Anyone who's been self-employed knows the terror of time. For the self-employed, there is no time clock, but there are no vacations, either. Because time is endless, it's tempting to put off necessary tasks and do something more enjoyable. There's always time to get the job done, later on. It's even more difficult for those of us engaged in professions with a large social component. A writer I heard on the Marketplace radio program, a self-proclaimed workaholic, tackled the issue after his son moved back home and just sat in front of the TV, not working. Not working? Not working! Then he realized that as a writer about culture, he himself always took time in the morning to read the New York Times. Then listen to the NPR news. Then take a brisk walk. Then check out CNN. After lunch and some modest writing, he listens to Fresh Air. Over dinner, NPR news again. And because he's writing about society, he watches the iconic The Sopranos. There's virtue in not working, he discovered. But little pay. (BTW, if any reader recognizes the book, which was published recently, please tell me the title and author's name.)

Being self-employed results in spurts of productive activity that are heavily leavened with unaccountability and slackery. In my experience, the spurts result in dramatic creativity and innovation. But slackery is always an issue.

The genius of the Industrial Age was the invention of employers who organized people's work lives to gain maximum management control and, allegedly, higher productivity (income from sales/investment in labor, i.e., employees). Mumford believed that this practice had its origins in agrarian Europe, when large town clocks were installed that could be heard in the fields, signalling the serfs when to plow the sod. (For a wonderful iconography of the clock, see designer Christian Hubert's Clock.) Whenever it began, industrial organization results in a continuous stream of tasks being assigned and undertaken. When Henry Ford combined this process of rationalizing workers' time with the assembly line, he invented mass production (an invention that radical sociologist Antonio Gramsci lovingly named “Fordism”). It was only a matter of time (there's that word again) until all employees became subject to its dictates.

Now almost all companies require continuous labor from their employees, allowing only for lunches, vacations, maternal and military leave (only because they're legislated), and occasional bouts of shopping online. The modest time that workers formerly used for personal purposes is now monitored, in the factory and in the office. The result in the office is a sensation like standing under a waterfall, with reports and phone calls and email cascading down -- and the flow seems eternal. You can step out at day's end, but you're going to get drenched again tomorrow. That sort of monotony ("single-tonedness") is one of the reasons why a show like The Office(in both the UK and American versions) is so successful: its portrayal of the workplace as a modern hell bathed in florescent tedium and spiced with lots of acting out, petty aggression, resignation, and despair, is too familiar. People watch it with a sense of resignation or, if they're still unbowed, ressentiment (the French suggesting a more anarchistic attitude).

The result of this hyper-management isn't heightened productivity; it's antipathy. The experience of paid work today -- not necessarily the tasks themselves, but the social and material environment in which tasks are carried out -- is not usually a good one. Even the "creative elite" sweats it out on the job.

My friends Charlie Grantham and Jim Ware head The Future of Work, a membership organization dedicated to improving the experience of work in America. No easy task. But Future of Work claims it reduces the cost of operations and workforce support -- the costs that employers absorb as a result of their employees' poor working experiences -- by more than 30 percent. Charlie and Jim aren't efficiency experts or union busters (in fact, both are progressives). They focus on the experience of work. Working with employees and employers, they engage in active learning based on dissecting the workplace and then redesigning work according to criteria different from those of industrialism's primitives. Often, this has to do with the physical environment, but the social environment is often more decisive. For more information on Charlie's and Jim's activities, visit their Future of Work Weblog. I suspect they're on to something, but their ambition isn't one shared widely in North America and except for labor oases like Northern Europe, almost unknown everywhere else. Here's to their essential campaign for redesign and reform.

There's more to be said about work which is, next to sleep, our most frequently recurring experience. What's your experience of work?