The average workday increased during the pandemic’s early weeks (2020)

In my last job, I was paid hourly wages, but the work we were doing was piecework. They could have structured our pay around how many pieces we finished during a shift.

It was indeed WFH and, during the lockdowns, more or less a dream job. The supervisors were lasseiz-faire and there was minimal surveillance of our activities. They repeatedly explained that the quality and attention to our work was more important than the speed or efficiency we could achieve.

However, I was operating at a rather advanced level, and my talents permitted me to absolutely burn through that piecework at an accelerated rate compared to anyone else. I could do dozens, hundreds in an hour if they were uncomplicated. And I could finish them with accuracy, attention to detail, and a personal touch in the feedback each time.

But going at the speed I did, there were mistakes made, and I tended to be a bit sloppy in overlooking things, when reading for comprehension would've improved if I slowed down. My colleagues offered gentle feedback about this between the lines, except the main feedback was focused on their KPIs and metrics, which I was far exceeding by every standard. But the haste took its toll on my intellect. I could barely catch my breath after some long sessions. I could fill a Slack channel before anyone else had a chance to chime in. I felt numb and drained, and I forgot every student's name, and they all blurred into one.

Thankfully, we rarely came together for meetings. They just weren't seen as necessary and it was true. Meetings were reserved for special trainings. At one point, some of the coworkers were putting together short self-care sessions, like yoga instruction, which was really cool of them!

But I was being paid by the hour! If I finished 50 pieces of work, I was paid the same as a guy who plodded through three of them! Was that unfair? I don't know. Because the time scale did matter; we were often slammed with a huge amount of work, and we did operate with deadlines. But other than kudos and verbal recognitions, there was never an incentive to clear backlogs or work priority tasks as they were publicized.

So in the end, I felt a little underappreciated, you know? But, I loved the company so much, and my colleagues and supervisors were great, and it wasn't really about the money at the end of the day for me; it was about the company's mission and my own fulfillment by doing something valuable for them.

I'm kind of confused by your writing. So your argument is that you didn't have incentive to do a shit ton of work compared to others, but by your own admission, your work was subpar because of the amount you pushed out.

Why would that get rewarded? I'm not trying to be hateful, I'm trying to understand your thought process.

Couldn't you just slow down and do really good work? Wouldn't that solve both problems?

Your own description of your work seems self-contradictory?

You have a paragraph that says you could work much faster than others and still "finish them with accuracy, attention to detail" and then in the very next paragraph you note that going so fast meant you were making mistakes and overlooking things.

This is only to say that I'm not sure how to interpret your own description.

It also sounds like the KPIs that had been set did not match the stated goals of your supervisors. KPIs focused on speed of output while your supervisors are telling you that quality and attention to your work is more important. I see this as a classic example of an organisation falling into the trap of just measuring what's easy to measure because they can't measure what they actually care about.

The KPIs weren't focused on speed at all; don't know how you came to that conclusion. Their KPIs were in-line with their spoken criteria and they were always calibrating for best outcomes.

The only time speed or volume was at issue was when we had a backlog. Sometimes we would begin to miss deadlines/time frames and sometimes there was priority work to be picked up. And AFAIK, KPIs weren't looking at those as a negative. It was just one of those productivity issues we encountered in staffing vs. amount of work vs. deadlines.

Basically my work was excellent by all objective criteria and I was receiving fantastic performance reviews. But I still had room for improvement, don't you see? Simply because of the high rate of speed, I could personally tell that it could've been better, more, nicer, with some TLC and some better pacing. That doesn't mean that anyone else noticed or cared. It was mostly my personal assessments of how I was doing.

But they did drop hints -- once or twice, an issue was raised and my mentor said "It's easy to miss if you're going quickly lol". It was just a hint and hardly even criticism, just a reminder that slowing down wouldn't hurt.

And it's true that the rewards weren't there. If I finished everything then everything was finished and sometimes I was forced to clock out without work to do. That was the drawback of hourly wages for, essentially, piecework.

Slowing down was fraught with complications. I type 100wpm, my thoughts operate at a certain pace, and I would get into a groove like playing a video game. Would you slow down in a video game to do a better job? If I slowed down, would I do better or would the artificial pace cause trouble? I often tried playing ambient, tempo-less or downtempo music to slow my pace, but I would typically just find a rhythm and go with it, rather than artificially slow down. Honestly, due to physical issues and the whole WFH distraction, it was often difficult for me to stay at my desk for a stretch.