Surviving the Daily Grind
Bartleby's Guide to Work
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- $25.99
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
One of today's pre-eminent financial journalists, and the Bartleby columnist for the Economist, reveals strategies and tips for surviving—and making the most out of—the work week.
We spend a lot of our time at work and would be depressed with nothing to do. But when it gets to Monday, many of us are already longing for the weekend and the prospect of escape. How did work become so tedious and stressful? And is there anything we can do to make it better?
Based on his popular Economist Bartleby column, Philip Coggan rewrites the rules of work to help us survive the daily grind. Ranging widely, he encourages us to cut through mindless jargon, pointless bureaucracy and endless meetings to find a new, more creative—and less frustrating—ways to get by and get things done at work.
Incisive, original, and endlessly droll, this is the guide for beleaguered underlings and harried higher-ups alike. As Rousseau might have said: "Man was born free, but is everywhere stuck in a meeting." If you've ever thought there must be a better way, this is the book for you.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this chipper send-up, Coggan (More), who wrote the Economist's Bartleby column on work and management until 2021, provides an irreverent accounting of how overlong meetings, noisy office plans, incompetent managers, and other exasperating eccentricities of the modern workplace burden employees. "Bartleby's law states that 80% of the time of 80% of people in meetings is wasted," Coggan writes, blaming "Buzzword Bills" and "Cliché Charlies" for making vacuous comments that prolong such gatherings, and recommending that managers hold fewer meetings and specify their purpose in advance to keep participants on task. Corporate jargon's primary purpose is to create the impression of expertise, Coggan contends, devoting a full chapter to lambasting such buzzwords as "blitzscaling," "disintermediating," and "blue-sky thinking" ("This is the kind of phrase used by managers who have no idea what to do next but would like to demonstrate that they have intellectual flexibility"). Coggan sprinkles in some actionable guidance, advocating for the commonsensical positions that "treating... workers with fairness and empathy" is good for business and that "awayday" trainings should only be required if necessary. However, the focus is largely on ridiculing the inanities of contemporary work, and though the subject has been exhaustively covered by numerous other volumes, Coggan's cheekiness buoys the familiar criticism. The result is a pleasantly peppy lampooning of the plight of the modern professional.
