Don’t bet against the “suitcase principle” of white-collar work

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In 1984, journalist Steven Levy wrote a great item on the electronic spreadsheet, a new invention that was saving people enormous amounts of time. He told the story of an accountant who had “an urgent assignment, sat down with his micro and his spreadsheet, finished it in an hour or two and left it on his desk for two days. He then he sent it Fed Ex to the customer and he got all kinds of accolades for working overtime.

I’ve spent the last few weeks meeting with lawyers, accountants, and consultants who are starting to use generative AI in their day-to-day work. They all talk about the time savings of having AI do technical research or first drafts of documents or provisions for them.

I was curious what they were doing with the time saved. Coming home early? Longer lunches? Stupid question. They are using the time to do more work.

White-collar workers have shown the same trend in the pandemic. A global investigation of people in 27 countries published this year found that working from home saved about two hours of travel time per worker per week in 2021 and 2022. What did people do with it? According to the survey, they devoted the majority of it – about 40% – to doing more work, with smaller amounts spent on leisure and childcare.

Online calendars and remote meeting software, meanwhile, seem to have encouraged people to fill each other’s days even more.

“Now, people generally look at diaries and the first thing they do is look for a 15-minute gap, and it just gets taken,” one consultant tells me. “My biggest challenge is finding time to have lunch.”

I’ve come to think of this as the “suitcase principle” of white-collar work: just like you always pack your suitcase whether you’re going away for a weekend or a week, white-collar work always seems to expand to fill the time available.

What happened after the invention of spreadsheets is an instructive example of how time-saving technology can create more work. The days when accountants could sit back and relax didn’t last long. At the time Levy was writing, new technology was already reshaping demand.

People began to expect work to get done faster because they knew about it I could be done faster. More importantly, spreadsheets have greatly expanded the type of analysis possible.

Suddenly, companies could be tracking things that weren’t previously tracked because they would take too long to calculate, such as sales employee daily performance rankings. And with the push of a few buttons, it was now possible to model all kinds of different scenarios: What would happen to the bottom line if we cut the pension plan, or we sold that factory, or we took over this company in a hostile takeover?

These new capabilities have shaped the course of corporate history and also created tons more work for people. Many thousands of accounting clerk jobs have disappeared, as have those jobs today that consist mostly of tasks that AI can do for less, such as copywriters. But that doesn’t mean there will be less white-collar work overall. Demand and expectations may expand as different products and services become possible.

My “suitcase principle” is, it seems, not a particularly original thought. In a wise in the 1955 Economist, C. Northcote Parkinson described the same phenomenon in public administration. According to “Parkinson’s law”, officials like to multiply their subordinates and everyone tends to work for each other.

He describes the arrival of an incoming document: “Officer E decides that it is within the purview of F, who presents a draft response to C, who drastically edits it before consulting D, who asks G to deal with it. But at this point G goes on leave, handing the file to H, who draws up a report, which is signed by D and returned to C, who revises his draft accordingly and presents the new version to A.

Person A rewrites it and walks home as the light dims, “reflecting, shoulders hunched and a wry smile, that late hours, like gray hair, are among the penalties of success.”

Is working life in most large corporations and bureaucracies really that different today, despite tools like email, spreadsheets, Slack, and Zoom? And will it really be that different with generative AI in the mix?

I don’t know whether to admire or despair at the human ability to make ourselves work. But even in the age of AI, I think you’d be brave to bet against it.

sarah.oconnor@ft.com