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Danielle Batist is an experienced freelance journalist, founder of Journopreneur and co-founder of the Constructive Journalism Project. She lived and worked all around the globe and covered global and local stories of poverty, exclusion and injustice. Increasingly, she moved beyond ‘problem-reporting’ to include stories about the solutions she found. She witnessed the birth of the new nation of South Sudan and interviewed the Dalai Lama. She reported for Al Jazeera, BBC and the Guardian and regularly advises independent media organisations on innovation and sustainability. She loves bringing stories to the world and finding the appropriate platforms to do so. The transformation of traditional media fascinates rather than scares her. While both the medium and the message are changing, she believes the need for good storytelling remains.
The trend is reversing, but could we reverse it back? First, for over a century, our long work weeks kept getting shorter. But for the last three or four decades, we’ve actually started to add extra work hours to our week. Author Rutger Bregman, whose book “Utopia for Realists” I have written about before, makes the case for reversing this trend again by making us all work less.
In this article he first explains how we ended up working more. It’s got to do with the fact that work and leisure are becoming increasingly difficult to disentangle:
“A study conducted at the Harvard Business School has shown that, thanks to modern technology, managers and professionals in Europe, Asia, and North America now spend 80–90 hours per week 'either working, or "monitoring" work and remaining accessible.' And according to British research, the smartphone has the average employee working 460 more hours per year — nearly three weeks.”
And yet, he argues, working less could solve many of the big issues of our time, from stress to accidents, to female emancipation and unemployment, and even climate change. You might not agree with all his arguments, but this story is sure to challenge your thinking next time your answer to the “how was work today” question is: “busy”.