In defense of wasting time

"This sensibility can be traced back to Frederick Taylor's doctrine of scientific management, which recast work as an engineering problem and workers as components in a machine to be optimized, standardized, and controlled. In reducing human effort to measurable outputs and time-motion efficiencies, Taylorism marked the beginning of the end for seeing people as thinking agents, turning them instead into productivity units not unlike laboratory rats, rewarded or punished according to how efficiently they ran the maze."

"Organizations began to concern themselves with engagement, motivation, wellbeing, and work-life balance, not out of benevolence alone but because value increasingly resided in people's minds rather than their muscles. Human capital came to mean employability, shaped by intelligence, drive, expertise, and a new, if imperfect, meritocracy that coexisted with vocational careers. The growth of the creative class reinforced this shift: machines would handle the boring, repetitive tasks, freeing humans from the assembly line to think, design, and imagine."

Modern management began by treating idle time as a vice under Frederick Taylor's scientific management, which optimized work and reduced people to measurable productivity units. Taylorism emphasized outputs and time-motion efficiencies, rewarding or punishing workers for performance. The post-war rise of knowledge work and the talent era shifted value toward minds, prompting concerns with engagement, motivation, wellbeing, and career development rather than mere jobs. Human capital expanded to include employability, intelligence, drive, and expertise, while the creative class relied on machines for repetitive tasks, freeing humans for design and imagination. AI now increasingly encroaches on cognitive and creative tasks once considered uniquely human.

Read at Fast Company