I walked into a Swatch store the other day, but promptly walked out when I realized I had absolutely no use for a watch. When I was a kid I loved to buy and wear cool watches, but ever since I got a cell phone I haven’t needed one. Apparently I’m not alone, as a friend tipped me off to a story in Slate on the declining sales of watches.
Although my watch usage is related to the development of new technologies that happen to give the time, like computers and cell phones, I actually took off my watch for the first time in college when a friend, who was a math major who wore shorts and sandals in the winter, explained that she didn’t wear a watch because it freed her from the habit of worrying about time when she didn’t need to.
The time is irrelevant most of the time: it only really matters when you need to be somewhere or meet a deadline. And when you really need to know, there’s almost always a clock within sight. Not having a watch actually makes you more efficient, because you don’t waste time looking at the wrist or worrying about the passing seconds. And, it’s more relaxing because you’re not looking at your wrist or worrrying about the passing seconds.
This, I think, is a particularly west coast approach to a productive life.
And, it’s doubly appropriate because my sandal/short wearing math major friend who discovered this paradox grew up in Pittsburgh, and later moved to Palo Alto.
Yesterday a group of lawyers and law students at an eastern law school sat down to talk about working and living on the west coast. The lawyers all worked in California, and the students were planning to move out west for work. One student asked whether it was difficult for students raised or trained on the east coast to move out west. The lawyers made some interesting observations:
It’s not that different to work as a lawyer on the west coast, particularly in a large firm. People work just about as much, and the amount of work depends far more on whether the lawyers are unionized (as they apparently are in some legal aid offices).
Eastern aggression turns into western passive aggression. Which is preferable?
If you’re a plaintiff side attorney then you’d rather deal with defense counsel based in San Francisco than with counsel based in LA. As one participant said “You can just hear in their voice right away if they’re not based in San Francisco.”
The NYT has an article today on Google’s new offices in Chelsea. As often happens, it’s a deep, and potentially political, commentary on American society, but the editors put it in the Styles section. (The most egregious example of this practice was a 2001 article on NYCers in Union Square protesting military action, just days after 9/11. I think then the strategy was to blunt criticism that the NYT was unpatriotic just for covering the protests. Here I’m not sure why it’s in Styles).
My memory is that back when major news outlets were covering the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA, they focused on how Google’s beach volleyball court, Segways gourmet food, and free massages encouraged the playful creativity that may make Google the market leader in so many domains. This is a behavioral-economics-ish take on the Google workplace.
But transplant the same infrastructure to NYC and the Times sees it as a clever way to keep employees at work longer:
The strategy of keeping employees happy and committed to spending endless hours on campus seems to be working. Richard Burdon, 37, an engineer who joined Google two years ago, has been staying past midnight to prepare for the introduction of a project. (Google’s Manhattan engineers have been responsible for developing Google Maps and are working on some 100 other projects.)
“Google is about as interesting as starting your own startup because you can really follow your own ideas,†said Mr. Burdon, who previously worked for Goldman Sachs, Sony and I.B.M. The only time he could remember leaving the office during the workday was to buy a friend a birthday present.
The Times seems to totally miss the other benefits — creativity, social cooperation, and . . . happiness. It is as if they are looking at the office with neoclassical blinders.
