tl;dr: Please stop telling people that a “work” week is about time. It’s not.

I am not sure why this even is worthy of a blog post other than for the fact that I was overcome by a sense of righteous indignation when I read Roxane Gay’s career advice column, The 40-Hour Work Week Is, in Fact, Life.

“There is no magical way to earn a salary other than a full time job,” she writes.

Really?

I guess the thing that got me going was that, here was a supposed “expert” telling a young college student what to expect from their career and the advice was, well, incorrect.

Her advice is based on an outdated paradigm that has no place in an information economy.

The 40 hour work week is a relic of the industrial age, so yeah, I guess if you’re saying “if you want to work in a factory, you have to work 40 hours because the foreman tells you to.”

But if you want to do anything else, you’re going to work in an environment of outcomes not output.

And since output is measured in time, but outcomes are measured by knowledge, (per Peter Drucker, not Roxane Gay), then you’re going to have infinite flexibility in the types of roles and jobs you can have.

We need to get rid of the idea of a “full-time” job.

There’s a “full engagement” job, perhaps, but until we get rid of this idea that time=value, we’re going to doom an entire generation of people to thinking about the wrong results.

Not “how long did I work today?” rather “how much value did I create today?”

If you work for a DAO (a Decentralized Autonomous Organization), NO ONE is ever going to ask you to fill in a time sheet.

Same goes for any role in an OKR-based organization (which is going to be pretty much every knowledge organization by the end of the decade).

Not only was Ms. Gay’s advice incorrect, it’s damaging, because it creates the wrong paradigm in the mind of an impressionable college student trying to navigate her career.

I doubt she will, but I hope Ms. Gay reconsiders her position and does every young reader a service to recognize that the time in which they are entering the workforce is vastly different than when Ms. Gay did.

Otherwise, it’s readers of her column who will be relegated to 40 hour per week jobs and they won’t know why.