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

> Focus on output, not hours. It’s virtually impossible to track how employees are actually using their time. Instead, managers should focus on the quality of their work.

This was the most important change to the workplace since 2020, and it should have always been this way in the first place.

Time spent on tasks was never as relevant as hitting deadlines without backtracking or building up technical debt. Managers and their employees alike only ever focused on hours because they hated their jobs. Many were laid off and the rest of the office is better for it.

The other massive improvement has been moving most conversations to text or recorded calls. It has been a chainsaw to the sociopaths who used to get in the way of real productivity.

This doesn't explain "Theory of the firm" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm.

Employees shouldn't theoretically exist - everything should just be subcontracted, but for some reason firms that employ people (with fixed time contracts) usually do better than some kind of virtual company that just subcontracts everything out (essentially managing by KPIs).

Companies don't have perfect plans, contracts, and KPIs, and never will, unless someone like Jeff Bezos manages to turn the extraction of profit from human assets into an exact science in the company.

Fixed time employees have to hit their deadlines and also have some slack time to use their initiative. KPIs effectively means a much more rigid adherence to a plan, rather than trusting employees to invest their time at work on things that the employee (not their boss) thinks is valuable, with minimal friction. I guess this will be changing though, since employees with slack time can no longer be trusted to hopefully work on something that's beneficial for the company.