If others aren’t wasting my time then I find ways of wasting my own

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

What is even more demoralising about working in bed than playing Boggle is the bad clothing.

Clad in my sloppy flannel pyjamas and fleece dressing gown, I’m looking again at the UBS booklet and thinking how crisp those lovely shirts look and marvelling at the wisdom of the advice.

No short-sleeved shirts; no cartoons on socks.

Skirts must not be too short or too tight. Scarves must be tied just so.

The Wall Street Journal blog says the brochure smacks of Big Brother. Actually, it smacks of big sister and a kindly, helpful one at that.

What I would like most to do now is to rise from the uninterrupted squalor of my bed, get up and skip off to the office perfectly groomed in a uniform that gets me in the right frame of mind for working, in an environment where interruptions are imposed by others, leaving it up to me to engage in a little light work in the spaces between. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010)