A Better Argument for Working Less

If you want to understand work culture in America, you have to understand how one man looked at his stopwatch. Frederick Winslow Taylor was born in 1856 to rich Quaker parents. Rather than become a lawyer like his Princeton-educated father, Taylor opted for a manufacturing job at Midvale Steel, where he was promoted from time clerk to machinist to machine shop foreman and, eventually, to chief engineer—all before he turned 30. At Midvale, Taylor noticed how some of his coworkers put in minimal effort, which he took to be a personal affront. 

As he advanced in leadership, Taylor dedicated himself to righting the injustice. He wanted to figure out how to squeeze the most work out of every worker. Taylor used his stopwatch to study the efficiency of both the machines and their operators on the factory floor. He broke down each job into discrete actions—pick up a piece of metal, place the metal on the lathe, mark where to cut—and then measured how long it took to complete each action. Taylor saw each action as an opportunity to maximize efficiency, and thus save the firm money.

After 12 years at Midvale and a few years working for a large paper mill operator, Taylor opened up his own consulting business to bring his “scientific management” philosophy to the masses. Businesses hired Taylor to study their workers and optimize their workflows. But there was a problem with Taylor’s “scientific” approach: He notoriously fudged the numbers, lied to clients, and inflated reports of his own success. One client, Bethlehem Steel, fired Taylor after his recommendations didn’t actually yield any increases in profit or efficiency.

But that didn’t stop Taylor from preaching his gospel to anyone who would listen. His skill as a writer and marketer trumped the unreliability of his data. He published multiple books and traveled around the country to broadcast his ideas. The private sector became enraptured with the belief that implementing the right management system was the only barrier to maximizing efficiency. Influential figures, from Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis to H. L. Gantt (the inventor of the Gantt chart), championed Taylor’s work. So did Peter Drucker, “the father of modern management.” He famously said: 

“Darwin, Marx, Freud form the trinity often cited as the ‘makers of the modern world.’ Marx would be taken out and replaced by Taylor if there were any justice in the world.”

Taylor’s scientific management approach still reverberates through much of the global economy—especially in the manufacturing and service sectors. But today, instead of managers holding stopwatches, it’s often faceless technology platforms—the Amazon warehouse scanner, the attorney’s hourly billing software —that crack the digital whip. Worse yet, we crack the whip on ourselves. 

A lot has been said recently about movements to work less. There are four-day workweek experiments, legislation to prevent overwork, and weekly debates on whether you can actually be a successful entrepreneur while working fewer than 60 hours a week. One common argument against overwork is that productivity and hours worked are not directly related. An oft-cited study from Stanford found that productivity per hour sharply declines after people work 50 hours a week. And those who worked 70 hours didn’t get any more done than those who worked 56.