read our blog posts and for links to the articles and other resources mentioned in today's show. Finally, please take a moment to rate and follow or subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts Spotify, I Heart Radio, Google podcast for your preferred podcast provider.

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