在办公室犯懒比在家强 Better to waste time in the office than at home

Even though it’s a weekday and during working hours, I’m in bed. The reason for such slovenliness is that I’m not feeling my best. Too unwell to feel like getting up, yet not so unwell that I can’t move my fingers over a keyboard.

尽管今天是工作日，现在是工作时间，我却呆在床上。之所以如此懒散，是因为我感觉状态不佳。身体非常不舒服以至于不想起床，但又还没到敲不动键盘的地步。

From this position I have been peering at the world of work through my laptop screen and found two things of note.

在这种状态下，我一直在通过手提电脑屏幕盯着工作世界，并且发现了两个值得注意的东西。

The first is a video clip from TED (the groovy organisation that devotes itself to “Ideas Worth Spreading”). It shows Jason Fried, a young web entrepreneur in jeans and black

第一个是来自TED（那个致力于“值得传播的思想”的很棒的组织）的视频剪辑——身着牛仔裤与黑色T恤的年轻网络企业家詹森•弗里德(Jason Fried)告诉观众，办公室是世界上最不适合干工作的地方。

T-shirt telling an audience that the office is the worst place in the whole world for doing any work.

第二个是互联网上转发次数最多、并非来自维基解密(Wikileaks)的文件——瑞银(UBS)的新着装规定。这份40页的文件带有漂亮的插图，内容包括珠宝、缝纫细节及铮亮的黑皮鞋。在这份文件中，瑞银详细规定了其瑞士银行家们应如何着装，甚至包括了最私密的细节：女性须穿肉色内衣，衣领不能有任何衬底；男性须佩戴与脸形相衬的领带。

The second is the most forwarded document on the internet not to have come from Wikileaks – the new UBS dress code. In 40 gloriously illustrated pages – featuring pearls and stitching details and shiny black shoes – it tells its Swiss bankers precisely how to dress, down to the most intimate detail: women must wear flesh coloured underwear and not get any foundation on their collars and men must wear ties to match the bone structure in their faces.

分开来看，这两样东西都颇为令人惊奇。但结合在一起，它们描绘了全方位的现代办公室生活——从极度严格的管理（已经管到了口红），到极度的宽松（管理者任何强加秩序的努力，都只会抑制员工的内在创造力）。

Both exhibits are quite something individually. But together they represent the full spectrum of contemporary office life – from extreme managerial uptightness, where command and control

从我卧床的角度来看，弗里德反办公室的激情演讲似乎更切题。他说，办公室的问题在于无止境的干扰，主要是会议与经理。他说，这些干扰是一场灾难，因为工作就像睡眠，如果被打断了，就无法找回状态。

extends to lipstick, to extreme

你也许认为他是对的。我此时此地的进展就支持这个论点：我已经开始以在工作中更难以复制的专注程度打这篇文章。

hang-looseness, where all attempts by managers to impose order merely hamper the inner creativity of the workforce.

他也有逻辑上的支持。办公室早在多年前就失去了意义。在使用纸张、文件柜及“格林小姐，你可以做口授记录吗？”的时代，它曾是有意义的，但现在已毫无意义可言。它成本高昂，效率低下，会愚蠢地浪费精力，尤其是在想到所有那些交流的时候。

Viewed from the perspective of my bed, Mr Fried’s anti-office tirade might seem the more germane. He says the problem with offices are the endless interruptions, which mainly come in the form of meetings and managers. These interruptions are a disaster because work, he says, is like sleep. If you get interrupted you can’t go back to where you were.

但实际上，弗里德彻底错了——不管是关于办公室、关于干扰的本质，还是关于发表演讲时的着装。

You might think he’s right. My progress here and now supports the thesis: I’ve started typing this article with a dogged focus that is harder to replicate at work.

公司是人的群体，为了兴旺发展，他们必须要花很多时间在一起。这意味着，迄今最明智的做法就是将所有人都赶到办公室里面。

He also has logic on his side. The office has been quite pointless for many years now. It used to make sense in the age of paper and filing cabinets and can-you-take-dictation-Ms Green? But now there is no point to it at all. It is jolly expensive and inefficient and a ludicrous waste of effort, especially when you think of all that commuting.

弗里德辩称，办公室是一个不友善的工作环境，因为其他人会干扰你，而在家，任何干扰通常都是出于自己的选择，因此是善意的。

But in practice Mr Fried is utterly wrong – about offices, about the nature of interruptions and about what to wear when giving a speech.

这证明他的意志比我坚定。我所有最严重的时间浪费都是自己造成的。我最近迷上了iPad上的Boggle游戏——如果不是iPad没电了，而充电器又不在楼下，我现在就会在玩。

Companies are groups of people and in order to thrive they need to spend an inordinately large amount of time holed up together. Which means by far the most sensible thing is to herd everyone into offices.

当我在家工作时，第一个小时效率会非常高，而后便开始精神松懈。就好象我受到一条内在的浪费时间定律的控制，即我每天浪费的时间总量是恒定的。如果别人不浪费我的时间，我自己就会想法浪费。区别在于，在家的时间浪费质量很低——Boggle不会令任何人受益，但在办公室，时间浪费更具社交性质，有时还会迸发出好的创意。

Mr Fried argues that the office is a hostile environment in which to work because the interruptions are imposed by others, whereas at home any interruptions tend to be by choice and are therefore benign.

较之Boggle，在床上工作更令人意志消沉的是糟糕的衣着。我裹着肥大的法兰绒睡衣和羊毛家居服，再次浏览了瑞银的着装手册，想象着那些可爱的衬衫看上去有多么干净利落，对建议中蕴含的智慧肃然起敬。不允许穿短袖衬衣；袜子上不允许带卡通图案。裙子不能太短也不能太紧。丝巾要扎得一丝不苟。

This proves that he is made of sterner stuff than I. All my worst time-wasting is self-inflicted. My latest addiction is Boggle on the iPad, which I would be playing right now if the thing hadn’t run out of juice and if the charger weren’t downstairs.

《华尔街日报》(The Wall Street Journal)的博客说，这本手册有点“老大哥”的味道。事实上，它更像老大姐，而且是一位热心、乐于助人的老大姐。我现在最想做的，就是从我这不受干扰的破床上坐起来，起床，穿上一身可以让自己产生良好工作心境的制服，赶去办公室，在一个受到他人干扰的环境中，任由我在繁忙的工作之余干点轻松些的活。

What happens when I work at home is that the first hour is productive and then I start going to pieces. It is as if I am governed by an internal time-wasting law that says the amount of time wasted in any day is constant. If others aren’t wasting my time, then I find ways of wasting my own. The difference is that at home time-wasting is very low grade – Boggle benefits no one – while at work it is more sociable and sometimes a good idea materialises as a by-product.