10. IN DEFENCE OF WASTE - On the Essential Inessential
This week I was giving a talk to a group of Headteachers about a research project I had undertaken in collaboration with group of local schools. When asked if we had found the collaboration worthwhile, our response was that the work we had done together had been “enjoyable, interesting, but inessential”. Our argument was that while we had all benefited from the work we’d done together, and the work had overall been a pleasant experience, we had ultimately only found something useful to do because we had to. We had been put together as a group first as an experiment by our schools, before any clear purpose for the collaboration had been decided, and we felt that the cart had been put before the horse. Each of us could have happily spent the last academic year without having undertaken the project at all - hence “inessential” - but, despite this, we were all glad about what we had achieved having done it.
The comment was quickly picked up on by my own Headteacher, who pointed out that in a world where so much of work is inessential and not at all enjoyable or interesting, shouldn’t we be pleased that the opportunity had at least given us some enjoyment and interest? And wouldn’t work be better for all of us if there were more such occasions for interest and enjoyment, no matter how inessential it might at first seem?
Going further, they suggested that perhaps, in fact, the additional enjoyment and interest to our working lives may ultimately make such an inessential thing essential, for what would life be without those two elements?
The feedback echoed something I have been thinking about for a very long time, and was further amplified on Sunday, as my wife and I sat down for the best part of an afternoon to watch the five hour marathon between Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer in the men’s finals at Wimbledon. We each had work to do, and had each planned on doing that important, essential, stuff after the frivolous tennis had ended…but as the hours clocked up, and a fourth set became a fifth, and a fifth set became a tiebreak, we stuck with the enjoyable, interesting, yet inessential tennis instead of returning to our desks. Likewise tonight, each of us still have work to do, and yet we will be taking time out to see Measure for Measure at the RSC Theatre in Stratford. Completely inessential but, we hope, enjoyable and interesting.
It is now my belief that the inessential, the waste, may be the most important thing in life for ensuring our true wellbeing. Furthermore, it may also ultimately have a knock-on effect of improving the productivity and efficacy of the essential.
On the one hand this thought is nothing new. As an ageing anarchist, enamoured by Marx in my youth and influenced by the 9-5-hating punk rock songs on my stereo, of course the idea that those moments in life unshackled from the life-stealing prison of time exploited and directed by an employer are better than those spent under their thumb would appeal. Work, let’s be honest, is the ultimate in unnecessary. It is a chosen and imposed consequence of an equally chosen and imposed economic system arbitrarily built on selling labour for wages whereas any number of alternative systems could’ve reduced or eliminated work (or at least “toil”) from our lives entirely. And as a result of these economic decisions, the bulk of unnecessary work (made necessary by the economic system) is done with little enjoyment or interest, but merely to pay the bills. As work dominates one’s life, with at least five days out of seven taken over by it for the bulk of one’s waking hours, the fact that for many it is unenjoyable and uninteresting is a tragedy. Couple that tragedy with the notion that we are bound by our employment contracts to do what we are told by our employer, and a lot of this self-alienating employment appears to be “essential” yet soul-destroying. So the idea that it is in the inessential and the frivolous we find our true humanity is not too surprising for such a worldview. However, I also think that the inessential, the waste, may be vital within these exploitative economic systems from the perspective of the economic system itself to improve productivity and efficacy by promoting the genuine wellbeing of the exploited and ultimately making them better workers.
The thought began as Tory austerity measures began to hit schools. Suddenly we were all being forced to “tighten our belts” and “rationalise” our spending. In essence, schools, like everyone else, were suddenly concerned with saving as much money as possible in a desperate bid to balance budgets. One day, as staff were discussing the cuts for the hundredth time around the staff room table, I wondered how much productive time had been lost to teachers like me complaining about how hard it was to plan for lessons with diminishing resources, or trawling through supplier catalogues to save a few pennies for exercise books, or looking for lost pens because there weren’t any more in the supply cupboard. Worse - how many professional hours had been lost auditing and monitoring who used what, down to the very last paperclip, to ensure that next year only the exact right number of paperclips were bought?
My feeling was then, and is still now, that if we overbought and overspent to ensure that no one ever had to spend a second worrying about where their next staple was coming from - wasting a little money in the process - no worker would ever have to waste their time worrying about these irrelevant things and could actually focus on the jobs they were really being paid for.
Which is not to say that workers should be treated like robots and squeezed for every productive second they can be exploited for. I still would hope that workers in newly over-stocked offices, with plenty of time now to focus on their jobs worry-free, would also have lots of spare time leftover to waste on idle thoughts; only now they would be truly idle thoughts, not thoughts corrupted by anxiety about stationary or concern about budgets. Because from such idle thoughts several things are often born:
Regeneration and rejuvenation from a long and stressful day (or even just a short and stressful burst), giving one new energy to tackle the next tasks of our exploitation afresh.
Creative thinking which may spawn interesting and fruitful practical ideas which could be applied to work.
Time to bond with others and thereby create a pleasant working environment for all (and when people like where they work and feel invested in it, they are compelled to work hard and do well there).
Time for the subconscious to work on seemingly intractable problems and problem-solve in the background, allowing you to come to old problems with new eyes later and overcome work-related obstacles.
As a teacher with a “free” period, I know only too well that the idea of spending them freely is professionally frowned upon. Indeed, in my school, even the students are given this very clear message, with their own “free” periods redefined as “independent study” sessions; the expectation of work and not of waste being clearly built into the name. And so, after a mentally draining morning of flitting between A-level expertise in philosophy of mind, engaging introductions to Hinduism, and GCSE discussions about abortion ethics, I usually feel pressured by institutional expectation into spending my “free” period 4 marking, inputting or analysing data, or otherwise “working”, before my lunchtime club and two more afternoon sessions teaching the problem of evil to year 7 and explaining Plato’s cave to year 9. By the time I get home, the idea of being anything but exhausted is laughable, yet it is here, now, that I am expected to come up with amazing lesson plans and schemes of work to dazzle and delight. Repeat that five days a week every week, and the treadmill trudge of endless work becomes a prison to the soul and devourer of the intellect.
Luckily for me, I spotted this trap early. After watching work consume my life, I noticed that work’s relationship to time was like a gushing pipe’s relationship to empty space - it would fill any empty crevice it found with flood-water unless it was actively stopped. Whenever I gave up any semblance of a real life for work, the work would not get done any sooner, it would simply creep into every hour I had agreed to give over to it. However, on the rare occasions when I would prioritise myself over work and take some time off to do something enjoyable, interesting, but definitely inessential, I would discover that the work still got done in the shorter amount of time (because, being essential, it had to) but I would feel a lot better about doing it because the break had been revivifying.
So I began to make little rules - no work on Friday nights; one whole day of the Saturday/Sunday weekend must be kept work-free; no working during school holidays; and then, more daringly, no work on a Wednesday night either, so I could pursue other interests like music or improv comedy; setting aside time each week to write this blog; making plans with friends or with my wife during the working week without cancelling them…
And amazingly, the work never suffered and my overall sense of happiness, satisfaction and wellbeing improved as a result. Even more amazingly, the work, if anything, got better. I became a more effective teacher because I was a happy teacher. I was a human being who enjoyed my life; a human being with interests. Those interests could be incorporated into lessons as I was stimulated creatively to think outside the box. And in an effort to free myself up for more time for the inessential, I found far more efficient ways of doing what was essential so it could be done quickly and well allowing me the time to waste on more appealing personal pursuits. My department marking policy has been redefined and our department’s GCSE results last year were the best in the school. And all because I embraced the inessential and leaned in to the idea of waste.
It is often in my students that I see the biggest evidence of the benefits of waste. How many teachers like me have bemusedly watched a class “wasting their time” when they should be “on task” chatting with friends and messing about; ultimately forcing themselves to have to do homework that never needed to come home, had they only done it the first time it was set in the classroom?
And yet, those students, far more than the regimented ones who silently comply with every instruction and work, work, work, those students who waste time in class so often end up being the most creative and interesting human beings. The ones who know themselves, who have opinions and ideas, and, once they realise self-motivated reasons for doing the work you have set, the ones who produce far better pieces of work done in their own time, at their own pace, than those who merely did as they were told.
But here of course comes the caveat - because the above does not universally describe all such students. Some of those who waste time in class simply continue to waste more time at home. They end up failing the class instead of excelling, just as some staff who embrace the waste that I do end up stranded in that waste, rather than refreshed, never quite getting to the point of rejuvenation and just floating further and further adrift into detachment and ultimately laziness in the classroom. Just as some, even with a supply cupboard endlessly full of staples, pens and paper will still find something irrelevant to talk about in the staff room and never capitalise on all the new free time they have gained. To embrace waste and the inessential on an institutional level means also having to embrace the fact that there will be some workers who you do not see the benefits from and accepting that level of waste too, because of the ultimate benefits gained from those who do use the inessential time in ways that feed back into the institution.
The best example I can give of the attitude needed is my attitude towards welfare cheats: they do not bother me at all. If the price we pay for ensuring that those who need welfare is paying a bit more for a small minority of people who do not need it and cheat the system, then so be it. I am happy with the wasted money spent on people for whom benefit payments were not essential in order for those who genuinely need those payments to get what they do need without the draconian and dehumanising levels of evidence needed to prove they are truly deserving and not cheats. I would also advocate giving those on welfare more than is essential, so they can also enjoy the inessential and waste that makes us truly human and not just cogs in a machine.
In essence, the old argument that waste is a problem which needs to be eliminated needs to go. Evidence of waste is not always evidence of a fault in a system, but may well be evidence of a necessary element of overall productivity: the hidden mechanism through which we can inject our otherwise exploited and overworked lives with much needed interest and enjoyment. And as my Headteacher suggested as we gave our conclusion on collaboration: by adding interest and enjoyment does not the inessential become essential, for what would life be without those two elements?
AUTHOR: D.McKee