Michael Phelps, the swimmer, is the most decorated Olympian in history, having won 28 medals, 23 of which are gold. He once held world records in the 200m freestyle, as well as the 100m and 200m butterfly, and the 200m and 400m individual medley.
But let's consider his record-breaking 200m freestyle time: an impressive 1 minute 42.96 seconds. Impressive, that is, until you do the math. Over 200 metres, that's about 6.99 km/h. The thing is, I'm a slightly overweight 42-year-old who can run faster than that. In wellington boots. In the outskirts of Johannesburg, you could probably find 300-pound, tattoo-covered smokers who could pull a tow-truck for 200 metres faster than Phelps can swim it.
Yes, he's a remarkable swimmer. But as a means of getting around, swimming is dire. It costs a huge amount of effort to achieve speeds that a toddler on a tricycle could beat. Instead of praising him, perhaps we should point out that this is a spectacularly inefficient use of his energy.
All this leads to a broader point: effort doesn't always equate to effectiveness. In the world of work, we often assume that the people who work the hardest are the most productive — but, as Olympic swimming shows us, this isn't necessarily so. If Phelps had heeded Peter Drucker's advice — "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all" — he might have chosen a more energy-efficient way to get around.
Which brings me to my real concern. I keep seeing pieces in newspapers claiming, "It's time to return to the office five days a week." And I wonder if these writers are suspicious of remote work simply because it's less demanding. It smacks of a Puritan streak: if it isn't hard, it can't possibly be worthwhile. Behavioural scientists call it the "effort-reward heuristic."
Yet we've adopted equally disruptive changes before with nowhere near this level of scrutiny. Email, to me, is a productivity black hole. Typing is far slower than talking, and to make matters worse, email is asynchronous. Try scheduling a meeting with four people by synchronous Teams and you'll find a time in two minutes. Do the same by email and you'll be waiting several days.
Then there's the open-plan office. If you were a vice chairman of a large company in the 1970s, you'd have had an extravagant office — perhaps with your own humidor and bartender. Now, you walk in, and you're allotted a power socket and a chair (not even the same one each day). Plenty of evidence shows that open-plan setups kill productivity. Yet no one much enjoys them, and because they make work more difficult, everyone assumes they must be beneficial.
Finally, courtesy of a pandemic and the internet, we've stumbled upon a new style of working that many people actually appreciate. But we have so little trust in people to manage their time effectively that we assume if they like it, it must be a waste. I'm not saying we should embrace 100 percent remote work overnight, but it seems worth a cautious, open mind.
