Uncover the Shocking WFH Debate and Join a Wednesday Golf Extravaganza!

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I wouldn’t say I’m a workaholic; The word is ugly and simplistic. But as I enter my sixth decade, I’m finally starting to recognize some bad work habits. Unlike my father, who went to the office in the morning, came home at night, and rarely worked outside of those hours, I could work anywhere, anytime. I draw the line at the bedroom. I never work in the bedroom. But other than that, I tend to let work seep into everything.

I realize this is nothing to be proud of. It’s nothing unusual either. Technology has been a great enabler of poor hygiene at work. My father, who installed and programmed mainframe computers, would have had difficulty performing many useful tasks from the dining room table. But for many knowledge workers today, that option is always available. The line between work and play becomes so blurred that not only is work less productive, but leisure is less fun.

Of course, it’s useful to be able to work from anywhere, answer work emails while standing in line at the supermarket, check off a couple of tasks while on the train, or write reports and attend meetings during a pandemic lockdown. But convenience always breeds temptation. Very soon, we will not only be working in the dead moments, but we should also be relaxing, paying attention to our loved ones or having fun.

Workers win and lose with this. Your employer may tempt you to answer emails while he cooks for his family or require you to do midnight research for his boss instead of joining his partner between the sheets. But what goes around comes around. In retaliation, you can laze at your desk playing a video game, staring at TikTok, or shopping online.

Or you can go play golf. Several of my colleagues have noted the most charming but infuriating academic finding of the year: researchers at Stanford University found that “working from home has fueled a huge boom in Golf”. This boom is most visible in the middle of the week and mid-afternoon. For example, playing golf on Wednesdays increased nearly 150 percent between 2022 and 2019, while playing golf at 4 p.m. on Wednesday afternoons increased more than 275 percent.

This increase is due less to the growing popularity of golf than to a change in golf habits: Playing golf on Saturdays was slightly less popular in 2022 than in 2019. “The most likely explanation,” write researchers Alex Finan and Nick Bloom, “is that employees play golf as a break while working from home.” Well, indeed.

This discovery brings bitter joy. Golf reeks of privilege, and since the ability to work from home is also a privilege, this story is a double-decker privilege sandwich. On the other hand, there is something delicious about the idea of ​​any worker finding a way to play hooky. Many of us struggle to have enough free time in our lives. Play, relax, enjoy. . . These are things that no longer seem to come naturally. It’s good to see golfers standing up for their right to have fun.

It was during the first lockdown that I realized how bad my own work habits had become and how often, before the pandemic, I had saved myself from falling into a desk slump thanks to my compensatory habit of making plans. firm to do other things, like going out to dinner or seeing a concert. Too often during lockdown I would take a dinner break and then go straight back to work. Admittedly, I was trying to convince myself during a difficult time that my calculations were somehow important. But most of all, the job came when I hadn’t taken the time to think of something better to do.

When the world began to open up again, I was determined to remember the lesson. I’ve been trying to fill my free time with activities interesting enough that the question of working simply doesn’t arise. It’s difficult, not to mention rude, to check your phone while walking or having dinner with friends. Intense sport is perfect, as is going somewhere where only a fool would check their phone, whether it’s a swimming pool or a symphony hall. As Benjamin Hoff prophetically wrote in The Tao of Pooh (1982): “It’s really a lot of fun to go to a place where there are no time-saving devices because when you do, you find that you have a lot of time.”

What has changed since the pandemic is the uncomfortable question of what office hours should be. Before, if you had a job, you swam in the morning, afternoon or on the weekends. Now you might fancy a dip on Thursday afternoon. Who decides if you can? Who will even know? In a world where so many people catch up on emails at 6 a.m. or midnight or both, it’s not clear to me that the worker who does yoga or golf in the middle of a work day is doing anything unreasonable. (This is not legal advice!)

What discourages me about golfers is that some of them are failing. Surely one of the benefits of a good game – golf or anything else – is getting away from work tasks for a while. But the golf course has long been a place for business discussions, and it appears that hasn’t changed: Finan and Bloom cite a technology executive whose colleague “was taking his Zoom call from the golf course. He was silent and without video, but once, while he was talking, I heard someone talking about the street and the beatings.”

Attending a Zoom meeting from the golf course risks ruining both the meeting and the game of golf—proof that there is a just God, but definitely not an example for the rest of us to follow. At a time when too many knowledge workers have forgotten the difference between work and play, we must draw deliberate boundaries between the two.

Tim Harford’s new children’s book, “The Truth Detective” (Wren & Rook), is now available

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